The Brundtland Commission in its report titled Our Common Future in 1987 defined the concept of sustainable development as development addressed towards the needs of the future as well as towards the needs of the present policy architecture.
The Brundtland Commission was shortly dissolved at the end of the same year. However, how can we have sustainable development given the rapid rate at which we are consuming the Earth’s resources?
How is Development Sustainable?
This definition in what is known as the Brundtland Report has remained somewhat vague in comprehensively encapsulating the concept of sustainable development. Indeed the concept of sustainable development without uniform international realization has remained an amorphous concept. The question in the concept of sustainable development is of how can development pursue production processes but at the same time return inputs or allocate practices into resource collection such that future generations might reap the benefits of abundant resources, without which production cannot occur. The concept of sustainable development thus ensues including development policies and innovations that sustain Earth’s resources for use by future generations.
Thus steadily, the concept of sustainable development has come to primarily mean in terms of an actionable framework the integration of economic and environmental policies in terms of developmental strategies such that a balance is achieved between economic development and the environment. This means that economic policies are designed and implemented such that the end of environmental protection is achieved to the highest possible degree so that future generations might benefit from environmental conservation to the greatest possible degree. To understand this more closely, we must look at the theory of ecological succession, most notably known for the contributions of Eugene Odum.
Ecological succession looks into ecosystem development as in how energy and materials follow cyclical paths within ecosystems. This aspect is what Odum (1969) explored in his paper ‘The Strategy of Ecosystem Development’. A key part of Odum’s analysis is that the strategies of man and nature are diametrically opposed. While the focus for man has primarily been high production out of nature, for example in terms of harvesting certain agricultural crops, reducing the total productive biomass, nature in its succession process goes for the reverse efficiency, thus favouring biomass production rather than production that largely wastes biomass, as in man’s approach.
Nature thus manages to maintain a balance in its production process in sustainably producing biomass for procedural use while man’s production processes are not as all-roundly efficient or sustainable. A major environmental aspect of our time is indeed in moving towards an environmentally sustainable future. The discipline that is most entwined into the management of environmental resources is economics, closely followed by technology, which is a part of the economic superstructure.
While nature can participate in production and at the same time generate an output that feeds cyclically into the production process, human technology has not as yet evolved a cumulative production process that generates a cyclical output like nature. In human economies, what circulates cyclically into the production process is currency while capital investments such as natural resources and even human labour are extinguished in the production process.
Rather than a total cyclic system as in nature, in human economies the only economic good that circulates cyclically is currency. Currency in human economies moves from consumer to producer and then to consumers again as wages, following a cyclical path in the production process. When people consume goods produced during the production process, the producer is credited with currency received. However, when these same consumers participate in the production process as labour, they receive currency from the producers as wages, thus completing the cyclical process through which currency circulates in human economies.
However, the same is not true for other inputs into the production process. Natural resources extracted or even labour exchanged for currency is exhausted in the production process. Labour does not circulate in human economies as an end in itself thereby returning labour with more labour in return. Labour is compensated for and replaced by currency. Similarly natural resources occurring as capital are also exchanged for currency ultimately, and are exhausted in the production process such that the use of natural resources does not produce more natural resources. The aim in human economies is to use natural resources to produce currency.
The question that then arises in this scenario is as to how economies meant primarily to circulate currency can be environmentally sustainable? The question is one of how can natural resources be used in such a manner such that they can be replenished and also circulate cyclically in production processes to the greatest degree? If this end is realized whereby natural resources used in the production process by humanity are replenished and circulate cyclically, the possibility arises that natural resources could be used perpetually or at least for long periods of time into the future.
Thus the concept of sustainable development could work if humanity was able to circulate natural resources cyclically into production processes or use natural resources that are not expected to finish in the near future. This indeed is the engine behind the concept of sustainable development. This represents one massive method through which we can make development sustainable and is the focus for many policy-makers and scholars in rooting for environmentally sustainable development.
Sustainable Systems
Although the concept of sustainable development is one of the great ideas of our contemporary time, its fruition leaves much to be desired. Of central importance in evaluating the concept of sustainable development is over how human societies can be geared to respond and adapt to the concept of sustainable development and its working. The concept of sustainable development would imbibe not just correct resource utilization in human economies, which still is an uphill task, but also societal changes in the form of a stronger regime of economic equity, or fairness, which needs to be intergenerational.
In nature, inputs into the production process are not under any form of conscious individual or collective ownership. These circulate freely into being transformed into one form of energy to the next, thus forming a co-dependent web of energy transfers. Nature forms a total system, and very little if any is wasted, which usually occurs once in a long period of time for an ecosystem, causing an evolutionary event. Analyzing the economic system, Pigou (1920) pointed out in his ‘The Economics of Welfare’ that the difference between marginal private costs and marginal social costs or benefits creates externalities such as transaction spillovers, costs or benefits unaccounted for, or wastages such as in the form of pollution. There is thus a private, a social and an environmental cost to economic transactions. The economy does not function as a harmonized system of transactions.
Economists Michael Porter and Claas van der Linde (1999) for example have cited pollution, saying that it is an example of the industrial system using resources inefficiently. In an economic system based on competitive advantage, it is inevitable that economic actions will generate costs not just within the economy, but also for society and the environment. However, competition also occurs in nature, in which energy transfers are balanced out and equilibrium is eventually achieved. The key difference here between the economy and nature is that nature returns its components back to its original categorical form whereas the economy converts natural resources into products that do not necessarily return to their original natural form. The case of plastic is a case in point.
There is thus necessary wastage by the economic system which generates costs and inequity. For example, the paper used to produce currency cannot be returned directly by the economic system to produce the trees that are used to produce paper such as the pine, fir, larch, eucalyptus, aspen and birch trees. The costs incurred in processing and procuring paper from the natural resources thus represent sunk costs and thus cannot be recovered. What are recovered are the investments made in procuring and producing paper products that are recovered after consumption as currency. It is therefore these sunk costs in procuring natural resources that present the greatest challenge to the economic system in going for environmental sustainability and towards thinking of the concept of sustainable development. These sunk costs are representative of one particular form of wastage – one for the economic system itself.
The economic system generates costs for society and for the environment as well as there are wastages. In looking from an economic point of view, these wastages can account for the sunk costs incurred by society and the environment. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is causing more and more greenhouse gases to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere. If Climate Change is allowed a free reign as a result of these wastages, life on Earth shall bear sunk costs that are both societal and environmental as changes that are not recoverable. On the other hand however, if renewable sources of energy are adequately utilized, where there is much less wastage, there can be a much greater lack of sunk costs borne by society and environment on Earth.
The idea thus in the concept of sustainable development and in sustainable systems in terms of the economy is thus to reduce the wastage not just in procuring natural resources but also in reducing wastages for society and the environment. In such a scenario, there shall be less sunk costs borne in the economy as well as in the society and environment. This is a win-win for all, wherein the reduction in sunk costs and wastage can act to bring down overall costs in both aspects thus increasing equity overall, which can only be a boon to a healthy economy, to society and to the environment.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.