Reflections on “Sustainability”

Keynote by Mukesh Kapila, Professor of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs, University of Manchester

25 March 2015 at DIHAD, Dubai

Mahatma Gandhi once famously said “the world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. Surely that is at the ultimate core of all discussions on sustainability.

The preoccupation with sustainability has been a worry for mankind from our earliest days on planet earth. The historical recordincluding the amazing monumental remains to be found in all continents testifies to the ultimate fate of civilisations that rose and fell over past millennia.

Frequently this was because they failed to adapt to environmental challenges or survive killer disease outbreaks. But only too often a civilisation also failed because it ran out of purpose or lost its meaning through the deterioration of its principles and values,or it got side-tracked into pointless wars by bad leaders.

We also see this in the most immediate modern era of the past century or so – and right now - where states have fallen and risen in what appears like the blink of an eye. We also observe this in our world’s subsystems such as in finance and business or technology where new ideas or game changing innovations destroy what appeared to be rock-solid institutions, and new enterprises rose out of their ashes.

We may deduce from this a very important lesson: cycles of destruction and re-construction are an essential part of human progress. Thus, sustainability does not mean permanence. Nothing lasts forever, no one can presume to dominate for too long, and no idea is so immutable that it cannot be overtaken by a better – or sometimes, worse - one.

Having said this, what then is sustainability – especially in relation to development and humanitarianism?

On the development side, we are just concluding an eventful 15-year period of the Millennium Development Goals. A lot of progress has ben made in several of the eight areas covered by the MDGs; for example, through the reduction in poverty and the diminution in conditions such as malaria and HIV, or by improvement in other spheres such as child survival and primary school enrolment.

While it is right to celebrate these hard-won gains, are they sustainable? We don't know that yet but the worry is that the progress is fragile because the MDGshave been largely external-aiddriven.

I was reminded of this in discussion with an African health minister who was boasting of how his country had got so much funding for its child immunisation programmes from a global fund. I wondered what this said about the social bond between his fellow citizens and their state that contracted out its most sacred obligation – that of protecting its young future – to outside financing. Yet, who can blame that country when the aid funds are so easily available for what is admittedly a common global good. Even undoubtedly noble intentions can have a perverse effect on sustainability.

Although domestic ownership and national investment have improved over the MDG period, the reductionist approach of the MDGs through narrowly defined technical targets has meant that the enabling factors – social and political – to underpin essential transformations have been relatively neglected.

I don't think a development paradigm based on the notion that if you throw enough cash at a problem, some of it will stick, can be really sustainable.

Another concern with the MDGs – not in their original conception but in their rollout - was an underlying assumption that was never stated but seemed to be implicit. This was that bringing about healthy and educated citizens was primarily a means to ensure a productive society. If human development comes to be seen simply as an input for production, even if it is lightly garnished in more recent years withhuman rights language, then development cannot be sustainable. Human development is only sustainable if it is recognised as having no purpose other than being of worth for its own sake.

That is why the post 2015 framework, through the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) is a welcome move in the right direction. The proposed 17 SDGs are a more comprehensive and inter-connected framework covering human, social, economic, political, and environmental domains. Amartya Sen summed up such thinking most elegantly when he said,“Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance and overactivity of repressive states.”

Thus, if progressed in the right spirit, the SDGs could signpost a move towards a dignified life for all within planetary boundaries.

But what is this “right spirit”? The clue lies in the philosophy that underpins the SDGs which echoes the much earlier definitionstated by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This brings in four important notions:

  • First is the notion of needs as opposed to wants.
  • Second is the idea that there are limits to our own consumption and growth.
  • Third is the notion of stewardship that enjoins on us an obligation to husband the resources at our disposal.
  • Fourth is the concept of wider fairness including inter-generational justice.

Is this not asking too much from selfish human beings like all of us who are said to be largely motivated by self-interest and short-term gain?

The question of sustainability is, therefore, ultimately, about the values and ethics of the society we want to be part of. As said by the writer-activist Derrick Jensen, “We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”

What then are the critical threats to sustainable development?

In my view, the main one is international envyborn out of the competition among nations. It is difficult to find a book on development without a set of tables at the back ranking nations according to some metrics on their wealth or health or some other aspect of their endowment or functioning. Now, our happiness is also being quantified and compared. Is there nothing sacred left in this world when even our most private moods and feelings are subject to competitive measurement?

The notion behind this is, of course, well meant. The reasoning goes that by doing this, we are highlighting inequalities, targeting resources at the most needy, and fostering peer pressure to motivate and improve performance. All that must surely be a good thing.

However, I have doubts. Is the rivalry between India and China on who is growing fastest particularly helpful to the citizens of both countries? Or does it fuel their anxieties and paranoia? And is the competition between Europe and the US just a playful positioning for influence on the world stage? What kind of world does that lead to – one that is internally contented or one that is constantly dissatisfied through looking over the fence to where the grass looks greener? Which one will be sustainable?

Let me turn to humanitarianism. Is it possible to talk about sustainable humanitarianism? At first glance, no, when everyday we are assailed by bigger and bigger statistics on disasters and conflicts, refugees and displaced, brutalities and atrocities? And resources to help them are always short. On second glance, also not, because humanitarian action has short time frames. Also – but this is arguable - humanitarians are more concerned with the ends i.e. the imperative to immediately save lives and relieve suffering, and they are more pragmatic about the means to achieve this. In contrast, development people are said to plan for the long-term with means seen to be as important as the ends.

However, let us look again. We are continuously reminded that Palestinian camps – initially set up as temporary refuges in 1948 – still exist and, indeed, have expanded further following subsequent cycles of violence that continue to the present day. I don't think this is quite what we intend when we talk of long-term sustainability. But it is a reminder of the more general global phenomenon that for more than a billion people at least, somehow surviving and muddling along in perpetual crisis – whether from conflict or natural disaster - is just normal. And this is not going to get better any time soon.

One reason it is not going to get better soon is that we also live in a world that is making such rapid progress in so many ways, be this in ideas, or in technology, or in forms of organisation, or indeed, simply because we have more and more educated and interconnected people due to globalisation. The consequence of all that knowledge and empowermentis that more and more people, communities, and nationsare capable of forming their own opinions and want to assert themselves. They want to change the world they live in. It is a noteworthy observation from history that the periods where progress and change have been most rapid have also been the times of greatest turmoil.

In that context, there is much talk nowadays on relief-development linkages or continua. This makes me uneasy. Just because we may not be able to fully ameliorate the consequences of a crisis through humanitarian aid, does this necessarily mean that development approaches will somehow be more effective? Especially when there areunderlying deep-rooted political – and often violent – causes. “Doing development” in such contexts is more likely to entrench the underlying injustices and indignities, than to remove them. At the very least we should strive to “do no harm” with our development approaches.

Such reflections lead me to wonder if development can be truly sustainable especially as we know that true development – in the proper context - is about destabilising the status quo through challenging and changing the world we live in for the world that is more fair, inclusive, just. In any case, this is a perpetual quest because the goal posts are relatively situated and will shift as each step of progress is made.

In such a tumultuous world, the traditional norms of humanitarianism take on renewed significance. We witness its expression every day across the spectrum that spans, on one side, random acts of individual kindness to strangers to, on the other side, the growth of impressively organised humanitarianism.

The humanitarian instinct – the urge to help someone in distress – is as old as humanity itself. So, it seems to me that the only truly sustainable ideas are the ones that have been with us from our veryorigins – that of compassion and empathy.

Twitter @mukeshkapila