Is sustainable growth an oxymoron?

The concept of sustainable development is now an important part of the discourse. Much of the credit goes to the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, generally known as the Brundtland Commission, which gave currency to the concept. Today words such as “sustainability” and “sustainable” have become common buzzwords mouthed approvingly by anyone from media moguls to multinational mining companies that often mean nothing more than environmentally desirable.

The most widely quoted definition of ‘sustainable development’ is the one given by the Brundtland Commission: development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

This definition has two crucial elements – the notion of needs and the idea of inter-generation equity. Need from the environmental perspective may be distinguished from want, as used by economists, and greed, as pointed out by Mahatma Gandhi: “the world has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed”.

For economists, the dividing line between need and want is rather blurred as wants can transform, or be made to transform, into needs. Then there is the question of whose needs should have primacy: poor or rich people; urban or rural people; the environment or the corporation; this generation or the next generation?

When a trade-off becomes necessary, whose needs should go first? Thus, the concept of needs embodies a number of difficult moral and policy choices which a society has to exercise in a fair and equitable manner acceptable to its members.

What this implies is that economic activities should be consistent with sustainable use of renewable natural resources, protection of ecosystem features and functions, preservation of biological diversity, and avoiding irreversible damage to the environment and nature. In the ultimate analysis it implies a qualitative change that goes beyond mere growth in quantitative economic terms and encompasses social and environmental dimensions while maintaining the integrity of the life sustaining processes of the ecosystem and ensuring inter-generation and intra-generation equality and at the same time protecting the interests of the deprived and vulnerable groups.

Conceptually this implies that economic growth and sustainability are incompatible as the logic of the two frameworks is contradictory. For this reason, the physicist Albert A. Bartlett has argued in a paper titled “Physics and Sustainability” that sustainable growth is an oxymoron. His logic is very simple: sustainability has to mean “for a time period long compared to a human lifetime”; and “exponential arithmetic shows that steady growth of numbers or things for long periods of time is impossible.”

The biggest challenge for achieving this sustainable development in practice is absence of an appropriate methodology for translating its goals and objectives into implementable policies and measurable outcomes. This simple truth is often lost sight of.

Governments often think, plan and act in silos – sectoral and departmental. As a result, the integrated and holistic character of development gets lost. Development encompasses a number of dimensions which are closely inter-related. It is more than mere economic growth; it has linkages with many areas of economic, social and cultural life and the overall environmental domain.

What this implies is that we must conceptualise development as a network or web of inter-related fields, all of which are equally important. All should be addressed simultaneously, since change in one field has an impact on, and is in turn affected by, change in other fields.

It would be mistaken to conceive of change or development in a sequential mode: viz., let us take care of economic growth first and worry about say health or education or the environment later. The “triage” model which underlies this thinking is wholly inappropriate in the field of development.

The aim of development policy is, or should be, to benefit all persons, irrespective of their economic or social status. On the contrary, the idea of social justice and equity demands that those who are most deprived and most in need should be benefited to a greater degree by allocating a larger share of resources. in order to achieve a larger measure of equality in outcomes. From an environmental perspective social justice and equity also have an inter-generational dimension; we have no right to deprive future generations of access to crucial resources.

Economic and social policy should proceed in tandem in order to realise the larger goals that a society has set before itself. The challenge before development professionals is to craft a framework for addressing changes in all areas of economic, social, cultural life of a people in an integrated and holistic manner. The policy framework for sustainable development should resemble a complex web of inter-related activities rather than a series of discrete linear relationships.

Furthermore, the environmental dimension needs to be incorporated as an inherent feature of the mutual relationship of different interventions rather than an add-on. We are singularly lacking in such a framework. Consequently, environmental concerns and sustainability continue to be treated as an externality by proponents of development as economic growth, to be jettisoned whenever it is convenient to do so.

The author is a Honorary Director, Doon Library & Research Centre, Dehradun