Tag Archives sustainable development

What can the frugal innovation debate learn from the renewable energy debate?

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In this article, Hubert Schmitz and Peter Knorringa look into the pathways, processes, and coalitions necessary for achieving innovation, and compares the recent leaps in the renewable energy sector with the conditions to make frugal innovation practices a reality. They propose new ways of framing frugal innovation, borrowing from renewable energy campaigners, and propose new types of ‘coalitions of the willing’ that can help bring about innovation that is sparing of resources, and also accessible for people with lower incomes.

Photo by Andreas Gucklhorn via Unsplash

Making economic progress sustainable has become the central issue of our time.  Recent work on frugal innovation seeks to contribute to this challenge. This blog asks what the analysts and practitioners of frugal innovation can learn from the renewable energy debate. Frugal innovation is a young line of work compared with that on renewable energy, which has a long and prominent history.  It therefore makes sense to distil what the former can learn from the latter, particularly since both seek to contribute to the sustainability of human life on our planet.

The key attributes of frugal innovations are first, that they are sparing in the use of resources and second, that poor people can afford them. These features matter especially in poor countries but also for low-income people in rich countries. Frugal innovation is thus relevant for most of the world’s population and can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.  Here are some examples: low-cost ventilators that do not need electricity to help hospitals treating COVID patients; irrigation pumps that do not require diesel or electricity; safely sending and receiving money without a bank account.

 

What are we trying to achieve?

Our central concern is to find ways of making frugal innovations more common. Indeed, the central concern which underlies this blog is whether and how the development and uptake of frugal innovations can be accelerated.

There are of course examples of standard innovation that benefit poor people. Perhaps the best-known example is the mobile phone, which enables people to leapfrog fixed phone lines and organise their lives in a multitude of time saving ways: arrange meetings, make payments, negotiate deals, and access the latest information. The standard innovation process, however, is rarely driven by the concerns of poor people. On the contrary, the innovation process is usually targeted at the better off and benefits to the poor tend to be a by-product that emerges at a late stage in the product cycle. Support of frugal innovation aims to target lower income customers at an earlier stage and do so for many products. Even that is just half the battle.  The aim is to come up with products which are also sparing in the use of scarce resources.  Frugal innovation is about addressing the resource constraint and affordability criterion.  This is a tall order.

Another way of capturing the essence of frugal innovation is to talk about over-engineering.  Products tend to be over-engineered when the innovation process is not driven by concerns with affordability and material saving.  Most of us have ample experience of dealing with over-engineered products that are sophisticated and expensive, providing features which we rarely, if ever, use.  In contrast, we tend to have few products which result from frugal innovation. The aim is to help change that balance. But how?

In order to address this HOW question, some useful lessons can be learned from the renewable energy debate which has a longer history.  Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is essential for reducing carbon emissions responsible for the climate chaos (increasing frequency of extreme weather events) which we can now observe in many parts of the world. We will draw here in particular on the development and deployment of solar and wind energy, so far the most successful technologies in replacing fossil fuels. The literature on the energy transition is huge. In this blog we draw on two articles which have pulled together the most relevant lessons: Cameron Roberts, Frank Geels, Matthew Lockwood et al, 2018, ‘The politics of accelerating low-carbon transitions: towards a new research agenda’, Energy Research & Social Science 44, 304-311, and Hubert Schmitz, 2017, ‘Who drives climate relevant policies in the rising powers?’, New Political Economy 22:5, 521-540.

The first lesson is about framing.  The concern is to accelerate frugal innovation. We are not starting from scratch. This provides a space for celebrating the frugal technologies and the organisations which have brought them about. There is something to build on. Exploring frugal innovation is not a hopeless undertaking.  A framing in terms of accelerating progress also invites a discussion of why there is success in some cases and failure in others. Even if successes are rare, the comparison with failures makes for a more analytical debate.

The second lesson from the renewable energy debate is that the key problem is not technological but political. This seems to apply also to frugal innovation. Solutions which prioritise saving resources and being affordable can be found.  But the forces which drive the innovation tend to take the process into a different direction.  This became clear in a discussion we had with a senior EU official who was himself enthusiastic about the potential of frugal innovation but sceptical about getting it high onto the EU innovation policy agenda because ‘nobody lobbies for frugal innovation’.

 

The coalition perspective

This hint at politics takes us in the right direction but needs further thought.  The renewable energy debate helps us with this.  It suggests a political economy approach which takes four analytical steps:

  • Recognising that no single actor has the resources to bring about the transition to renewable energy.
  • Recognising that actors in government, business and civil society seek to advance or slow down the process.
  • Paying attention to alignments of interest across government, business and civil society.
  • Including actors with different motives and to understand these alignments.

Detailed empirical analysis has shown that these alignments of interest have made the difference at key moments in renewable energy promotion. The vocabulary used for these alignments varies,  some call them ‘coalitions’, others prefer ‘alliances’.  The breakthrough in the renewable energy debate came when it was recognised that those joining the coalition did not necessarily do so in order to fight climate change. Some were more concerned with securing energy for their region or company, others with building a new industry and creating jobs.  What mattered was not their motivation but their support for a particular piece of legislation or for a new programme or project. Often the resulting coalition was incidental, members happened to pull in the same direction for whatever reason.  In other cases, there was a consciously pursued strategy.  This distinction between incidental and strategic coalition seems useful as well.  Finally, it is important to realise that this coalition approach works both ways. It can help us to understand where and why progress was made. It can also help to understand where and why progress was held back.

In summary, climate-relevant renewable energy research has given us a language and an analytical apparatus which has the potential to advance the frugal innovation debate.  We will now discuss some specific ways in which this could be made to work.

 

Coalitions for frugal innovation?

How can the development and uptake of frugal innovation be accelerated?  This is our central question.  Adopting the coalition perspective means asking who is interested in frugal innovation – for whatever reason.  We will want to look for relevant actors in government (including inter-governmental organisation); in business (both domestic and foreign, both large and small); and in civil society (including academia). Let us start with the latter.

The first actor that comes to mind is us: the members and associates of the International Centre for Frugal Innovation. Most of us are academics, trying to understand the world and improve it. There are others pursuing the same objective but operating under a different heading. A notable example is ‘the circular economy’. We need to apply the coalition perspective to ourselves and reach out to the colleagues who use the circular economy approach. They have an even stronger emphasis on saving resources with their ‘Triple ‘R’ strategy (re-use, repair, recycle) and ‘extended producer responsibility’ for end-of-life disposal. Implementing this strategy requires above all organisational innovation.  Affordability is a less explicit objective, but it is implicit in their work. The important thing in adopting the coalition perspective is to concentrate on common ground and not on differences.  This can be uncomfortable in that the brand (frugal innovation, circular economy, appropriate technology) gives us a feeling of identity and sometimes also privileged access to a particular funder.

As policy-oriented researchers we need to work with people in government, concentrating not necessarily on ministries or departments but pockets within these ministries or departments that are interested in and relevant for our work.  Governments tend to work in silos. The coalition perspective makes us look across these silos and identify the most significant players who (can) support our work.  In seeking to identify these players, our question is not whether they have the same objective but whether their policies and projects affect what we want to achieve.  For example, there are often pockets in central or local government which seek to promote competitiveness in particular products and services.  If their policies make products or services more frugal, we will want to work with the government officials driving these policies whatever their rationale.  In practice this will often mean adopting a sector-specific or sub-sector specific approach. The International Centre for Frugal Innovation recently ran a course with entrepreneurs involved in horticulture. Most of them initially thought that ‘doing innovation’ was only for high-tech sectors with R&D labs. They were surprised how they could in a few sessions co-develop frugal innovations that created new markets for their products. For example, one entrepreneur developed a gift set of mini plants that could be ordered online and delivered through a physical mailbox.

If we are serious about accelerating frugal innovation, we need to work with business.  This is not easy.  We cannot expect business federations or chambers of industry and commerce to put frugal innovation on their banner. These organisations exist to lobby government and support the competitiveness of their members. Broad industry-wide pleas to pay more attention to frugality in their competitiveness strategy are unlikely to work.  Cheese producers operate in a world different from makers of electronic sensors or truck manufacturers or enterprises which specialise in shelving solutions.  At the sectoral level, however, it might be possible to identify enterprises that have developed frugal products, and which can make them more competitive in their home or international market. Asakawa et al (2019) show how this can be achieved in their article ‘Frugality-based Advantage’ (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024630117305290).   Such positive examples are important to demonstrate that frugal innovation is not just desirable from an equality and sustainability perspective but can also be a good business strategy.  Working with such enterprises would be essential for making the coalition perspective work.

Business schools have good access to private enterprise and might become key allies.  There is fierce competition between business schools to attract the greatest talents.  Being relevant for the new age of sustainability is essential for business schools to succeed in this competition. ‘Frugal innovation’ provides them with a focus for achieving this.  This can be our entry point for working with business schools.  Such collaboration can help us with studying and promoting frugal innovation.

Identifying the relevant actors in a coalition is merely the first step.  There is a tested methodology for rapid political economy analysis which can then be used for the subsequent steps: mapping the actors according to whether they support or oppose specific policies or projects; according to how influential they are; according to their location in society (public, private, civic sectors); and according to their priorities (making money, enhancing competitiveness, minimising waste, protecting environment, reducing poverty).  There are simple ways of visualising these configurations of actors and identifying (potential) coalitions. These methods are of the ‘quick and dirty’ kind, more appropriate for rapid analysis than for PhD level research.

The analysis will then need to distinguish between incidental alignments of interest that come together just to get a particular law or project approved and coalitions which have a more enduring character with regular meetings on strategy and targets.  This is an important point. Coalitions need not be long term alliances, they can be short term for specific aims such as: reforming industrial policy, vocational training or industrial standards; exhibiting a new approach at a trade fair; or developing a new conceptual and practical course on ‘frugal innovation’ to be taught at business schools. Tracing where renewable energy made significant steps forward showed that this kind of coalition perspective helps to see political feasibility in a different – usually more optimistic – way.  In short, in order to accelerate the development and uptake of frugal innovations we need to come to grips with the politics of the process. Borrowing freely and selectively from those who have analysed the political economy of the energy transition is a promising way forward.

Aerial photo of solar panels in Offingen, Germany by Andreas Gucklhorn via Unsplash 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Professor Hubert Schmitz is a renowned development economist specializing in sustainable industrialization, investment politics, and green transformations with 40 years of expertise. An Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, he advises bilateral and multilateral development agencies. Known for concise policy research synthesis, he has managed international teams and focused recent research on the impact of the global power shift on low-carbon transformations and the drivers of climate-relevant policies.

 

Peter Knorringa, Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, specializes in the multifaceted influence of businesses on development. As the academic director of the International Centre for Frugal Innovation since 2013, he examines the developmental impact of frugal innovations. His broad research portfolio spans clustered SMEs, trust in value chains, and sustainability standards. With extensive experience in India, Vietnam, and other countries, he contributes to a nuanced dialogue on when and where entrepreneurs and firms contribute to inclusive and sustainable development.

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Blame games won’t help us address the climate crisis by Lize Swartz

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The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink our relationship with the world around us and the effect of our own actions (or inaction) on this massive collective action problem. Blame games are becoming a dangerous diversion tactic used to deny responsibility for our own role in the crisis by blaming others for causing it, writes Lize Swartz. Recent developments in the Netherlands and beyond reveal just how far we still have to go to acknowledge the climate crisis as a collective action problem and to rethink our own role as natural resource users in addressing the crisis.

Crises are often associated with the polarization of different interest groups through the politicization of crises and crisis responses due to the uncertainty they cause and the inevitability of change they come to signify. The global climate crisis is no different: it is arguably the biggest collective action dilemma we as humankind have had to face, generating massive uncertainty about the impacts of a changing climate, and making it clear that radical change is necessary. We now have to come to terms with the fact that we have a very limited time in which to reverse the effects of the damaging development trajectory we have collectively subscribed to over the last centuries on the climate—something we are very hesitant to do due to the implications of such radical change for our comfort and quality of life.

As a result, we have started trying to place the blame on each other in order to avoid having to take action ourselves due to the refusal to acknowledge the effect of our own actions on the creation and exacerbation of the crisis. The recent protests in The Hague highlighted cleavages in society resulting from polarizing discourses of who’s to blame that will undermine efforts to address the crisis. Over the past few months, The Hague has become a political battlefield as groups have marched to the political hub of the country to make their voices heard in the struggle to find solutions to the climate crisis on Dutch soil that seems to have paralyzed the country’s political leadership. When Dutch politicians suggested curbing agricultural and building activities to reduce nitrogen emissions, farmers first rolled in en masse on their tractors, followed by those working in the construction sector. Their message was clear: we will not be made scapegoats—others are equally or more guilty and should also have their activities limited. They felt victimized and proceeded to blame other parties for causing the crisis. The blame game seems to be a vicious cycle of receiving, denying and passing on blame.

Similarly, a recent article in a Dutch newspaper claimed that international universities are climate unfriendly because international students take intercontinental flights several times a year to visit their families. The author compared their travel patterns with those of European students, who ‘only’ took intracontinental flights to other European countries for the same reason. And the split between the ‘vegan’ and ‘meat lover’ camps, as if they are opponents in some figurative battle, is well known.

These examples make clear that the climate crisis is polarizing especially those societies discussing it. Through what has become somewhat of a herd mentality, it has become very easy to compare our own behaviour to that of others, finding ourselves superior (we recycle, we don’t own cars) and thus pressuring others to do the same, or simply refusing to acknowledge that our own behaviour is problematic and blaming others because we don’t want to change. The more pressing the problem becomes, and the more apparent the need for radical and immediate change becomes, the more demands seem to be placed on others to change their behaviour.

Collective action needs to move beyond global negotiations

Elinor Ostrom argued in 2010 that climate change is a collective action problem and that no single state should shoulder the burden of having to address it alone (Ostrom 2010). Collective action problems are defined as problems that require a collective effort to address them; individual responses based on individual interests undermine the ability of the collective to address the problem and have negative consequences (Ostrom 2010). The image of two donkeys tugging on a rope comes to mind. When the donkeys attempt to move in opposite directions, the rope becomes taut and neither of them can move. When they move in the same direction, alongside each other, there is no resistance and both can achieve their objective – to graze in peace.

We need the same kind of mentality when attempting to address the climate crisis, and recognizing that climate change is a collective action problem is a first step. Although a strong institutional response is necessary to lead international efforts to combat climate change, we should acknowledge the need for a combined institutional and individual response. Ostrom argued that states should collectively address the crisis, but we as consumers and producers are just as responsible for doing so.

Importantly, before blaming industry for emissions and states for failing to discipline industries, we need to better understand and acknowledge the way in which our own seemingly insatiable appetites for material products and consumables, including for food and water, are feeding our fossil fuel addiction and affecting increased production and emissions. The climate crisis, which fundamentally trails back to our relationship with the world around us and our problematic individual and collective claim on it, demands a different way of life. We will need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and our identity as consumers in order to understand our contribution to the crisis, and we will have to acknowledge this and then collectively define our respective roles in addressing the crisis together. The last thing we need is to stand divided instead of united.

References:
Ostrom, E. (2010) ‘A multi-scale approach to coping with climate change and other collective action problems’, Solutions.

Image Credit: Andol on Wikimedia

16177487_1348685531818526_4418355730312549822_oAbout the author:

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher at the ISS focusing on water user interactions with sustainability-climate crises in the water sector, in particular the role of water scarcity politics on crisis responses and adaptation processes.

 

EADI/ISS Series | Solidarity for People Displaced by Large-Scale Investment Projects

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By Kei Otsuki and Griet Steel

Since the 1980s, international organizations and financiers have created sophisticated  guidelines on involuntary resettlement procedures. They have relied on public consultation to build consent in order to establish resettlement projects as an effective, common, and sustainable solution to displacement. But the focus on pre-resettlement consultations has largely neglected the importance of follow-up processes when resettled people start facing difficulties to live their everyday life. How can we, development researchers and practitioners, engage with the long-term effects of resettlement and its potential pathways towards sustainable development?

“VIVER É DIFICIL (Living is difficult)” reads the slogan on a water tank set up next to a typical concrete resettlement house in Mozambique (Photo). A plastic water pipe connects the water tank to a gutter, placed under the corrugated zinc roof, designed to facilitate the harvest of rainwater. In this semi-arid part of Africa, however, rain is increasingly scarce. “God stopped the rain”, says the owner of this house, David, who also wrote the slogan on his water tank.

The difficulties David is facing are, however, not only caused by the lack of rain. He is one of the resettlers who were displaced from the Limpopo National Park in south-western Mozambique in 2013. These people had agreed to be displaced and resettled on the promise that they would have a better and modern life in the resettlement village built for them. The Park administration, sponsored by the German Development Bank and the South African Peace Park Foundation, had claimed that it needed to invest in wildlife-based ecotourism without human presence for the greater sustainable and economic development in the region.

Living in the National Park, David has had his own hut and independent huts for his two wives and their children. In the resettlement village outside the Park, his household of more than 10 members crams into one small concrete house with only two rooms. What’s more, the Park administration had promised to donate water pumps to the resettles to irrigate their new collective farm. However, since the pumps were delivered at the village leader’s house 5 years ago, they never got connected.

Considering these drawbacks, you would not expect that, before the resettlement took place, David and his fellow community members had actively participated in public consultations with the resettlement officers from the Park administration and local governmental officials for almost a decade. They had discussed and built consent on housing, irrigation, and water pumps. Yet, after their resettlement was completed and new life started, new situations unfolded and the new living conditions remained difficult.

Internalising Follow-Up Processes

This is not unique to the particular case of David’s resettlement village. Since the 1980s, international organizations and financiers – development banks, in particular – have created sophisticated involuntary resettlement guidelines, and relied on public consultation to build consent in order to establish resettlement projects as an effective, common, and sustainable solution to displacement. But, as David’s case exemplifies, the focus on pre-resettlement consultations has largely neglected the importance of follow-up processes when resettled people start facing difficulties to live their everyday life.

As debates on mining-induced displacement and resettlement show, the core of the problem lies in the externalization of the cost of displacement and resettlement. Displacement and resettlement are treated as side effects with limited budgets allocated for compensation. It is vital instead to envision how resettlement projects could be firmly internalized in the core business of investment projects. Projects should allocate substantial financial and human resources for following-up on the resettlements’ sustainable development.

How can we, as development researchers and practitioners, engage with the long-term effects of resettlement?

At the upcoming EADI-ISS International Conference, we propose a panel in which colleagues working on different cases of displacement and resettlement can share their insights and perspectives about the processes through which resettlement projects evolve, develop and perhaps create chains of displacement effects and grievances over time. These unfolding realities in post-resettlement contexts cannot be fully planned and agreed upon in consultations. For example, in David’s case, the resettlers are in constant negotiations with their host community to negotiate land for cultivation or sharing basic infrastructure such as water boreholes. Yet, we know little about effects of such unfolding interactions for the overall sense of justice and sustainability.

At the same time, there might be cases that positively shape cooperation and solidarity through post-resettlement interactions. In any case, one question remains: How can we, development researchers and practitioners, engage with the long-term effects of resettlement and its potential pathways towards sustainable development?

The understanding of solidarity is vital – in these contested frontiers of displacement and resettlement in both rural and urban areas. We thus call for papers that delve deeper into the lived experiences of resettled populations, such as David’s, to deepen our understanding of what solidarity means in different cases of displacement and resettlement. In addition, we are interested in discussing methodological issues pertaining to our responsibilities of doing research on such contentious issues.

This article is part of a series launched by the EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) and the ISS in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”. It was also published on the EADI blog.

About the authors:

Kei pasfoto.jpg

Kei Otsuki  is a sociologist/geographer specialized in sustainable development in Latin America (esp. Brazil) and Africa (esp. Ghana, Mozambique) as well as in Japan. She holds a PhD in development sociology from Wageningen University and MSc and BA degrees from the University of Tokyo. Her research interests center on equitable and sustainable development, environmental justice, and remaking of communities and geopolitics, especially regarding investment-induced displacement and resettlement on resource frontiers.Griet-640x427.jpg

Griet Steel is an assistant professor in International Development Studies at the Department of Human Geography and Planning. She is an anthropologist by training and has been involved in several international research projects addressing the interplay between gender, technology, land and mobility and the broader challenges of sustainable urban development.

 

SDG 12: a long way off from changing how we produce and consume by Des Gasper, Amod Shah and Sunil Tankha

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The SDGs are a striking set of goals that potentially could facilitate major changes across the world. SDG 12—to ‘ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’ (SCPs)—is fundamental and exceptionally broad. But both political and technical factors have contributed to a watered-down set of SDG 12 targets and indicators. These need to be revisited, deepened and added to in national and local level plans for the goal to live up to much of its promise.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, have many notable features. They apply for all countries. They link economic, social and environmental dimensions of development, moving beyond the Millennium Development Goals’ narrower focus on poverty, education and health. And not least, they include an exceptionally broad Goal 12: to ‘Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns’ (SCP). How did this goal arise and what might it mean in practice? We have been looking at this as one part of a research project on the SDGs, coordinated from the New School University in New York and the University of Oslo.

To understand how the stand-alone SDG 12 and its targets emerged, we studied the 2013-14 discussions in the intergovernmental Open Working Group (OWG) on SDGs established by the UN General Assembly. The OWG proposals for SDG 12 were adopted in an unchanged form after further negotiations in the General Assembly in 2015. We explored, too, the subsequent work of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators in 2015-16. We conclude that both political and technical factors have contributed to a watered-down set of SCP targets and indicators, which need to be revisited, deepened and added to.

SDG-12-Ensure-sustainable-consumption-and-productionA stand-alone goal on SCP…

The successful push for a stand-alone goal on SCP represents a partial success for developing countries in trying to ensure application in the SDGs of the Rio principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR).[1] Richer countries implicitly bear primary responsibility for a SCP goal since they have, and have long had, the greatest environmental impacts per person.

The OWG discussions show that while wealthier countries argued for shared responsibility and for SCP to be only a cross-cutting theme across all SDGs, many developing countries emphasised CBDR and the duty and necessity for richer countries to act first and do more, and hence pressed for a stand-alone SCP goal. They argued, too, that any universal goal on SCP should not compromise their priorities of poverty eradication and socio-economic progress.

The eventual adoption of a stand-alone goal also reflects developing countries’ strong concerns about their ability to access green technologies. Many countries, not least India, were adamant on strengthening the visibility of rich countries’ responsibility to share technologies needed to produce energy and goods cleanly, and to counteract the bias in market-centered innovation whereby intellectual property rights help to motivate innovators but also limit diffusion, especially to poorer countries. The inclusion of targets on scientific and technological support to developing countries in SDG 12 (and on technology transfer in SDG 17) serve to heighten public attention to this issue, even though they are not directly actionable since they depend on the cooperation of patent-holding private corporations.


…but with often vague and diluted contents…

The positions in the OWG discussions reflected deeper disagreements about the nature of SCP and the paths to reach it, including the ethical and production choices to be made and the distribution of costs and benefits of these efforts. The negotiations on targets brought considerable dilution of ambition; nearly all ‘targets’ are really sub-goals rather than specific targets and have often remained vague. They are universal in nature but practically all references calling on developed countries to ‘take the lead’ were removed. Removal, too, of almost all percentage references means that countries are not committing to specific quantified improvements. So progress will depend on the interest and priorities within individual countries.

Further, developing a set of strong and relevant indicators to measure and stimulate progress on SDG 12 will at best be a long process. The weakness as yet of many of the globally formulated indicators reflects the problems of operationalising what are sometimes vague and novel targets, and the limited political interest in a primarily technical exercise in which specialised UN Agencies and National Statistical Offices (NSOs) predominate. Moreover, the process of deciding upon the current indicators was highly compressed in time. In several areas, for example regarding corporate reporting, the indicators are mere publication counts.

While many targets under SDG 12 do not yet have very satisfactory indicators, enunciation of the targets may spur further work. Both the indicator specification and target monitoring need ongoing improvement, including at national level, where there will sometimes be scope for augmenting the targets too. Unfortunately, NSOs and other responsible parties typically do not yet have a clear and resourced mandate to collect the data required, let alone improve it. How far will national governments invest in the monitoring framework?

…and centred on technological innovation rather than consumption restraint…  

SDG 12 is not only extremely broad but, whereas most other SDGs have been achieved to more or less satisfactory extents in at least some countries, sustainable consumption and production (SCP) have not yet been realised anywhere.[2] So what is required is here perhaps even more open to debate. SDG 12 itself tacitly focuses on improving production and consumption, not reducing these processes. They can supposedly continue to grow indefinitely, as long as they become ‘smart’. Many researchers have argued, since the 1960s, that sustainability requires a fundamental rethink of not only production and distribution processes—to reduce waste, absorb by-products, and so on—but also of the culture of ever-growing consumption and the underlying systems of societal organisation and motivation, including by building an orientation towards consuming less while ‘living more’ and more equitably. The SDG 12 targets say little on such issues, apart from promoting ‘awareness for sustainable development’ (Target 12.8) through attention in formal schooling. Fundamental reorientation of consumer societies was a theme in many fora that fed into the SDG negotiations, but not into the outcomes.

SDG 12 continues, instead, the interpretation of SCP which emerged from ‘green business’ circles in the 1980s and 1990s (now sometimes called ‘eco-modernism’): that technical innovation will supposedly dramatically reduce ‘material footprints’ and allow production and consumption to grow endlessly. This perspective long ago became prominent also in UNEP, the coordinating agency for SDG 12 discussions, and in the Marrakech Process that followed up on SCP after the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development. No major new pro-business lobbying or interventions in 2012-15 were needed for this perspective to dominate the formulation of SDG 12. The approach emphasises voluntary, informed consumption and production decisions, rather than regulation. It rests on hopes that existing and soon-to-be-developed technologies can obviate the need for restraint and politically difficult discussions.

…yet offering a space for increased attention and future mobilisation ?

At present SDG 12 does not adequately reflect transformative conceptualisations of SCP. The targets appear often diluted and vague, and the indicators further narrow the scope and ambition. There is little attention to moderating consumption. SDG 12 does, though, provide major spaces for attention to SCP from relevant agencies and publics, worldwide, while underlining to some extent the CBDR principle. In an optimistic scenario the goal and targets would induce domestic mobilisation and country-specific reform, that would lead to augmentation of targets, innovation in indicators for both monitoring and demanding action, and broader innovations in thinking-and-doing for real sustainability.

[1] The CBDR principle was adopted at the 1992 Rio ‘Earth Summit’, the UN Conference on Environment and Development.

[2] See e.g. V. Mignaqui, 2014, Sustainable Development as a Goal, International J. of Social Quality 4(1): 57-77.

Picture credit: John Henderson

Desmond Gasper_UN-2014-resized2About the authors:


Des Gasper is Professor at ISS in Human Development and Public Policy.amod-photo

 

Amod Shah is a PhD candidate at the ISS, focusing on land acquisition-related conflict in India.039a9083bea074c4ac8332632eda82df
Sunil Tankha is Assistant Professor of States, Societies and World Development at the ISS.

 

 

Women’s Week | Feminist political ecology in research and action by Wendy Harcourt

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On 8 March 2018, Professor Wendy Harcourt will be inaugurated at the International Institute of Social Studies, becoming one of the few female professors at the Erasmus University. This blog is a reflection of her personal journey to professorship and on the ‘Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community’ (WEGO-ITN) project that she heads, which will be launched on the same day at the ISS.

 

The road to a personal feminist political ecology research agenda

I was awarded my PhD in 1987 from the Australian National University but I had long decided that I was not going to be an academic. I wanted to be part of the real world of social movements and on the ground politics as a feminist and environmentalist. Most of my PhD days were spent juggling my time between the need to get on with the PhD and the many commitments to different political causes—ranging from making sure the campus was safe for women at night to protests to stop uranium mining and the logging of wild rivers. Once I had completed the PhD, instead of taking up a lectureship in Australia, I went to Rome, Italy (I confess for romantic reasons) and after a year of looking for jobs became a programme coordinator and editor at the international secretariat of the Society for International Development.

IMG_1693
Professor Wendy Harcourt walking through a forest in Nepal during a research trip in 2012.

In the 23 years I worked in Rome, I continued my juggling act as an advocate at the UN level and as a social movement activist. My passion for feminism and environmentalism remained. As well as my on the ground community work, I became part of transnational feminism establishing a wide network of people and most importantly writing—and editing a journal called Development. The networking, publications and advocacy all stood me in good stead when I decided that, after all, I was an academic at heart. And after a visiting fellowship at Clare Hall at Cambridge University where I wrote an academically recognised book Body Politics in Development, I was lucky enough to get a position at the ISS.

A move towards feminist political ecology

At the ISS I have continued to focus on feminism and environment, joining forces with other feminist political ecologists, many of whom I had met as an advocate in my NGO days. Feminist political ecology is a subfield of political ecology (Harcourt and Nelson 2015). It is the study of the conflicts and convergences between development, conservation, cultural survival, body politics, gender equality, and political autonomy. At the core of feminist political ecology is learning about how people in different places are living in, and engaging with their natural and cultural environment (Rocheleau 2008).

By exploring what is happening in specific places where people are negotiating life and livelihoods in human damaged environments, feminist political ecology calls attention to emotions, feelings, the spiritual, non-scientific knowledges and interactions with non-humans, with technologies, life and death (Elmhirst 2011). The research is mostly based on case studies and is embedded in an understanding of broader political, economic and social issues (Nightingale 2011). It aims to explore the nexus of gender, diversity and the environment. Importantly, feminist political ecology invites us to step out of the bounds of modern science and economic thinking to look at political ecology as a relational and fluid social process.

So, to take an example, from a feminist political ecology perspective the Sustainable Development Goals can be studied on a variety of scales (Hawkins and Ojeda 2011, Resurrección 2017). Going beyond the obvious need to study agricultural practices, waste, water and forest management, we can examine forms of networked and rooted interactions in institutional development practices. We can record at the grounded level the lived experiences of the villagers who receive funds for a green road project. And at an embodied level we can register the emotions and concerns of women who are obliged to take contraception when they receive funds for a startup micro enterprise by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Harcourt et al. 2016).

The Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community (WEGO-ITN) project

The EU Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Innovation Training Network Grant for the project ‘Well-being, Ecology, Gender and Community Innovative Training Network’ (WEGO-ITN) (www.iss.nl/wego-itn) will provide an important space for European-based feminist political ecology to come to the fore with well-positioned and engaging research that asks these sorts of questions.

WEGO-INT in a nutshell
  • Grant value: €4 million (€4.000.000)
  • 10 partner universities in 5 countries across Europe
    • Freie Universität Berlin (FUB);
    • Humboldt University Berlin (HUB);
    • Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex University;
    • Pangea Foundation (PF);
    • Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU);
    • International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam;
    • University of Brighton (UofB);
    • University of Passau (UPAS);
    • IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft (IHE); and
    • Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
  • 8 training laboratories at
    • University of Auckland (UoA);
    • University of Vermont (UVM);
    • University of Western Sydney (UWS);
    • Defensoria del Vecino de Montevideo (DVM);
    • Island Institute (II);
    • Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM);
    • Associazione Culturale ‘Punti di Vista’ (PDV); and
    • Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
  • Yielding 15 PhD positions
  • 3 interconnecting research themes
    • Climate change, economic development and extractivism;
    • Commoning, community economies and the politics of care; and
    • Nature/culture/embodiment and technologies

In its research, WEGO will build from local engagement and knowledge of peoples’ practices and visions of how to live on this planet under climatic conditions never before experienced. WEGO will co-produce knowledge with people in both the Global North and South on how hybrid and emergent ecologies are creating new forms of livelihoods or life-worlds, in response to growing lack of resilience of the economy and ecosystem.

With that knowledge WEGO will then engage in the debates now being opened up by the Sustainable Development Goals in order to bring the stories of peoples’ changing historical and current experiences of care for the environment into the policy arena. Such grounded and engaged research will not only be about collecting data and evidence, but also about understanding political processes including the contradictions, the emotions and embodied reactions of people to economic, social and environmental change.

As the first international feminist political ecology research network of its kind, WEGO aspires to tackle socio-ecological challenges linked to policy agendas. This innovative and path-breaking project I hope will help to build resilient, equitable and sustainable futures. Ultimately, WEGO aims to provide important guides to strategies of resilience and sustainability that are required for meeting the SDGs.

WEGO thematic diagram
The three interconnected research themes of the WEGO-ITN project. Source: https://www.iss.nl/en/research/research-projects/well-being-ecology-gender-and-community

My vision is that WEGO, by providing a gendered knowledge of every day experiences of environmental practices, will make a difference, not only to the academe but also to the lives of the people with whom we co-produce knowledge. At the political level, I hope that WEGO can open up questions around scientific truth and the mistaken story of systemic coherence of unsustainable economic growth.

I am confident that Feminist Political Ecology can help to guide us along new tracks as we engage in encounters of different life-worlds, form connections among communities, and link exciting academic research to effective policy crucial for today’s sustainable development agenda.

Introducing WEGO-INT through visual media
A group of ISS students were asked to create a video for the WEGO project. Victoria Simpson, an intern from Erasmus University who participated in the making of the video, explains that

 

the trick was to produce something that addressed activists, students and academics all at once. Since many written explanations seem to be designed for experts in the field of social sciences, we wanted to create audience-flexible knowledge through the help of animations, visuals and narrations. With this idea in mind, we shot a film that shows the relevance of the WEGO project in the face of the ecological and social crises we are dealing with today. Specifically, we wanted to show how difficult it is to solve these overwhelmingly large issues on a basis of a €4 million research grant. We had the idea to asked people of different groups how they would use this grant to make a positive impact. The notion behind this was to show that even when the problem of gaining financial resources is solved, it is challenging to come up with a way to use them effectively.

 

The video can be viewed at xxx
Main picture: Picture by Emma Claire Sardoni representing the life worlds of Lago Di Bolsena in Lazio, Italy.
References
Elmhirst, R. (2011) ‘Introducing new feminist political ecologies’, Geoforum 42: 129–132.
Hawkins, R. and D. Ojeda (2011) ‘Gender and Environment: Critical Tradition and New Challenges’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(2): 237–253.
Harcourt, W. and I.L. Nelson (eds) (2015) Practicing Feminist Political Ecology: Beyond the Green Economy, London: Zed Books.
Harcourt, W., R. Icaza and V. Vargas (2016) ‘Exploring embodiment and intersectionality in transnational feminist activist research,’ in Biekart, K. , W. Harcourt and P. Knorringa (eds) Exploring Civic Innovation for Social and Economic Transformation, 148–167. London: Routledge.
Nightingale, A.J. (2011) ’Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal’, Geoforum 42: 153–162.
Resurrección, B. P. (2017) ‘Gender and environment from “women, environment and development” to feminist political ecology,’ in MacGregor, S. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, 471–485. London: Routledge.
Rocheleau, D.E. (2008) ‘Political ecology in the key of policy: From chains of explanation to webs of relation’, Geoforum 39: 716–727.

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Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the ISS. She is currently Chair of the ISS Institute Council, member of the ISS Research Committee, CI Research Group Coordinator, and Coordinator of the Marie Curie ITN ‘WEGO’ project.