Wiscana Astri Prabaswari

18/434657/PTK/12220
DD 16 (MPWK 2018/2019)

STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:

LOCAL AGENDAS FOR THE SOUTH
Edited by Michael Redclift & Collin Sage
 CHAPTER 2
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:
ECONOMICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Redclift, Michael. 1994. "Chapter 2 - Sustainable Development: Economics and the

Environment." In Strategies for Sustainable Development: Local Agendas for the South,
by Michael Redclift. New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 ANTECEDENTS: THE ETYMOLOGY OF
“SUSTAINABLE”
 Latin: sus-tenere means to uphold.
 de Vries (1989): Supporting a desired state of some kind or, conversely,
enduring an undesired state.
 An act or process which is capable of being upheld or defended.

THE FORMULATION OF PROPOSITIONS ABOUT SUSTAINABLE

DEVELOPMENT
1. As a concept, precisely because it combines the idea of prescriptive action, with
that of enduring, defendable properties, located in scientific principles.
2. Born of intellectual necessity, as much as political necessity. It emerges, in fact,
from problems generated by Modernism itself, including our faith in science.
 SUSTAINABILITY AND DEVELOPMENT:
THE DISCOURSE SURROUNDING NEEDS
• Developed a primitive concept of carrying
capacity.
European • The earth could be cultivated “like a garden”,
without considering that an environment
Enlightenment deteriorating as a result of human settlement,
might offer hard choices in the future.

• Represents an attempt to deal with the problem of

nature through reference to natural laws to
external limits imposed on human societies
Modernism • Two key elements in its perspective on the
environment:
• idea of progress, of reason and freedom;
• legitimation its own discursive practices.

• Critique to Modernism.
Post- • Development = Progress, linked with “natural”
limit.
Modernism • Sustainable Development then becomes a
methodology.
 THE ALLOCATIVE PRINCIPLES BEHIND
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
 Sustainable development invokes the concept of “need”, in the context of
“development” to meet problems of resource allocation in time and space.
• Problems of allocation in time (“now” & “later”)
Intergenerational equity, a concern to register the preferences and choices
of future generations, as yet unborn.
• Problems of allocation in space (“here” & “elsewhere”)
Intragenerational equity, especially between different societies and
between North and South.
 Sustainable Development (Brundtland Commission):
Intergenerational equity  Development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own
needs (WCED 1987).
 “Needs” are different things to different people – different ideological
positions on human needs. (Doyal and Gough, 1991)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE
PROBLEM OF LEGITIMATION
 Sustainable development is that the choice of a biological concept
(sustainability) leaves open the possibility that it can be treated both as a
model and as a point of legitimation.
 The natural world is used, in other words, both as a model for system based
on human intervention and, ultimately, a constraint on human development
 Sustainability appears to provide a point of reference outside the confines
human experience, which can also serve to guide human choice
ECONOMIC VALUES AND SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT: PARADIGM REGAINED
There are two aspects of the “conventional” approach to environmental assets
that are criticized:
1. Conventional economic accounting frequently regards the destruction of
resources as a contribution to wealth.
2. The cost of making good any environmental damage is recorded as a
positive contribution to GDP.
 THE LIMITATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL
ECONOMICS: PARADIGM LOST
Problems with the paradigm:
1. It fails to recognize that monetary values are always exchange values, not
use values.
2. It claims “value neutrality”, when environmental economics itself expresses
the preference and biases of the society in which it was developed.
3. It fails to recognize that conventional economic analysis rests on a particular
view of human nature and social relations.
 THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE
 Increasingly environmental problems are looked upon a scientific problems,
Amenable to scientific “answer”.
 We cannot achieve more ecologically sustainable development without
ensuring that it is also socially sustainable.
 We cannot achieve more socially sustainable development in a way that
effectively excludes ecological factors from consideration.
“Can our natural capital withstand the pressures of
increased population and levels of consumption?”
 CHAPTER 3
POPULATION, CONSUMPTION, AND
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sage, Colin. 1994. "Chapter 3 - Population, Consumption, and Sustainable Development." In

Strategies for Sustainable Development: Local Agendas for the South, by Michael
Redclift. New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 INTRODUCTION
 The relationship POPULATION – CONSUMPTION – ENVIRONMENTAL
RESOURCES is an intellectually complex and politically difficult  debate:
1. The growth of human number will inevitably outstrip the capacity of the earth
to provide food and other vital support services.
2. The innate ingenuity of human species will always provide the technical
means to overcome resource constraints.
 Population is vied either as single cause of impending planetary collapse or as
the catalyst for ever-higher level of material development.
 Causes of environmental degradation: in rich industrialized countries (the
“North”) vs. in poor and developing economies countries (the “South”).
 The North plans to reduce the depletion of ozone and tropical forest, and the
rate of population of growth in the South, but this can only begin once economic
growth has raised standards of living to “level compatible of human dignity”.
 Table Population Indicators for Major World Regions
Region Population Average Rate IMR per 1000 Percentage Urban Growth
Millions Growth (%) Urban (%)
1990 1990-1995 1990 1990 1990-1995
World 5292.2 1.7 63 45 3.0

“North” 1206.6 0.5 12 73 0.8

“South” 4084.6 2.1 70 37 4.2

Africa 642.1 3.0 94 34 4.9

N. America 275.9 0.7 8 75 1.0

L. America 448.1 1.9 48 72 2.6

Asia 3112.7 1.8 64 34 4.2

Europe 498.4 0.2 11 73 0.7

Oceania 26.5 1.4 23 71 1.4

USSR 288.6 0.7 20 66 0.9

Source: Data derived from World Resource Institute (1990)
 CONCEPTUALIZING POPULATION AND
ENVIRONMENT
 Thomas Malthus (the Malthusian):
• The relationships between population and food supply under conditions
where technology and resources in land remained constant.
• Human number would outstrip the capacity to produce sufficient food and
that “positive checks” such as poverty, disease, famine and war would
impose downward pressure on the rate of population growth in the absence
of fertility control.
• Central element of the model is population growth.
 Ester Boserup (the Boserupian):
• High population densities are in themselves a prerequisite for technological
innovation in which agricultural system continuously evolve into increasingly
land-intensive forms.
• This process has given rise historically to five distinct stages stretching from
shifting cultivation with long fallow periods to multiple cropping.
• Central element of the model is technology.
 Blaikie and Brookfield argue to Boserup and neo-Malthusian’s model:
1. “Pressure of population on resources” (PPR) which helpfully establishes a
linkage without the need to specify critical thresholds embodied in the term
“carrying capacity”, a problematic concept which is entirely conditional on the
level of technology and consistency of climatic factors.
2. The necessary distinction between intensification and innovation.
 Bilsborrow threefold classification in responses to population pressure:
1. Demographic – the variety of social responses available to reduce existing
level of fertility.
2. Economic – production responses in agriculture.
3. Demographic-economic – migration.
4. Off-farm employment for feedback effects (substitutes by Grigg).
 Paul Ehrlich said that land-use changes influenced by population, technological
capacity, and level of consumption.
I : environmental impact
I = PAT P : population
A : per capita consumption (affluence)
T : technology
 REGIONAL POPULATION TRENDS AND
DYNAMICS
 The rapid growth of world population in the post-war period is the result of a
sharp decline in mortality levels due to interventions in public health and
disease control.
 While death rates are approaching their anticipated minimum, birth rates in the
South are falling but lagging well behind mortality levels.
 Unlike mortality, which is highly responsive to improvements in economic
development, fertility is a matter of individual and family decision, as responsive
to cultural phenomena – gender relations, marriage contracts, inheritance of
wealth and property – as to social and economic influences.
 Determinants of fertility levels such as delayed age at marriage, reduced
remarriage, post-partum practices, extended post-partum sexual abstinence,
breastfeeding, contraceptive use, abortion, celibacy, pathological sterility, etc).
 ECONOMIC GROWTH, INCOME CHANGE
AND CONSUMPTION
 In the industrialized countries of the North, for example, the income elasticity for
food is low and approaching zero, whereas it is high and positive for such
functions as recreation and housing.
 In the South, by contrast, rising per capita income stimulate relatively large
increases in demand for basic food goods, although as incomes rise this
creates a change in the composition of demand.
 Rising income also creates other far-reaching changes in relation to land use,
for example by increasing demand for living space, transport and recreational
uses especially amongst urban populations.
 The two main factors responsible for changes in the level of resources depletion
are increasing per capita income in the North and increasing populations in the
South (Bilsborrow and Geores)
 The greatest disparities within rural areas of the South are often those between
areas of high agricultural potential which have benefitted from agricultural
modernization and those areas of low potential which have been neglected
(Leonard).
 POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL
RESOURCES: CONCLUDING COMMENTS
 “No simple correlations can be established between population and
environmental transportations” and that there is a “need for caution in using
populations as a simple surrogate for environmental transformation”.
 One of the principal areas where population growth has been treated as major
driving force of land-use change is in relation to tropical deforestation, and also
more intermediate factors such as land fragmentation, pattern of land-
ownership, migration, and tenure systems.
 Other believe deflecting the cause of deforestation away from demographic
increase, which is the outcome of complex historical process taking place in
interacting social and natural systems and sub-systems.

“We need to develop a much deeper understanding of relationship between

human populations, their technologies, culture, and value, and the natural
capital (renewable and non-renewable natural resources) they depend on for
life support if we are to achieve sustainability”.
THANK YOU
Wiscana Astri Prabaswari
18/434657/PTK/12220
DD 16 (MPWK 2018/2019)