4 - Environmental politics and place

Summary

REFRAMING SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

The concept of sustainability has been at the centre of environmental policy, science, and more general debate for the last three decades. While arriving at a coherent definition has remained elusive, there is general agreement that sustainability ideas and practices are the best way to tackle the most pressing environmental challenges. Part of the attraction of sustainability is its apparent neutrality: no particular political or social vision is attached to it, allowing thereby various stakeholders to align different, often irreconcilable ideals of a desirable future. This neutrality, as I argue throughout this book, is illusory. In fact, the idea of sustainable development (SD) is specifically configured to provide powerful ideological justification for neoliberal economics and politics. The dominance of the SD paradigm in public discourse and policy accounts for the fact that, despite constant warnings that we are approaching environmental limits on a bewildering number of fronts, there is no coherent vision of a credible alternative, that is, counter-neoliberal organisation of society.

The fact that the World Trade Organization (2016) has, for some time now, proclaimed sustainability as one of its core principles is a clear sign that the sustainability agenda is in reality an ideological justification for neoliberal economics. Despite the fact that global equity has been a formal part of international sustainability policy since the Brundtland Report of 1987, in reality the same patterns of global economic exploitation have prevailed and significantly accelerated in the intervening decades. While capital has chased cheap labour across the globe, the social and environmental conditions of workers have been severely impacted (see Harvey 2005: 87–119). The largely enforced urbanisation of developing nations is touted as a fast track to western style wealth but, as Mike Davis (2005) made clear, this has in actual fact produced a ‘planet of slums’.