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ABSTRACT
For over two decades, the concept of sustainable development has been salient in political discourse. But its promise of reconciling economic development, social welfare, and environmental sustainability has proven rather elusive. In recent years, we've seen numerous competing concepts emerge in debates about sustainable economic development. While many advance ideas of a green economy and green growth, others talk about wellbeing, gross national happiness, inclusive wealth, harmony with nature, de-growth, steady-state economy, and buenvivir (living well). This rhetorical diversity shows that there is no single vision for reconciling environmental sustainability and economic development. But the varied terminology itself obscures actual points of agreement and disagreement. This article reports on a bilingual ‘Q study’ of international debates about sustainable economic development. It reveals that three discourses underpin these debates: Radical Transformationism; Cooperative Reformism; and Statist Progressivism. The article dissects these discourses and contextualizes their key points of contention in wider sustainability debates over the past two decades.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the Q-study participants who volunteered their time; and colleagues at the University of Sheffield who participated in a pilot phase of the Q-study. Stephen Jeffares, Peter Schmolck, Martin Hughes, and members of the Q list-serv provided valuable methodological assistance and suggestions. Earlier drafts of the paper were presented at the BISA Workshop on Normative and Ideational Trends in Global Environmental Politics, University of Sheffield, 17 October 2014; and the Authors’ Workshop on ‘Discourse Power and Environmental Policy’, University of Freiburg, 29–31 October 2014. I thank John Dryzek, Peter Feindt, and other participants for their comments, as well as the two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here. [https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2015.1118681]
Notes
1 The distinction between economic growth and economic development is worth highlighting here at the outset. Economic growth refers to increases in total national output or income. Economic development is a much broader concept that refers to structural changes in an economy (e.g. diversification, or shifts from a dominant agricultural sector to a dominant manufacturing or services sector) and/or progress on a broader range of indicators concerning poverty, inequality, literacy, health, etc.
2 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this framing.
3 Many scholars identify in this way; see, for example, Green House (n.d.).
4 Stevenson and Dryzek (Citation2014) provide an account of what this might look like in the more specific context of global climate change governance.
5 Spanish was included to increase the diversity of material; my own linguistic capacity was the determining factor in language selection. Academic peer-reviewed material was excluded given my interest in identifying only the perspectives of engaged stakeholders (material published by academics for public consumption, e.g. blogs, were included). To make the sampling more manageable, material focused only on a specific city or country was also excluded.
6 The following search terms were used in Google (with searches limited to my two-year period): ‘green economy’ ‘green growth’ ‘sustainable development’, low carbon economy’ ‘sustainable economy’ ‘economìaverde’ ‘crecimientoverde’ ‘desarrollosostenible’ ‘economìa de bajocarbono’ and ‘economìasostenible’.
7 A Q-set of 40–80 statements is standard (Watts and Stenner Citation2012, p. 61), but Q-sorting has traditionally been done in person. Feedback provided by participants in this study suggests that a Q-sort more than 50 statements is inappropriate for online sorting; several participants reported ‘sorting fatigue’ with 48 statements.
8 See Appendix I for the values assigned to these attributed.
9 A high relevance filter was applied. Remaining documents were then filtered by key concept. For each key concept collection, half was selected with a view to maximizing diversity by author type and author region. The key concept category of ‘other’ was treated slightly differently to reflect its diversity; two-thirds of this collection was selected.
10 See Appendix II for a complete list of these categories. See Appendices IV and V for the complete Q-set in English and Spanish, respectively (https://www.academia.edu/10874690/Contemporary_Discourses_of_Green_Political_Economy_Appendices). The initial 270 statements included both English and Spanish statements; these were synthesized into English, and the final set was then translated into Spanish by a native speaker. Initially 50 statements were included, but this was reduced to 48 following a pilot study of the Q-sort. The pilot study was conducted among English- and Spanish-speaking colleagues in the Department of Politics, at the University of Sheffield. The statements were edited for brevity and clarity on the basis of feedback from pilot participants.
11 A database of authors was compiled using publicly available information. Most entries were authors directly named on the documents. Some documents only named an organization; in these cases, relevant individuals were located on the organization's website. Some document authors were not contacted because (a) their contact details could not be found; (b) there was no clearly identifiable author; or (c) the author was not an English or Spanish speaker (i.e. the document has been translated into one of these languages).
12 This included 29 English participants and 11 Spanish participants. The lower representation of Spanish speakers is explained by two factors: there was a higher proportion of English speakers in the list of potential participants; and a hyperlink malfunction created problems with accessing the Spanish version of the study. A P-set of 40 is entirely appropriate for a Q study. A P-set of 40–60 is generally considered adequate, but the most important consideration is that the number of participants is less than the number of statements (Watts and Stenner Citation2012, p. 73).
13 Developed by Stephen Jeffares of the University of Birmingham.
14 Appendix II shows how each of the Q study participants correlated with the final three factors.
15 A Z-score is a standardized score, which creates a ‘level playing field’ for cross-factor comparison. This allows us to compare the relevance of each statement for each factor, despite the fact that Factor 1 has 10 defining sorts, Factor 2 has 9, and Factor 3 has 4. The Z-score shows how participants ranked each statement overall among the 48 statements. Statements with a Z-score of greater than 1 (relative agreement) and lower than -1 (relative disagreement) are considered characteristic of a factor.
16 Italicized numbers in brackets indicate the relevant statement in the Q-set. P numbers indicate anonymized participant identity). Quotes from participants 29–40 (p. 29–p. 40) have been translated from Spanish to English by the author. The factors are written in a narrative form to show how the relationship between economic development and environmental degradation looks from each perspective; these should be read not as reflecting my own judgement, but as the assumptions associated with each factor. Participants’ quotes are drawn from the comments they provided in the final step of the Q sort (see ‘Factor 1: Radical Transformationism’ section).
17 In the academic literature, the idea that capitalism could be compatible with degrowth has been elaborated by Spangenberg (Citation2013).
18 Early examples include O'Riordan (Citation1983) and Cotgrove (Citation1982). More recent examples are Adger et al. (Citation2001) and Barry and Proops (Citation1999).
19 Statist Progressivism also resembles a position that has recently been called Green Keynesianism (Harris Citation2013).
20 For example, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), the World Bank's WAVES Partnership (Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services), and the UN's Systems of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) framework.
21 In this study, a couple of initial participants decided not to complete the study for this reason; their incomplete responses were not included in the analysis.
