Just Transitions

Initially, I had a few very specific foundational thinkers whose writing I had planned to use to outline the meaning of sustainability for me. However, the practicalities of life (and, most immediately, the threat of overdue library books) has led me to start somewhere else by focusing on authors and topics that I had planned on saving for later. In some ways, however, it is fitting that I start my substantive posts by reviewing the work of two local South African authors, Mark Swilling and Eve Annecke, whose contributions to the discussion of sustainability I find interesting and useful. It is also perhaps fitting that I start with their book, Just Transitions (2012), because in it they pay special attention to foregrounding the question of justice in sustainability, an issue that often seems overlooked or ignored in mainstream sustainability discourse.

As Swilling and Annecke state up front in Just Transitions (2012:xiii), “[t]he perspective and argument in this book is inescapably shaped by the fact that we live and come from the most unequal society in the world”, i.e. South Africa. This perspective informs their underlying assumption that socio-economic equality must be a definitional element of sustainability. But how is equality defined? Swilling and Annecke (2012:xiii) point to the principle of sufficiency: “that is, where over-consumers are satisfied with less so that under-consumers can secure enough, without aspiring for more than their fair share.” (See also 2012:119.) Sufficiency, Swilling and Annecke (2012:136) write, “is what everyone (including slum dwellers and over-consumers) should aspire to if they are concerned about the consequences of an increasingly unfair world.”

What a “fair share” means is in turn determined by the amount of energy, resources, and waste each human needs to consume and emit without reducing the earth’s socio-metabolic supplies or sinks. Swilling and Annecke cite the fairly significant and growing scholarship falling under the field of Material Flows Analysis to determine what are these socio-metabolic limits (Swilling and Annecke cite 2.2 tonnes of carbon and 6 tonnes of extracted materials per year as the best current estimate, 2012:119). The resulting numbers show that the earth can sustain the current population of humans at a decent standard of living only if the wealthiest billion or so humans significantly reduce their consumption:

"For about a billion of the wealthier urban dwellers this will entail drastic consumption reduction (from between 15 and 30 t/cap/yr to 6 t/cap/yr) and for the billion who live in slums it will mean significant increases in resource consumption. But for about a billion or so urban dwellers who do not live in slums and who are connected into the mainstream socio-metabolic flows via a set of networked infrastructures that deliver adequate basic services (such as water, energy, sanitation, and waste services, and access of some sort to public and/or private mobility), this is more or less how they live now." (2012:119.)

I did a quick survey on the Footprint Calculator to get a sense of where I stand in terms of consumption. Sadly (and admittedly using rough and very pessimistic estimates), my footprint looked to fall within the low end of the wealthiest billion people that Swilling and Annecke discuss (disclaimer: these two sources were used different criteria for calculating consumption footprints, but they seem to roughly align). According to the Global Footprint Network, I am in line with the average per capita South African footprint, and a number of times lower than the average American. For me, this reality reflects the need for broader societal changes that move beyond individual actions. The "default switches" of life need to be flipped in favor of less resource consumption, not more.

The need to reduce the consumption habits of the wealthiest people is not just an ecological imperative, however; it is also a moral one. For Swilling and Annecke, society’s unjustness reveals itself through the large and growing unevenness in economic and resource wealth. This unevenness, in turn, has developed with and from a modernist ideological framework that emphasizes “a belief in progress, the power of reason, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of empiricism, the unlimited universalism of scientific knowledge, and the virtues of secularism” (2012:7). While acknowledging the developmental accomplishments that modernization has achieved, Swilling and Annecke signal that it is also the cause of both economic and environmental obstacles we now face. For instance, they write that “[g]lobal warming is, in reality, not just an unfortunate side-effect of the global industrial system, it is an intrinsic part of how this systems is constituted, fuelled and financed” (2012:48).

Fortunately, a new generation of science focused on collaboration and complexity is questioning the reductionist and competition-oriented science and philosophy underpinning modernity. Swilling and Annecke see this shift in science as providing an opportunity to reframe our political, economic, and social ideologies as well: “[w]e have suggested that complexity theory (2012:15-18) helps to create a language for building this culture of ‘conscious evolution’ . . . . [T]his means starting by taking full responsibility for both what has been achieved and the imbroglio that now threaten our existence” (2012:25).

Importantly, Swilling and Annecke are concerned that societies are trying to reduce linear human metabolic cycles and resource and energy depletion without necessarily redistributing the portions of wealth more equitably. Swilling and Annecke associate this potential trajectory with the labels “green urbanism” and “ecological modernization”, perspectives that acknowledge the need to address ecological limits but assert that limits can be addressed by harnessing rather than discarding the economic and ideological underpinnings of modernization, namely capitalism and anthropocentrism (see 2012:128-132). Green urbanism seeks to “decouple” economic growth from growth in resource consumption, primarily through technology that increases efficiency without requiring large changes to consumption, waste, and development patterns.

Swilling and Annecke question whether the assumptions underlying green urbanism and ecological modernism are justifiable in light of actual experience, particularly with respect to ecological realities globally and developmental realities in the Global South (see 2012:132). I read their critique of green urbanism also as questioning the assumption that the change that is required is technical, rather than behavioral. This critical fork explains the difference in assessment of the “‘green mega-projects’ by the world’s design glitterati who want to design autonomous ‘sustainable cities’ for the globally connected elites [in order to] to secede from unsustainable cities and live in safe, carbon-free cocoons” (2012:128). Through the lens of green urbanism such green “techno-fixes” are progress; they do nothing to impact the underlying behaviors perspective that drive the disparities in consumption and resource allocation.

Swilling and Annecke offer an alternatives to the green urbanism and ecological modernization, which they call liveable urbanism and adaptive design. They describe liveable urbanism as sharing green urbanism’s concern for greater resource efficiency, but focusing “on emerging modes of bio-economic diversification that actively includes the urban poor into new networks of production and consumption” (2012: 136). Through these processes liveable urbanism seeks the restoration of life, not merely preservation or mitigation. Adaptive design in turn provides an alternative of sorts to the universalist techno-centric modes of ecological modernization, instead focusing on design solutions that “depend on -- and, indeed, foster -- social co-operation to keep things going” (2012: 286).

As an example of liveable urbanism and adaptive design, Swilling and Annecke offer descriptions of their own community, the Lynedoch Ecovillage, which they co-founded around 2000. Their descriptions offer a fascinating illustration of the practical application of their ideas and principles. While I imagine the authors’ description of this community is biased towards their own perspectives (a point about which I’m sure they would openly agree), such a concrete example, warts and all, is a really useful tool in helping visualize an alternative possibility regarding the path towards sustainability.

Ultimately, Swilling and Annecke are trying to build an alternative framework for conceptualising sustainability, one that can compete with ecological modernization and green urbanism. As they state, “[i]t is not possible to understand our world -- to become visible -- without understanding the language we use and the origins of the concepts that are embedded in the common sense ideas that get mobilised in everyday conversations, in the media and elsewhere, all the time” (2012, xvii). I agree, and for this reason I appreciate their thoroughly researched and systematic approach. This is not to say that I completely agree with everything in the book (I find their descriptions of epochal cycles a little teleological, and their faith in decoupled economic growth through technology perhaps a little too close to the optimism of ecological modernists). I do think, however, that it does make a compelling case for the approach needed in order to balance the socio-metabolic flows of societies more evenly.

In the end, my main take-away from Swilling and Annecke's book is its carefully supported argument that the definition and criteria for "development" must change, for both those living in the developed and developing world. The extreme increase in the ecological footprint of the wealthiest billion people is both a social and ecological threat to the entire planet, one that will not be solved by more of the same reductionist thinking that has caused both. We cannot, and should not, separate our environmental response from our response to societal problems caused by inadequate access to a decent human existence. They are different sides of the same coin.