Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice

Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice, by Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling, London, Earthscan, 2010, xiv + 212 pp., £19.99 (paperback), £75 (hardback), ISBN 9781849710923

The idea of sustainability emerged from the concept of sustained yield, the forester's dream of a “stationary forest” that yields a continuous flow of timber. But in the 1970s, ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling began to question this idea, and began to speak about “surprise” in ecosystem dynamics and sustainability-as-resilience – the ability to recover from unexpected shock or stress, rather than to yield a steady flow. While the concept of sustainability in the simple sense of “sustaining the ecological basis of human well-being” gained wide acceptance and the Brundtland Commission's simple definition of sustainable development caught the public imagination, ecologists and lately economists are grappling with what it means to sustain anything in the face of highly variable and unpredictable behaviour of socio-ecological systems. Others, however, have been sceptical of the sustainability bandwagon itself. As sustainable development has gotten “mainstreamed”, bureaucratised and eventually rendered meaningless by the political system, critics have pointed to the depoliticising nature of the term, and even its tendency to reinforce the status quo – sustaining today's inequities and injustices by painting doomsday scenarios and saying we are all in the same boat.

The book under review is a bold attempt to bridge these divergent perspectives. Itdoes so firstly by highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of sustainability, and secondly by taking an openly normative stance about what is to be sustained. The question the authors seek to address is: “How can dynamic, intertwined social, technological and ecological change contribute to processes and outcomes that are more sustainable with respect to the functions, goals and values that are important to poorer people?” (p. 65). Using four situations – water in dryland India, seeds and biotechnology in Africa, epidemics in an interconnected world, and energy in the context of climate change – as real world problems to illustrate their conceptual points, the authors weave an interesting narrative to answer this question.

Reviewing the vast literature on dynamism in socio-ecological systems (chapter 2), the authors make a fairly persuasive argument that one needs to move away from equilibrium thinking, based on linearity, predictability, homogeneity and simplification, to approaches that encompass nonlinearity, complexity, surprise and cross-scale effects. The authors suggest a response to this dynamism that expands theconventional focus on risk and uncertainty to include ambiguity (about the nature of outcomes) and complete ignorance (about both change and nature of outcomes). The counterparts of these concepts are presented as stability, durability, resilience and robustness. This four-attribute formulation of sustainability is somewhat similar to some earlier attempts at reconciling the steady-state anddynamic aspects (see, e.g. Lélé 1993) but much better conceptualised, elaborated and illustrated here. The case for such an approach is clear when one looks at the question of dryland or rainfed agriculture, which is subject to so much natural variability and to which the modern response has been to seek to suppress or control variation through irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides.

The role of “framing” is also critical. Framing, as defined by the authors, involves a combination of values, assumptions, world-views, and system bounding, all interacting to produce a particular “narrative”. In the water context, for instance, the “large-dams-as-solution” framing involves valuing overall economic development over needs of the poorest, setting the problem scale as regional rather than local, thereby deeming modern high-tech solutions as superior to traditional low-tech ones, and focusing on scarcity in absolute terms rather than on context-specific adaptation.

From this analysis of dynamism and framing in the sustainability discourse, the authors move towards solutions by outlining alternative approaches to governance, design and politics. They begin by showing how conventional approaches to governance tend to “close down” or converge towards equilibrium and stability thinking, partly due to institutional inertia, and partly because of deeply rooted styles of thinking. The authors then argue for a more adaptive, deliberative and reflexive governance (chapter 4) and specifically for a “broad and open” rather than “narrow and closed” system of appraisal (appraisal being defined as “the ensemble of processes through which knowledges are gathered and produced in order to inform decision-making”). They illustrate the “broad and open” approach with examples such as the citizen juries organised on biotechnology in Zimbabwe, which defined the question more broadly in terms of “developments in agricultural sector” rather than just technology choice, involved actors from all sectors, set up a jury of non-specialists which then interrogated specialists as “witnesses” and generated a broad agreement on some basic principles about goals and values along with a verdict questioning theuse of GM crops. In the next chapter the authors cover what they call the “the alternative politics” needed for their dynamic sustainability approach to work, by which they mean the kind of citizen mobilisation that would be necessary. Coincidentally, as I write this review, Wiebe Bijker has written a piece on the Dutch Societal Dialogue on Nanotechnology (Bijker 2011) that reinforces the authors' points about open approaches and broad-based debate.

While I found much to learn and ponder over in the book, I would like to flag two areas of concern. First, stylistically, I found the authors spending a too much time on “covering the literature” rather than actually making their own argument clearer – whether it is about dynamism in socio-ecological systems, or governance or the politics of policy. Second, more substantively, I found it hard to agree with both the “framing” (to use their own term!) and the logic behind foregrounding dynamism in certain contexts. The environmental problem has in recent times been framed as a “sustainability” problem. But the discomfort that many analysts have (and which the authors allude to in passing) about sustainability stems at least in part from the fact that not all environmental problems involve externalities over time. Many involve externalities over space and therefore are related to issues of “intra-generational justice” than either “long-term self-interest” or “care for future generations”. The pollutees are often (though not always) poorer or less powerful sections of society (Lélé 1998). And the existence of these problems seems unrelated to any inattention to ecosystem dynamism that may exist in science or policy-making. At another level, the example of energy policy that the authors use also highlights the limitations of their argument. There is actually little uncertainty that today's climate change crisis is the result of fossil fuel consumption. It is equally clear where this consumption and therefore the responsibility for mitigation primarily lies. The authors frame the energy-climate change problem as “how might technological and energy system pathways emerge which respond both to the diversity and [dynamism] of national and local demands” (p. 165). And their “alternative” narrative is that “rapid, radical reductions in carbon emissions are achievable by novel, small-scale, distributed, networked (technical and institutional) innovations for smart grids, efficient use, energy services and autonomous micro-generation”. But hardly anyone who has studied the energy-climate change link seriously and who is committed normatively to sustainability and social justice (as the authors are), would say that this “alternative” is going to be enough, and that radical changes in lifestyles of the rich are not required. This is not to say that uncertainty and dynamism are not going to be major issues in energy planning in the future. But just that if one is concerned about sustainability and social justice in the energy-climate change context today, one would not say “attention to dynamism or uncertainty” is the most important issue at hand!

Nevertheless, the book makes several important contributions to the literature on sustainability, and I am sure the authors will cover the larger question of sustainable and equitable development in subsequent writings.

© 2011, Sharachchandra Lele