The concept of renewable energy is generally used for electric power that is not derived from finite sources such as stocks of fossil fuels or uranium. It includes the harnessing of flows such as direct sunlight, wind, and water. Harnessing such flows for electricity production requires technologies that are fundamentally different from the technologies used for deriving mechanical power from burning stocks of coal, oil, or gas. This applies to wind turbines and hydroelectric dams as much as it does to photovoltaic panels, but the focus here will be on solar power.
The rise of the fossil economy
The burning of fossil fuels as sources of mechanical power began with the steam engine in Britain in the 1760s. This innovation was essential to the Industrial Revolution. It marked a transition from relying on organic and flow-based energy sources propelled by current sunlight—such as human labour, draft animals, watermills, and windmills—to the combustion of subterranean mineral stocks. These mineral stocks—coal, oil, and gas—contain energy from ancient sunlight accumulated in organisms and deposited as sediments in the Earth’s crust.
The energy transition of the Industrial Revolution was not simply a discovery of how mineral energy could be converted into mechanical power. The harnessing of mineral energy required capital, that is purchasing power. As the wealthy core of the world’s greatest colonial empire, Britain was able to invest in steam technology. The expansion of steam technology in late eighteenth-century Britain was thus a process linked to the British appropriation of African slave labour and American plantation land. It saved Britain substantial quantities of labour time and agricultural land, but at the expense of great amounts of African labour and American land.
Energy technology – part nature, part society
The experience of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and other wealthy areas of the world was interpreted as a miraculous achievement of engineering. This is undeniable but does not tell the whole story. Technologies are not merely ingenious ideas or blueprints applied to nature. For them to materialize, engineers must have access to specific physical components—and at specific ratios of exchange (that is, prices). Engineering was certainly a necessary condition for the establishment of steam technology in early industrial Britain, but it was not a sufficient condition. The technology for harnessing the energy of coal was contingent on the market prices of raw cotton, African slaves, the labour of coal miners, Swedish iron, lubricants, and other inputs in relation to the market prices of exported cotton textiles. The physical existence of the machine, in other words, hinged not only on the revelation of nature, but also on social processes of exchange. However, this hybrid essence of technology—part nature, part society—has largely escaped the modern conception of engineering.
Across the political spectrum, there is a general faith in the capacity of modern society to shift to renewable, non-fossil energy sources without substantially reducing its levels of energy use
By the end of the twentieth century, natural scientists had recognized that the combustion of fossil fuels is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. There have also been concerns about the depletion of finite mineral energy stocks and the decreasing net energy return on energy expended on extraction, also referred to as ERO(e)I (Energy Return On energy Investment). Moreover, the huge global disparities in per capita energy use are no longer easily rationalized as uneven development but suggest structural and increasing gaps between wealthier and poorer parts of world society. Given the dominant understanding of energy technology, however, these problems have generally not informed mainstream visions of the prospects of an increasingly globalized modern society. In these visions, the growing per capita use of energy continues to be fundamental to social progress, regardless of energy source. The problems with fossil energy are viewed as challenges of engineering. Across the political spectrum, there is a general faith in the capacity of modern society to shift to renewable, non-fossil energy sources without substantially reducing its levels of energy use.
Will renewables replace fossil fuels?
The main candidates for replacing fossil with renewable energy are solar and wind power. Experts are divided regarding their potential to replace fossil fuels. Some see no technical or economic obstacles to such a transition. Skeptics have argued that renewable energy technologies applied at such a scale would require impractically huge amounts of materials, space, or energy. Some have emphasized that the production and maintenance of infrastructure for production of renewable energy is based on fossil energy to such an extent that the energy derived from it is very far from carbon-free. This is particularly obvious where the manufacture of solar panels is conducted in coal-powered factories, as in China. Given that the world economy is currently propelled by fossil energy to about 90%, some have concluded that economic investments in renewable energy represent a fossil energy subsidy of similar proportions. Also, given this reliance on fossil fuels, a rise in prices of fossil energy cannot simply be hailed in terms of an increasing competitiveness for solar, as it will translate into higher production costs for alternative technologies. More centrally, given the fact that the cheapening of solar panels in recent years to a significant extent is the result of shifting manufacture to China, we must ask ourselves whether European and American efforts to become sustainable should really be based on the global exploitation of low-wage labor and abused landscapes elsewhere. The global, societal conditions for energy technologies tend to be equally overlooked whether we are accounting for the eighteenth-century shift to fossil energy or deliberating about how to abandon it. Both steam engines and solar panels have relied on asymmetric global flows of biophysical resources such as embodied labor, land, energy, and materials.
A transition to renewable energy generally focuses on electricity production, but most of the total global energy use occurs in other contexts, such as non-electric transports. Electricity globally represents about 19% of total energy use. In the year 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9% from wind, while over 85% relied on fossil fuels. In March 2018, Vaclav Smil estimated that as much as 90% of world energy use derives from fossil sources, and that the share is actually increasing. Solar power is not displacing fossil energy, only adding to it. The pace of expansion of renewable energy capacity has stalled—it was about the same in 2018 as in 2017. Meanwhile, the global combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise, as do global carbon emissions.
We have every reason to dismantle most of the global, fossil-fueled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries, and other commodities around the planet
Downscaling energy needs
How should we understand and transcend this impasse? To continue burning fossil fuels cannot be an option, but to believe that modern, high-energy society can be maintained based on renewable energy is similarly deluded. We shall certainly continue to need electricity, for example to run our hospitals and computers. But we have every reason to dismantle most of the global, fossil-fueled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries, and other commodities around the planet. This means making human subsistence independent from fossil energy and substantially reducing our mobility and consumption. Solar power will no doubt be an indispensable component of humanity’s future, but this will not happen as long as we allow the logic of the world market to make it profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the world. In order to provide the conditions for a sustainable technology, we must begin by establishing a sustainable economy. Crucially, also, we must modify our understanding of the very idea of technology. Contrary to our modern worldview since the Industrial Revolution, technology is not a neutral way of revealing and harnessing the forces of nature. A better way to define technology is to acknowledge that it is a global social phenomenon and a moral and political question rather than simply one of engineering. If we forget about this distributive aspect of technology, it will likely continue to save time and space for a global elite at the expense of human time and natural space appropriated elsewhere.
Further resources
Alf Hornborg. Nature, society, and justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the money-energy-technology complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Argues that modern energy technologies, in exploiting global differences in the price of labor and resources, are based not only on politically neutral revelations of natural forces but crucially also on accumulation of the capital invested in harnessing them.
Dustin Mulvaney. Solar power: Innovation, sustainability, and environmental justice. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Discusses what changes would be required in the life cycle of photovoltaic solar power technology to make it just and sustainable.
Vaclav Smil. Power density: A key to understanding energy sources and uses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Compares different energy sources in terms of the amount of energy that can be derived from them per square meter of space.
Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses on theorizing the cultural and political dimensions of human-environmental relations in different societies in space and time. His books include The Power of the Machine (2001), Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011), Global Magic (2016), and Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene (2019).
What we dream about the future affects how we act today. If utopias
express our desires, dystopias distill our fears. Utopias and dystopias are
images we invoke to think and act in the present, producing futures that often
look very different from either our dreams or our nightmares.
An oft-repeated criticism against the green movement is that it is dystopian and catastrophist (some call this ‘Malthusian’) when it comes to its diagnosis, and utopian when it comes to its prognosis. On the one hand, greens warn of a scary future of planetary disaster, and on the other, offer a peaceful dreamland where people bike to their artisanal work and live in picturesque houses with well manicured food gardens and small windmills. Nowhere to see is a realistic political plan on how we could ever escape from the current capitalist nightmare, and move to something remotely close to an egalitarian and ecological future.
I won’t deny that some green writings, especially in the 1970s and 80s (but also still today) merit this critique. But in the meantime, there has been a lot of new thought, under the labels of ecosocialism, degrowth, or environmental justice that cannot be caricatured and packaged in this simplistic mold. And yet this is what geographer Matt Huber does in a recent article published at the Socialist Forum, entitled Ecosocialism: Dystopian and Scientific. Huber argues that there are two types of green socialism, one that is utopian and unscientific, and one that is realistic and scientific, his.
Tired
dichotomies
Democratic socialism is a project in the making, and it is important to avoid tired dichotomies and divisions of the past, especially between green and not-so-green socialists. I find a lot to agree with in Huber’s socialist climate politics and would fully sign on to his concluding agenda in the Socialist Forum piece, where he defends an ‘inspiring and positive political program that can win the masses of the working classes … built on the decommodification and universal access to [their] needs, but also a more radical and democratic vision of organizing production to integrate ecological knowledge’ based on ‘public transport, green public housing … and public ownership of energy’. Yet, before that Huber argues that ‘degrowth oriented ecosocialists’ (his term), like us are too utopian, and not scientific. And here I disagree.
What I want to argue is that, first, being utopian is not a problem as Huber makes it seem it is, and second, we are scientific, at least as scientific as Huber can claim his position is.
Dialectical utopias
To begin with: what does Huber mean by ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’?
By utopia, Huber, following Engels, understands a social arrangement
that does not and cannot exist (a place that has no place, a u-topos). If such an arrangement cannot
exist, then it is a waste and misdirection of our energies, Huber implies.
Forgive me the heresy, but thinking about utopias has progressed – fortunately – a lot since Engels’ time.
Forgive me the heresy, but thinking about utopias has progressed –
fortunately – a lot since Engels’ time. David Harvey, who Huber certainly
reads, wrote a wonderful book on cities and utopias almost 20 years ago (Spaces
of Hope). Harvey says we should oppose utopias that are meant as models or
blueprints – not so much because they are unrealistic, but because the
realization of a perfect ideal tolerates no objection and crushes everything
that stands in its way. Harvey recognizes, however, the value of ‘dialectical utopias’ – contradictory and
incomplete images that express desires about the future, that challenge and
make us reflect, that generate conflict with prevalent visions and open up new
syntheses.
Ernst Bloch famously called utopias the education of desire. As Hug March and I argued, the future prefigured in the degrowth literature is indeed a dialectical utopia that wants to reshape desires. When French activists and intellectuals launched the word ‘degrowth’ in the early 90s, they intentionally meant it as a missile slogan that would generate a conflictual antithesis to the prevalent, and taken for granted, imaginary of growth-based development. The hope was – and is – that this conflict would catalyze a new synthesis – maybe not the bio-region of low-tech eco-communes utopia that Huber sees in degrowth writings, but at least some unpredictable new future other than one which would look exactly like capitalism, only with the workers in command.
Unscientific
socialism?
Huber claims this vision is ‘unscientific’. A scientific socialism, Huber
tells us, is one ‘grounded in analysis of what kind of socialist society is
possible given historical and material conditions’. So far so good. Only one
problem: who is to judge what is really ‘possible’?
Huber, for example, seems to think that something close to the energy or material consumption of an average American, secured for everyone in the world, is possible (Huber is against wasteful capitalism, and implies that unnecessary production and consumption could be curtailed, but is not clear what he classifies as waste –and in any case, insists on the point of ‘abundant energy’, which one can only think means at least as much energy as it is currently consumed, if not more). Energy should come from renewable energy, or why not 80% renewable and 20% nuclear, which is fine, Huber claims – and food from robotic agriculture. Moreover, we will do all this without exploiting anyone, taking everyone’s concerns democratically into account, somehow minimizing damage, or at least making those on the receiving side of such damage concede to it ‘democratically’.
I am a scientist too, and I think this vision is unrealistic. To use Huber’s terms, it is ‘materially impossible’.
I am a scientist too, and I think this vision is unrealistic. To use
Huber’s terms, it is ‘materially impossible’. I explain why here
or here in
more detail. The emissions, land use and material extraction involved in a
scenario like Huber’s make impossible a sort of American standard of energy
abundance available for everyone (or more precisely, it can be possible but
just for a few at the expense of many others, as it has been actually till now).
And if we were to take really into account everyone’s concerns (those
who live next to mines where the lithium for the batteries and the uranium for
the reactors will come from, those who will have to be relocated or see their
landscape destroyed to put windmills, etc) and actually compensate them for the
damages our consumption causes, then production would be inevitably much, much
lower than it is today on average. (Not to mention how much the economy would
slow down if we were to devote time to reach decisions on such matters truly
democratically).
The past is
not proof of the future
Granted, I might be wrong, and Huber right. But who is to judge whose
science about what is possible is right and whose is wrong? And what makes
Huber so sure that he is right and scientific while others are not? Any science—scientific
socialism including—is bound to be incomplete, uncertain and debatable. There
are different, contested views, of what is possible – crucially, these views
cannot be separated easily from our desires about the future.
Huber, for example, thinks it is undesirable to live with less energy. His argument is that since agricultural work is drudgery and no one wants to do it, societies without fossil fuels to power tractors had to and will have to have slaves. First, it is questionable whether the historical and anthropological record supports the claim that all societies without fossil fuels were slave-based.
Second, even if many were, this does not mean that we cannot have a future society without fossil fuels, with more manual work and without slaves. The fact that something did not exist in the past is not proof that it cannot happen in the future – if it were, then we wouldn’t be discussing socialism to begin with.
The fact that something did not exist in the past is not proof that it cannot happen in the future – if it were, then we wouldn’t be discussing socialism to begin with.
Third, no one that I know in the ecosocialist, degrowth or other
environmentalist communities that Huber seems to have in mind has argued for a
total substitution of fossil fuels by manual labour. It doesn’t help to take the arguments of others to
their extremes just to prove that they are impossible and unscientific. The
claim of those who support decentralized renewables or peasant agro-ecology for
example is much more nuanced and is based on the recognition that a sustainable
future would involve both cleaner energy and less energy use, as well as less
use of chemicals in agriculture. Agro-ecological, lower-intensity models that
would involve more human labour than is currently the case in countries such as
the U.S., are advocated. But these arrangements are generally envisioned as a
mix of old and new, peasant and industrial experiences, not a total overhaul of
modern techniques or a return to a pre-capitalist mode of living.
Engels was right and it turned out materially possible for capitalism to
produce plenty of goods at a fraction of the time they needed before. But that
doesn’t mean that it is today possible to power ever-growing energy use with
renewable and nuclear energy, with no harm done to others (or with harm done at
levels that can be ‘democratically’ tolerated by others). These are different
times and different arguments, and the fact that siding with a ‘pro-technology’
(so to speak) argument at one moment in time may have proved right, does not
make all similar arguments always and everywhere right or ‘scientific’.
Degrowth:
radical abundance
Capitalism produced (more than) enough, quite soon after Engels’s time,
but there is still poverty amidst an overabundance of goods and productive
possibilities. This should make us pause for a moment. The problem may not be that
we are not producing enough, but as Marx and Engels were among the first to
note, that we are not distributing equally what we are producing.
As Jason Hickel argues in ‘Degrowth. A
call for radical abundance’, the continued enclosures and dispossessions
that sustained capitalism have always been justified in the name of growth. The
story we are constantly being told is, as Malthus first put it, in the service
of his argument in defense of capitalist growth (yes, Malthus was a
defender of growth, not of limits to growth), is that ‘there is not enough
for everyone to have a decent share’. The artificial scarcity created in turn
by enclosures makes everyone live in need, and therefore work harder to stay
afloat, which is essential if the engine is to keep going and growing. So the
problem isn’t that we don’t produce enough, but that we can’t share the
abundance that we already have.
Huber’s vision of sharing and public luxury is not as far as he thinks
from a degrowth vision. I would only add that this has to take place in a
context of private sobriety – a sobriety that actually socialist
revolutionaries of all times have espoused and lived in their everyday lives.
It is what Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Euro-communists called ‘revolutionary
austerity’. It is the sort of personal austerity that real revolutionaries of
all times have practiced in their personal lives.
Relative versus
absolute scarcity
Defending Berlinguer’s revolutionary austerity does not make one accomplice to Thatcherite austerity. On the contrary, what is Thatcherite is the liberal assumption of a God-given right of each and everyone to mobilize all resources possible in their pursuit of their individual (or collective) goals. According to this ingrained liberal view, we cannot tell people that we could perhaps live better with less, because it is people’s god given right to want more and more, as much as those richer have. What is more revolutionary instead than Gandhi’s plea to ‘live simply so that others may simply live’?
Huber agrees that there is so much waste going on within capitalism, and
so much work expended just to goods and services whose purpose is no other than
to pay for rents and profits. Then just ending profits and rents could reduce
resource use significantly. Why insist on robots and nuclear plants if we could
live with less and sustain a decent material standard of living for everyone?
Note also that what counts as ‘decent’ living is always socially
determined and it makes little sense to defend an average, or middle class
standard of living. A poor person today does not die from diseases that royals
died in bygone eras. But if your loved one dies from a curable disease that a
rich person can pay to treat, this creates a real sense of scarcity.
Crucially, this scarcity is relative. If housing was public and cheap, Hickel
argues, then people could live with well with a fraction of their salary –
and produce and consume much less than they do now. To imagine an absolute
scarcity, and use it as a justification for mobilizing ever more work and ever
more resources in the name of making everyone have what the rich persons of
their epoch happen to have, is a fundamental myth that sustains capitalism.
Bending
material reality is not scientific
Huber also has a second take on the meaning of ‘scientific’. He writes
that ‘let’s get real, or ‘scientific’ … we are not going to win the masses of
workers with a socialist program based on … ‘drudgery for all’. Science here
seems to refer to realism about how can ‘we’ (sic) win the masses of workers.
There are problems with this formulation too.
Even if there were a mass of workers that wouldn’t be mobilized to anything that sounds like ‘less’, that still wouldn’t make it materially possible to have ever more stuff.
First, even if Huber were right and there were a mass of workers that wouldn’t be mobilized to anything that sounds like ‘less’, that still wouldn’t make it materially possible to have ever more stuff. Huber argues that given that the workers will never buy into a degrowth utopia then ‘the key to an ecosocialist future is finding some way to replicate the labor-saving aspects of the fossil economy with clean energy’.
This actually seems to me a very unscientific, and utopian in the bad
sense – having to ‘find some way’ to make something possible, independently of
whether it is materially possible or not. Rather than consider integrating your
political strategy to what is materially possible, the call here is to bend material
possibility, one way or the other, to what you came to think as the only
possible political strategy.
Fixed desires
But, second, like the statement on material possibility, the idea that some of us can know with certainty the limits of political possibility – that is, know what the workers really want – is also problematic. Who is to say that workers everywhere and always would only be attracted to visions of ‘more’?
Our mayor, Ada Colau won the municipal elections with the support of a substantial fraction of the working class. Her program emphasized dignity and equality, not growth and material affluence.
I live in Barcelona, and our mayor Ada Colau won the municipal elections
with the support of a substantial fraction of the working class. Her program
emphasized dignity and equality, not growth and material affluence. Colau
wanted to stop evictions and secure decent housing for everyone, she did not
have to promise air-conditions and cheap charter flights for all (I am not
saying that Huber advocates these, but Leigh Phillips, a provocateur who Huber
for some reason enthusiastically cites twice, does).
Third, Huber implicitly assumes that what workers want is fixed, and
that desires cannot be shaped through reflection and dialogue. This leaves no
space for new ideas or new desires and makes one wonder, how is it that workers
come to want what they want, and how does this ever change in time? If we
follow Huber’s logic then we can only cater to what exists, never shape the
possible – this to me seems a quite restricted view of the political.
Politics has a make-believe quality. Pre-defining what is possible leads
to self-fulfilled prophecies. If we assume that we cannot even utter our dreams
of a different future, because they are unrealistic and impossible, then of
course ‘workers’ will want what they currently want and alternative dreams will
remain unrealistic and impossible.
But fourth, and more importantly, it is not clear why, for Huber, ‘we’
who write these things are not part of the working class, and can’t understand
what ‘they’ want. If the working class is those who have to sell their labour in
order to survive, then it is not only coal miners and Joe the plumbers that make
the working class, not even only nurses and teachers, but also we University
professors and the precarious post-docs and students that read our musings. Those
among us who desire some sort of a degrowth future are not some weird romantic animals,
different from the rest of working people – we are not people who live from
rents, we are workers like anyone else who have to work in order to make it
from month to month.
Of course there are different experiences, and different power positions
within a broadly defined working class, or the 99%. We shouldn’t be blind to
our positionalities, for example, as academic urbanites, with a decent income,
a health insurance, flying regularly and so on. But the desires of education
workers or precarious youngsters are as legitimate as those of factory workers.
And our desires do not necessarily have to be different either (actually
keeping them different is essential for the hegemony of capitalism). And they
are increasingly not different, as the incomes, social protections and
privileges of the professional middle income groups are collapsing.
Chris Carlsson and Fransesca Manning write about a new ‘nowtopian‘ experience of class, shared among parts of the precariat which finds work and meaning outside wage labour, in urban gardens, social centres or pirate programming. Nowtopians formed the backbone of the occupied squares. Waving away dreams like theirs as unscientific (and implicitly, elitist) is not doing the building of a broad movement any service.
Reducing complex debate into outdated binaries
In conclusion, both material and social conditions are much more complex and uncertain than Huber allows for. Huber, I am afraid, is reducing a complex debate into simple binaries of the sort ‘(post)-industrial future’ versus ‘back to slavery’ (if not back to the caves).
The choices ahead are much more nuanced than that and will involve
different hybrids of advanced and simplified techniques and modes of living.
Consumption will have to go down and production will need to be cleaner –
fortunately this can be experienced as an improvement in living if the commons
are reclaimed and shared equally. The discourses and visions that will mobilize
the 99% to an eco-socialist future are bound to be context-specific, but I
firmly believe they can be constructed in a Colau-style fashion around ideas of
sufficiency and sharing the commons equally, while securing a dignified life
for all.
If something disappoints me, and motivated me to write this essay, it is
the feeling that no matter how hard some of us work to advance and refine a
certain strain of green-left thought (call it degrowth, ecosocialism or else),
we are bound to be caricatured as a blend of socialist utopians of the 19th
century and neo-Malthusians of the 1970s (never mind the stark differences
between these two sets of ideas).
We owe ourselves and the few people who might read us a more informed
and refined debate than a repetition of tired dichotomies from the 1970s.
Reality is complex, what is possible and what not is hard to know, and the
roads to ecosocialism (or however else you might want to call an egalitarian
and sustainable future) are many.
Aaron
Vansintjan commented on a previous draft and helped me improve this text.
Giorgos
Kallis is an ICREA professor of political ecology and ecological
economics at ICTA-UAB in Barcelona. He is the author of Degrowth (2018,
Agenda Publishing). A collection of his essays and media articles, ‘In
Defense of Degrowth,’ can be downloaded free
of cost.
by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta
The seductive nature of development rhetoric, sometimes called developmentality or developmentalism, has been internalized across virtually all countries. Decades after the notion of development spread around the world, only a handful of countries that were called ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’, now really qualify as ‘developed’. Others struggle to emulate the North’s economic template, and all at enormous ecological and social cost. The problem lies not in lack of implementation, but in the conception of development as linear, unidirectional, material and financial growth, driven by commodification and capitalist markets.
Despite numerous attempts to re-signify development, it continues to be something that ‘experts’ manage in pursuit of economic growth, and measure by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a poor and misleading indicator of progress in the sense of well-being. In truth, the world at large experiences ‘maldevelopment’, not least in the very industrialized countries whose lifestyle was meant to serve as a beacon for the ‘backward’ ones.
A critical part of these multiple crises lies in the conception of ‘modernity’ itself – not to suggest that everything modern is destructive or iniquitous, nor that all tradition is positive. Indeed, modern elements such as human rights and feminist principles are proving liberatory for many people. We refer to modernity as the dominant worldview emerging in Europe since the Renaissance transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The cultural practices and institutions making up this worldview hold the individual as being independent of the collective, and give predominance to private property, free markets, political liberalism, secularism and representative democracy. Another key feature of modernity is ‘universality’– the idea that we all live in a single, now globalized world, and critically, the idea of modern science as being the only reliable truth and harbinger of ‘progress’.
Among the early causes of these crises is the ancient monotheistic premise that a father ‘God’ made the Earth for the benefit of ‘his’ human children. This attitude is known as anthropocentrism. At least in the West, it evolved into a philosophic habit of pitting humanity against nature; it gave rise to related dualisms such as the divide between humanity and nature, subject and object, civilized and barbarian, mind and body, man and woman. These classic ideological categories both legitimize devastation of the natural world, as well as the exploitation of sex-gender, racial and civilizational differences.
There is no guarantee that development will resolve traditional discrimination and violence against women, youth, children and intersex minorities, landless and unemployed classes, races, castes and ethnicities. As globalizing capital destabilizes regional economies, turning communities into refugee populations, some people cope by identifying with the macho power of the political Right, along with its promise to ‘take the jobs back’from migrants.. A dangerous drift towards authoritarianism is taking place all over the world, from India to USA and Europe.
Development and sustainability: matching the unmatchable
The early twentieth-century debate on sustainability was strongly influenced by the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth argument. Regular conferences at a global level would reiterate the mismatch between ‘development and environment’, with the report Our Common Future(1987) bringing it sharply into focus. However, the UN and most state analyses have never included a critique of social structural forces underlying ecological breakdown. The framing has always been on making economic growth and development ‘sustainable and inclusive’ through appropriate technologies, market mechanisms and institutional policy reform. The problem is that this mantra of sustainability was swallowed up by capitalism early on, and then emptied of ecological content.
In the period from 1980s on, neoliberal globalization advanced aggressively across the globe. The UN now shifted focus to a programme of ‘poverty alleviation’ in developing countries, without questioning the sources of poverty in the accumulation-driven economy of the affluent Global North. In fact, it was argued that countries needed to achieve a high standard of living before they could employ resources into protecting the environment. This watering down of earlier debates on limits opened the way for the ecological modernist ‘green economy’ concept.
At the UN Conference for Sustainable Development in 2012, this hollow sustainability ideology was the guiding framework for multilateral discussions. In preparation for Rio+20, UNEP published a report on the ‘green economy’, defining it ‘as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities’. In line with the pro-growth policy of sustainable development advocates, the report conceptualized all living natural forms across the planet as ‘natural capital’ and ‘critical economic assets’, so intensifying the marketable commodification of life-on-Earth.
The international model of green capitalism carried forward in the declaration Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development reveals the following flaws:
No analysis of how the structural roots of poverty, unsustainability and multidimensional violence are historically grounded in state power, corporate monopolies, neo-colonialism, and patriarchal institutions;
Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance with accountable decision-making by citizens and self-aware communities in face-to-face settings;
Continued emphasis on economic growth as the driver of development, contradicting biophysical limits, with arbitrary adoption of GDP as the indicator of progress;
Continued reliance on economic globalization as the key economic strategy, undermining people’s attempts at self-reliance and autonomy;
Continued subservience to private capital, and unwillingness to democratize the market through worker–producer and community control;
Modern science and technology held up as social panaceas, ignoring their limits and impacts, and marginalising ‘other’ knowledges;
Culture, ethics and spirituality sidelined and made subservient to economic forces;
Unregulated consumerism without strategies to reverse the Global North’s disproportionate contamination of the globe through waste, toxicity and climate emissions;
Neoliberal architectures of global governance becoming increasingly reliant on technocratic managerial values by state and multi-lateral bureaucracies.
The framework of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now global in its reach, is thus a false consensus
We do not mean to belittle the work of people who are finding new technological solutions to reduce problems, for instance, in renewable energy, nor do we mean to diminish the many positive elements contained in the SDG framework. Rather, our aim is to stress that in the absence of fundamental socio-cultural transformation, technological and managerial innovation will not lead us out of the crises. As nation-states and civil society gear up for the SDGs, it is imperative to lay out criteria to help people identify what truly is transformative. These include a shift to well-being approaches based on radical, direct democracy, the localization and democratization of the economy, social justice and equity (gender, caste, class etc), recommoning of private property, respect for cultural and knowledge diversity including their decolonisation, regeneration of the earth’s ecological resilience and rebuilding our respectful relationship with the rest of nature.
This article is an excerpt of the introduction to the forthcoming book Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta (editors).
Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh and Vikalp Sangam in India, and co-editor of Alternative Futures: India Unshackled.
Ariel Salleh is an Australian scholar-activist, author of Ecofeminism as Politics and editor of Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice.
Arturo Escobar teaches at University of North Carolina, and is author of Encountering Development.
Federico Demaria is with Autonomous University of Barcelona, and co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocubalary for a New Era.
Alberto Acosta is an Ecuadorian economist and activist, former President of the Constituent Assembly of Ecuador.
