Abstract
In 1987, Our Common Future set out a new agenda for nations to integrate social and economic development with environmental protection. That book has since become a sustainability “classic” and is known worldwide for its definition of sustainable development—“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, p. 43). Our Common Future framed its agenda within the context of the environmental crises emerging throughout the world, which are now more fully understood and recognized than they were at the end of the 1980s. Benefiting from two decades of knowledge creation and experience in how to address these challenges, Cents and Sustainability follows in the footsteps of Our Common Future with the mission of identifying pathways to decouple economic growth from environmental pressures.
The perspectives and commentary offered at the start of Cents and Sustainability by Gro Brundtland, Rajendra Pachauri, Kenneth Ruffing, Jim MacNeill, and Rob Purves—leading figures in sustainable development—provide a unique and valuable context for the work. For example, in his introduction, Jim MacNeill, the lead author of Our Common Future, comments on how the world focused on only one of the many potential definitions of sustainable development contained within the 1987 report. His discussion highlights other definitions related to ideas such as sustainable levels of consumption, which now find new expression in Cents and Sustainability. He further comments on the urgent need to reconfigure governmental systems to value environmental protection with the same passion as economic growth. To do this, the conventional wisdom that environmental protection limits economic performance or reduces employment opportunities needs to be addressed. The authors of Cents and Sustainability respond well to this challenge by revealing through numerous studies and examples how a focus on environmental protection can promote both competitiveness and economic growth.
Since there are many discourses from which sustainable development can be viewed, it may be helpful to try and situate Cents and Sustainability within them. I would describe the book as falling somewhere in between the notions of weak and strong sustainability. There is a clear focus on the need to promote economic growth, but growth that is not accompanied by increasing environmental pressures that could lead to the collapse of, or significant decline in, critical natural systems. The book highlights the OECD’s notion of absolute decoupling, whereby economic activity does not undermine the requirements for environmental sustainability. These requirements are captured by four criteria: (1) regeneration (with an emphasis on enhancing the production capacity of renewable resources rather than only operating within the capacity of existing natural systems); (2) substitutability (i.e., the substitution of nonrenewable resources with renewable resources and the efficient use of nonsubstitutable nonrenewable resources as long as the other three criteria are met); (3) assimilation (i.e., emissions and waste must not exceed the assimilative capacity of natural systems); and (4) avoiding irreversibility. The book’s focus on sustained economic growth is defended by the argument that since “there is no sign of any government committing to ‘slow’ economic growth . . . efforts to decouple are the only realistic option and need to be better informed and accelerated” (p. xliii). The book addresses this task by providing a multitude of actions that if broadly adopted could result in significant decoupling of environmental impacts from economic growth. In this regard, the book is timely in its summary and review of ways in which developed and emerging economies can transition away from environmentally and socially destructive products, processes, and services without stifling economic growth. Cents and Sustainability retains the technological optimistic stance of Our Common Future and argues that since wealth (and hence consumption) and population are unlikely to decline in the medium term, significant technological changes present the only practical way to make progress toward the goal of absolute decoupling and, hence, environmental sustainability.
The book has two distinguishable parts. Chapters two to five explore the notion of decoupling, describe barriers to achieving decoupling, discuss the ability of developing nations to decouple, and outline nine elements to be considered when creating national decoupling strategies, respectively. Chapters six to eleven focus on the major environmental challenges linked to economic growth and present strategies to decouple them. These challenges include climate change, the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, the overextraction of freshwater, growing waste production, and increasing air pollution. These categories align with the environmental focus areas of the OECD and are intended to complement and build on that organization’s work.
Those familiar with the writings of Lester Brown, Amory Lovins, and Ernst von Weizsäcker, and Nicholas Stern’s review on The Economics of Climate Change, will find that Cents and Sustainability leans heavily on their work. While all of these authors have contributed much to the sustainability dialogue, it would have been helpful to have heard a wider perspective on the ideas being discussed.
Cents and Sustainability will be especially valuable to policy makers searching for strategies to reduce negative environmental impacts linked to economic activity. The book contains numerous examples of how environmental pressures can be reduced through regulatory instruments, eco-taxes, subsidies for environmentally sound practices, market-based instruments (such as emission trading schemes), and voluntary schemes. The implementation of an aggressive national decoupling agenda using such approaches is likely to generate resistance from actors who fear a loss of profitability, competitiveness, and jobs. In chapter three of the book, the authors respond directly to such concerns and make a compelling case for a decoupling agenda but fall short with regard to two issues—job creation, which I will address below, and the lack of a compelling argument (beyond government intervention) that efficiency improvements brought about by technological advances will not result in more consumption because of the well-known boomerang effect or Jevons Paradox.
Chapter twelve, the final chapter of the book, provides an in-depth discussion of the activist stance that the Indian Supreme Court took in reducing air pollution in Delhi. The chapter feels somewhat out of place given that there are no other detailed national case studies looking at climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, freshwater, and municipal waste. Nevertheless, the case study is engaging and informative and raises an interesting question about whether a judiciary should adopt a super-administrator role that is typically the domain of the elected legislature. The moral of the case study is that the means of achieving a desired outcome is just as important as the end result itself—that is, in adopting an activist stance the Indian Supreme Court damaged its credibility and missed an opportunity to establish a national- rather than city-level approach to reduce emissions from mobile sources.
The case study’s message that the means to an end is just as important as the end in itself returns me to my comment on job creation. The main way to decouple environmental impacts from economic growth is through technology-based efficiency improvements that continually reduce the environmental impact per unit of product or service consumed. This approach to promoting green products, processes, and services has a heritage in ideas such as dematerialization, industrial ecology, and ecological modernization. Over the past decade, there has been a growing number of studies on the employment impacts of green technologies that consistently conclude that while these technologies can benefit workers, the number of jobs created is marginal (see Getzner 2002, 2004; Walz 2010). The authors of Cents and Sustain-ability do acknowledge that “the likely economy-wide effect of environmental regulation is to shift jobs without increasing the overall level of unemployment” (p. 79) but go on to state that “if decoupling policies are implemented well, . . . there is potential for such policies to create new jobs” (p. 79). This idea is reiterated throughout the book. However, the authors seem to disregard the existing evidence that similar efforts have not realized significant economy-wide gains in employment. The reason for this is that green technologies represent innovation in the Schumpeterian sense. As Schumpeter elaborated, innovation unleashes the power of creative destruction, and although the creation of green jobs is indeed creative, there is also an element of destruction, which is typically expressed by the dislocation of competitive industries that were deemed to be technologically inferior. These industries tend to be the traditional energy industries.
An additional problem that is not directly addressed in the book is that as new innovations are created, the form in which they are originally introduced tends to be the most labor intensive. However, as new process innovations take place, labor tends to be increasingly replaced by capital, and jobs are lost in the process. Furthermore, when opportunities for additional technological modernization are seized, more labor can be shed. Thus, for the decoupling approach to be successful there needs to be an explicit consideration of how meaningful and well-paid jobs can be enhanced and become a part of the creation and delivery of new highly-efficient products, processes, and services. The challenge of creating jobs that are resistant to efficiency-based displacement should be given the same status in decoupling strategies as the four criteria for environmental sustainability. The authors of Cents and Sustainability do provide a valuable discussion of ways in which higher education needs to be renewed to deliver the necessary skills to support decoupling strategies. However, the problem of how to dampen the displacement of jobs through efficiency improvements is not directly considered. If one accepts the above concerns related to Schumpeterian innovation and efficiency-based job displacement, the means of achieving decoupling become as important as the end, especially if one is concerned about increasing purchasing power through well-paying jobs.
In summary, Cents and Sustainability is a timely work that revives the message of Our Common Future that economic growth and environmental protection can advance in unison. It is a valuable resource for policy makers looking for ways to decouple their economies from environmental impacts and provides business leaders with evidence of existing approaches that can significantly reduce the burden their actions might be placing on our natural systems. My main criticisms of the work are that it does not adequately address the reduction of consumption and how the decoupling agenda will create (and sustain) new jobs, which are messages it consistently conveys. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the book is accompanied by three earlier publications—von Weizsäcker et al. (2009), Stasinopoulos et al. (2008), and Hargroves and Smith (2006)—that together provide a useful array of strategies and approaches to address the environmental and social challenges ahead.