Sustainable Development
Discussion
Peter Ulrich:
"Why is the formula „sustainable development“ so widely accepted?
I argue that the surprisingly broad consensus on „sustainable development“ derives from the fact that sustainable development seemingly resolves the many social conflicts between private economic interests, ecological aspects and existential needs of the people.
The very popular „triple bottom line“ (Elkington 1999) is symptomatic for this view: the triple bottom line suggests that the three dimensions of sustainable development can be added up without any problem and that ecological and social acceptability can be harmonized with the existing economic system. However, as soon as we acknowledge that there are conflicts between the ecological, social and economic dimension, we realize that the normative problem now just concerns the weighting of the three criteria. Let us briefly reflect where there is in principle harmony and where there is conflict between the social, the ecological and the economic dimension. We can distinguish two fundamental problems: Harmony between economic growth and ecological as well as social criteria becomes particularly manifest in the poverty-driven environmental destruction in third world countries (e.g. deforestation in order to get fire3 wood due to a lack of other energy supply). If poverty could be eliminated through economic growth from which broad levels of the population and especially the poorest benefit, these people would not be forced anymore to deforest local woods in their daily fight for survival. And let us note: this concerns their present not their future needs. Such economic growth would mean that we get down to the socio-economic root of this environmental destruction – through good development aid. In contrast to this, a conflict with ecological and social criteria exists in the case of environmental damages that are caused by wealth. The tendency that ever widening sections of the population consume almost as much as the wealthy people causes an increase in energy and environmental consumption – this is true on a national as well as on a global level (think for example of the ecological horror vision if every second Chinese or Indian drives a car). The burden for us, the privileged Western Europeans, in this context is: our energy- and resource-intensive level of wealth cannot be generalized in a global scope. In the long run we could only maintain our level of wealth through a violent oppression of the South for a limited period of time. But if the rich and mighty OECD countries want to avoid the danger of violent oppression and if they want to promote a peaceful and more or less just living together of all people on this planet, we, and particularly the richest among us, have to restrict our own aspirations. Are we really up to this, individually and politically? What is open to debate, are core ideas of a legitimate form of life and societal order, which finally determine how we treat the environment, individually and collectively. The justification of models of a sustainable development that can be legitimized towards everyone is therefore, as mentioned, an ethical or even economic-ethical task, also with regards to ecological aspects. It is a technocratic illusion that we only have to increase the ecological efficiency of our economic means but that we do not have to increase the sustainability of our economic ends (Ulrich 1997): Against this illusion, we have to understand the problem as an inherently socio-ecological one (Diagram 2): ecological scarcities do not exist per se but they result from normative ideas of the good life, and they are therefore always – and increasingly – in the spotlight of social conflicts of values and interests."