“Sustainable Development”
has become a cliché. The world has realized that the current models for
development are untenable – both in terms of resources and social conflict. The free market economy is going to
progressively shift the control of resources in larger and larger measure from
the communities and the state to the market forces. The real effects are at
least three fold:
- Denial or defeating the purpose of rights and egalitarian legislations,
which are the hallmark of democracy.
- Loss of control of the state in managing critical natural resources
by transferring their management to corporates particularly the MNCs
- Progressive abstraction of the real value of natural resources
based on global market speculation and cartels adding to consequent
vulnerability of the local and larger economy.
Therefore the
future ought to renegotiate the ground and pragmatic mechanisms have to take
shape to structurally transform the economy.
While the new economy needs to be efficient, it also needs to meet the
other non-orthogonal attributes – environmental soundness, equity and
endogeneity or self-reliance. Sustainable Development at the functional level could be conceived as a
process of using resources that do not deplete the options for the future
generation – more specifically – it means generating more alternatives while
conserving existing options. Communities
will be sustainable only when they are in harmony with the ecosystems.
It is also
widely recognised that all these principles have to be concurrently adhered to
and addressed at various scales (individual through community to the global
scales) and different levels of human intervention (policy, programme and
practices).
The current impasse we are really faced with
arises out of the precarious situation where ongoing developmental activities
have had a massive impact on deepening widespread poverty, squalor and
environmental degradation, but a feeble impact on sustainable development of
local communities and have contributed very little to their capacities to
maintain and improve their environment and well-being.
The real challenge that stares us in the face
is the challenge to hone our skills, choose our technologies and build our
resources in such a manner that it provides for the human needs of Food,
Clothing and Shelter and enhances the quality of Water, Energy and Biomass
systems. The challenge beyond the basic needs is that the Community, Government
and the Market should be able to provide the human institutional inputs -
health, education and occupation - for societal development. While one can
deterministically say that more closer the resolution of basic needs, more
sustainable would a community be, but in the case of the basic human institutional
inputs the scales could be more complex.
The moot
question is whether the existing vested interests would be overcome by a
determined effort by the communities with greater local control of
institutional inputs rather than be dependent on distant speculative processes.
This demands that we walk beyond institutions
and sectors, even nation-states and regions to seek solutions. And, it is
becoming clear that this can only happen as an accretionary process. The future politics will have to lie in its practice.
