Is doughnut economics too Western? Critique from a Latin American environmentalist

Apologies for the blog going offline yesterday – some server glitch which has now been rectified. On with the discussion on Kate Raworth’s new paper. Here Latin American environmentalist Eduardo Gudynas takes on the doughnut from a deeper green perspective for uncritically accepting western concepts of ‘development’.

The discussion paper just launched by Oxfam, ‘A Safe and Just Space for Humanity’, has many positive aspects that can be shared with organisations and movements in the Global South. It also contains elements that are in line with Oxfam’s commitment to eradicating poverty and protecting the environment.

The document proposes a doughnut, which adds a pastry to the mix of sustainable development recipes, and we should review it thoroughly.

Let’s begin by pointing out that this approach is ambitious, since it claims to offer a new perspective on sustainable development: the articulation of human rights and environmental limits in a just and safe ‘space’.

But just how ‘new’ is this perspective? The idea of an environmental ‘space’ was first considered in the 1990s, by both academia (in the early work of the Wuppertal Institute in Germany) and social movements (in this case Friends of the Earth, a point acknowledged in Oxfam’s paper).

Furthermore, the idea of linking human rights and environmental issues is older still. To give you an example, in 1974, amid the hubbub of debate about development and the environment, a group of prominent academics and politicians issued the Cocoyoc Declaration. It was a very important contribution at that time, and held that the future of humanity lay in finding a balance between the environmental ‘outer limits’ and the ‘inner limit’ of fundamental human rights.

This type of problem, where the new is not so new, and the key background seems to have been forgotten, has become commonplace in the current cooking of sustainable development. My impression is that the discussions, about Rio+20 in particular, have great difficulty in recovering the long tradition of debates on development and the environment. I say this not because I am concerned about this tradition, but because in many cases it seems as if we are starting from scratch, and the trials and errors of the recent past have been forgotten. 

Many believe that it all started with the Brundtland report in 1987, which led to the disappearance of the fertile discussions of the 70s and most of the 80s. This amnesia is reinforced by many governments and by the way in which UNEP deals with sustainability.

These points are relevant, as the origin of the concept of sustainability was an environmental criticism of development. It was a questioning that forced a redefinition of ‘development’. Thus, any discussion of sustainability necessarily involves an intense debate about the ideas of development.

Starting with this concern, although there is a description of ‘sustainable development’, and that development in the 21st century must eradicate poverty, I’m not exactly clear on what the idea of ‘development’ is in the doughnut, At times the paper seems to suggest that it is not necessary to discuss the basic ideas of ‘development’, but rather that our notion of development should be reduced to the components of the doughnut.

But in my view, a discussion about sustainability requires the idea of development to be questioned, especially the Western conception of development. There are undoubtedly many ways of understanding development, and we have seen capitalist programmes with varying emphasis (neoliberal, Keynesian, neo-Keynesian, etc.), as well as socialist programmes (e.g. the Soviet model and all its variants), and even complex hybrids (like that of China). These tendencies have significant differences in terms of the role of state, the concept of property, and ways of redistributing wealth. The ‘right to development’ was also spoken about, which would greatly complicate the doughnut. But what is striking is that they all share a set of basic ideas, all of them Western, such as the belief in progress, the appropriation of nature, and the dream of material comfort. ‘Development’ involves common principles for organising society, production, and the relationship with the environment.

the offending pastry.....

These different ‘developments’ may diverge in their instrumental management choices, but in the end they all share a common belief with regard to progress and the efficient appropriation of nature. This is plainly evident, in all its drama, with the position of the World Bank’s current chief economist, Justin Yifu Lin, a Chinese native who first trained as a Marxist economist in Beijing and later at the neoliberal Chicago school of economics. Lin advocates a mix of Marxism and Keynesianism, of State communism and corporate capitalism, in which there is no room for sustainability. This he does openly in public, and even more so, from the World Bank. [Guest post from Justin here]

This makes it evident that the ideas of development are deeply rooted in contemporary culture. A radical criticism must be aimed at these foundations, like that of sustainability. Without such questioning, there is a risk that the ‘doughnut’ version of sustainability will be branded as a new example of alternative development. It will join the list of other attempts at reform, such as human development, local development, endogenous development, etc., which started off with a certain radicalism, but ended up being co-opted by the conventional position. Would it be a success in the future if the UNDP published a doughnut index, as it does today with human development?

The social and environmental crisis is so serious that it is now time to put aside minor adjustments and reforms, and instead address the root causes of resistance to the idea of development. We must adopt an approach whereby the term ‘sustainable development’ no longer requires the suffix ‘development’. The civil society programme in Rio+20 should not focus simply on fixing the superficial problems of development: it is necessary to look for alternatives to the entire body of ideas about development.

In this effort, the ethical dimension is key, and this point appears in the references to the norms of the doughnut. But here also it is necessary to delve a little further into the ingredients of this recipe.

If sustainable development strengthens its demands for change, it must abandon the traditional idea of development and thus break with the anthropocentric ethics that are characteristic of Western cultural tradition. Conventional development needs anthropocentrism, as within this concept, it is man alone who can give value and, as a consequence, man asserts his authority over nature, women, children, etc.

The solution to this position lies, among other things, in recognising the rights of nature. This is an essential ingredient in the environmental components of a critical proposal on sustainable development. We cannot talk seriously about the environment without first acknowledging the rights of nature. In this area, Oxfam’s Discussion Paper must review recent experiences in South America, especially with regard to the recognition of those rights in the new Constitution of Ecuador. Under this new ethic, in these kitchens there would not be doughnuts separating environmental components from social ones, but rather some would be contained within others.

These and other examples show that sustainability also requires more multicultural recipes that do not rest so much on Western traditions. But these are matters for another post on this blog..

Eduardo Gudynas is a senior researcher at the Latin American Center of Social Ecology (CLAES), based in Uruguay. His expertise is on sustainable development and alternatives to development. Read his blog here.

‘Denial is everywhere’: the traumas of an intelligent green

Some beautiful writing and public agonising from George Monbiot on the impasse of the environmental movement, and whether it should follow the path of the story tellers or the number crunchers:

“Denial is everywhere. Those opposing windfarms find it convenient to deny that climate change is happening, or that turbines produce much electricity. Those promoting windfarms downplay the landscape impacts. Enthusiasts for nuclear power ignore the impacts of uranium mining. Opponents of nuclear power dismiss the solid science on the impacts of radiation and embrace wildly-inflated junk numbers instead.

Primitivists decry all manufacturing industry, but fail to explain how their medicines and spectacles, scythes and billhooks will be produced. Localists rely on technologies – such as microwind and high-latitude solar power – that cannot deliver. Technocratic greens refuse to see that if economic growth is not addressed, a series of escalating catastrophes is inevitable. Romantic greens insist that the problem can be solved without even engaging in these dilemmas, yet fail to explain how else it can be done.

We’re all responding to the same impulses, but we’re all being tripped up by denial. Denial, and a failure to see the whole picture, are our enemies. Or perhaps, as doctors say about alcohol, our false friends.

Green narratives have collapsed precisely because they were unable to withstand the steely quantification demanded by an attempt to get to grips with problems like climate change. Or they have been struck down by circumstance: such as the inconvenient non-appearance of the commodities crunch they predicted. If a new poetic narrative is no better able to answer questions such as how a steady-state economy can be achieved, how low-carbon electricity will be produced, how the Common Fisheries Policy can be reformed or how, in a land-based economy, bricks and glass will be made, it too will collapse. In fact, it will never get off the ground as these questions, once formulated, won’t go away.

Perhaps we are less tolerant of myth than we used to be. Perhaps we should be. Is creating new, opposing myths the best way of confronting the founding myths of neoliberal capitalism? I don’t think so. Is it not better to fight them with withering analysis, quantification and exposure? But can we do this without becoming insensible to beauty, and to the impulse – a love for the world and its people, its places and its living creatures – which turned us green in the first place? I don’t know.”

This builds on his earlier piece: 

“All of us in the environment movement – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project.”