Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Sustainability and Democracy
A Conference Sponsored by IBASE and WEED
Bonn, October, 1995
The following two texts are the main contributions to the conference "Sustainability & Democracy" which was held in October 1995 in Bonn, Germany. The conference was a joint project of the Brazilian NGO "IBASE" and the German NGO "World Economy, Ecology & Development - WEED".
For further information contact: Weltwirtschaft, Ökologie & Entwicklung - WEED
Berliner Platz 1
D-53111 Bonn
Tel: +49 -(0)228-69 64 79
Fax:+49- (o)228-69 64 70
e-mail: weed @oln.comlink. apc.org
"Sustainability and Democracy in Industrialized Countries"
Christine M. Merkel
staff member of the German UNESCO CommissionThe usefulness of our discussion may best be judged by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the year 2045, when they will have walked quite a distance on the road of turbulence and creativity of change.
Will they enjoy a happy, balanced and meaningful life which left behind the deadlocks of over-consumption, a phenomenon quite unknown to the generation of our grandparents? Will they be free and appreciated citizens of whatever country they may live in? Or will they find themselves surrounded by barbed wires in the literal and figurative sense -- either because they belong to the privileged club of the few who live at the expense of everybody else, or because they exist at the margins of society and are being kept there by force? Will they live with a sense of relief reading the concerns of 1995, or rather with a mix of anger, hope, cynicism and realism. Let's hope they'll be remembering our efforts with sympathy.
This paper places the current reappraisal of democracy in its contradictory context of nation States struggling with the phenomena of globalisation. Simultaneously, aspirations for democracy, the questioning of its efficiency and the discourse of making it an aid conditionality can be observed. It looks into the history of democracy as a struggle to civilise power and overcome the latent violence of conflicting interests.
In the context of the changing meaning of democracy in the global system, it discusses the proposal of a process of double democratisation and the notion of divided, 'softened' sovereignty, able to stretch territorial and time boundaries of accountability. Which sort of democratic governance and culture will be able to bring about sustainable modes of production, distribution, consumption and local regeneration? Will the necessity of self-limitation, world-level information, co- operation, capacity for local regeneration and long-term knowledge about impacts push for the transformation of liberal democracies? Some innovative ideas of democratic regulations of rights and resources are examined against this perspective.
I. Democracy and Sustainability in Times of Paradox
We examine the questions of sustainability and democracy in industrialised countries in times of paradox: Over the last few years, people have expressed aspirations of democracy in the most diverse cultures, with the end of military dictatorships in Latin America, the end of Communist one-party regimes of the old type in Central and Eastern Europe and Soviet zones of influence, as well as with the end of apartheid in Southern Africa. The modern history of the idea of 'the rule of the people' (demo-kratein, in the meaning of the Greek word) is little older than 150 years. It is being re-embraced at a moment, when the older liberal democracies of Western industrialised countries question its efficiency as a national form of political organisation and show a performance of 'low intensity democracy'.
In the last two decades, the liberal democratic model has been under sustained attack from both the Right and the Left, "on the grounds that the relationships that underpin liberal democracy are, in their existing form, insufficiently symmetrical and congruent. More markets and minimal states, for the Right, direct participation of citizens in the regulation of the key institutions of society (including the workplace and local community), for the Left, are the bases of recommendations for overcoming insufficiently responsive organisations and institutions" (David Held, 1991, p.141).
As more and more social, economic and human activities are being organised and have implications at a world scale, ironically enough, the notion of democratisation in a national context is entering the development conditionality discourse through the frontdoor, accompanied by a widespread and newly developing culture of electoral assistance (by the UN alone to some twenty countries in 1994). However, this trend may well lead to unintended results. In the OECD DAC policy document 'Participatory Development and Good Governance', the remark can be found that the introducing of these concepts pushes donor countries nolens volens towards reciprocity. These conditionalities can only be maintained if donor countries work for coherence in their own policies and practices, in particular concerning arms exports (OECD, DAC 1995, p. 7 ff). Will we soon see the subversive effects of a 'democracy boomerang'?
This renewed interest also brings about a fresh look into key elements of the democratic process, including the human rights corpus in its full scope (see for example the annexes key Democracy elements, governance areas and measures, Human Rights Standards, Democratic Society Indicators, from the study of Roel von Meijenfeldt, 1994).
Concerning democracy, there are choices to be made by citizens, governments and inter-national structures concerned alike: its future is fraught with uncertainty as we observe a coming together of Western 'free' market forces with Asian authoritarian rule and the economic elites of the former communist semi-industrialised countries. In the age of the democracy discourse, who has really a vital interest in opting for a democratic political future ?
Insofar as sustainability is seen as an important policy goal at all, there is a strong inclination towards international agencies born in the spirit of patronising technocracy with the excuse of time pressure in the light of the limitedness of natural resources. Democratic procedures and change are said to be too slow to achieve the necessary adaptations of lifestyle, domestic production of goods and service as well as the rules of international exchange with the speed required. The assumption that free will of associated citizens is unable to self-limitation easily lends itself to expect rather (State)eco-dictatorship or (non-State)eco-terrorism than a happy and fertile marriage between democracy and sustainability. From there it is only a small step to a merger with the racist and exclusionist policy of the new right under the heading of a technocratic and hostile reading of substainability.
The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the 1789 Declaration of human rights of the French revolution proclaimed the aspiration of freedom, equality and justice, triggering off struggles for democracy. The institution-building which followed in the 19th century, was fostered by the developing century of economy with its wars and emerging nation States. It transformed the monarchies of the railway- age into constitutional ones, most of them later into republics. As the century of ecology, the 21st century will be characterised by obligations to self-limitation, the necessity of world-level information, co-operation, capacity for local regeneration as well as long-term interconnected thinking of synergistic effects etc. Hence the question raises whether these principles can push further the necessary transformation of democracies, as did the century of economy with the feudal monarchies. How conflicting and violent will a transition towards sustainable modes of production, trade, consumption and culture be ? How strong must the civilising and conflict transforming forces be, how strong can they realistically be? We find ourselves only at the beginning of an age of democratic aspirations, trying to cope with and balance globalisation and re-defining public interest under these circumstances. We realise that we can neither develop sustainability nor democracy without diversity. Complex identities and the compatibility of values are the results of communication and a culture of sharing. They cannot be organised and administered in authoritarian or totalitarian ways.
There exists a strong potential for civic innovation, both in conceptual, practical and institutional respect, within the framework of constitutional and political thought. But its political life energy is threatened from an angle unexpected five years ago: The three-year siege of the Mediterranean urban cosmopolitan centre of Sarajevo is a symbol for this dangerous tendency. As before with the destruction of Beyrouth, not only the real life of this secular, multiethnic and pluri-religious city and society is deeply wounded and bleeding. The Band-Aids offered by the international community of nation-State governments risk to undermine " the agreement to tolerate differences of belief and ideology (which) was a founding principle of the modern states system " (Held, 1991, p. 159).
As reminds us Held, the modern states system developed precisely in the context of schisms and bitter conflicts which dominated Europe from the start of the Reformation. It was a system of overlapping authority structures and conflicting loyalties which was the critical background condition of the rise of the modern State. The latter emerged in part as a conceptual and institutional resolution to the strife and turmoil created by the former.
The varieties of institutional forms resulted from the settlement of conflicts of transformation, depending whether the starting point was a plurality of monarchies (as in Spain or Germany), the absence of feudalism (as in Norway) or a highly centralised empire (as in France). It is important to recall that the roots of democracy were the struggles to limit absolute power of monarchies: Oblige them to elements of accountability (budget rights, taxation), predictability (rule of law), ask legitimacy of power through separation of the executive, legislative and the judiciary and practise non-violent change of government through elections. From the very beginning, the request of the sharing of wealth was of paramount importance (welfare and well- being as constitutional goals, social guarantees and obligations of the State, poverty polity).
The history of building democracy in the West, as probably everywhere else, too, can be read as an ongoing, long and painful struggle for social justice. It can be read as a partly successful story of the inclusion of new historic social actors, affirming their position in society and claiming citizenship, from the (male) nobility and the bourgeois to workers, farmers, former slaves, women, indigenous people and migrant, a partial inclusion under the 19th and early 20ieth century conditions of modernisation and marginalisation, mobility and political repression. This mixture, together with raising aspirations, pushed more than 100 millions of Europeans to leave the old continent in search for a better life.
II. The changing meaning of democracy in the global system
Following David Held's very interesting argumentation, we have to re-examine "the underlying premises of democratic theory...that democracies can be treated as essentially self-contained units, clearly demarcated one from another" (Held, 1991, p.139ff.). The context of the global system opens up new options and puts at the same time limits to key concepts as the principle of majority rule, the nature of sovereignty, accountability towards the citizens and the rule of law.
The application of the" principle of majority rule is at the heart of Western democracy: it is at the root of the claim of political decisions to be regarded as worthy or legitimate. Problems arise, however, not only because decisions made by nation-States, or by quasi-supranational organisations such as the European Union, NATO or the World Bank diminish the range of decisions open to a given 'majority', but also because decision of a majority affect (or potentially affect) not only its own citizens." Having given a series of examples as the decision making on airport siting, Chemical factories, food and military aid, nuclear plants etc., Held comes to the conclusion that the reality of the global interconnectedness and outcome raise questions which go to the heart of the categories of classical democratic theory and its contemporary variants. "The very idea of consent becomes deeply problematic as soon as the nature of a so-called 'relevant community' is contested....What is the relevant constituency? Local? National? Regional? International? To whom do decision-makers have to justify their decisions, and to whom should they?.... What is the fate of the idea of legitimate rule when decisions, often with potentially life-and- death consequences, are taken in polities in which large numbers of the affected individuals have no democratic stake? ...Territorial boundaries demarcate the basis on which individuals are included and excluded from participation in decisions affecting their lives" (p.143). In sum, the very process of governance seems to be escaping the categories of the nation-State.
This has profound implications for the key ideas of democratic thought: "the nature of a constituency, the meaning of accountability, the proper form and scope of political participation, and the relevance of the nation-State, faced with unsettling patterns of national and international relations and processes, as the guarantor of rights and duties to subjects." We see an increased level of State integration with decreased levels of democracy, facing "multi-bureaucratic decision making" at the national and international level, which sustains and redefines the power of states.
This process changes the nature of sovereignty: "The blurring of the boundaries of domestic politics ...and the operation of states in an ever more complex international system both limits their autonomy and infringes ever more upon their sovereignty...Sovereignty itself has to be conceived today as already divided among a number of agencies - national, regional and international - and limited by the very nature of this plurality (p.158)". However, in contrast to a line in the globalisation discussion, Held underlines that the nation-State cannot be replaced as a central point of reference. "What is called for, is...a theory of the changing place of the democratic State within the international order."
As a consequence, citizens face the situation that meaning and place of democracy have to be rethought in relation to a series of overlapping local, regional and global structures and processes. For the further development of democracy there are at least three key consequences of globalisation to absorb: "first, the way, processes of, among other things, economic, political, legal and military interconnectedness are changing the nature of the sovereign state from above; second, the way local and regional nationalisms are eroding the nation-State from below; and third, the way global interconnectedness creates chains of interlocking political decisions and outcomes among states and their citizens which alter the nature and dynamics of national political systems themselves (p. 158)".
Recurring to the medieval "system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty", Held hopes for the construction of a new form of universal political order. He sees it as a potentially 'softening' strategy of State sovereignty: "If modern states were to come to share their authority over their citizens, and their ability to command their loyalties, on the one hand with regional and world authorities, and on the other hand with sub-State or sub-national authorities" a number of advantages may be achievable, "notably, the provision of institutional mechanisms to bind large populations together peacefully while avoiding the typical dangers and 'continual jealousies' (Hobbes) of the states system, on the one hand, and the risk of huge concentrations of power which might accompany a system of 'world government', on the other" (p.159).
This last argument is extremely important in the light of an important stream in the ecology debate, who sees no other option than centralised power concentration and 'top down' ruling in order to achieve the necessary containment of the industrial waste economy. Of course the decisive question is whether such a version of "democracy in the middle" would make the shift towards sustainability easier. What, if anything, would be the equivalent mechanism to representative democracy to assure accountability in a system of divided sovereignty? Transnational corporations, the International Monetary Fund, NATO and others may even have mechanisms of accountability to shareholders, to representatives of sovereign member states etc. The pressing question remains their accountability, if any, towards the ordinary citizen of the nation-States in which they operate.
III. A Federal Model of Democratic Autonomy - both enabling and constraining
Held is optimistic that the severe objections to such a hybrid system can be overcome, "if a multiple system of authority is bound by fundamental ordering principles and rules", what he would call a "federal model of democratic autonomy". "International agencies, organisations and states could opt to become part of this structure if they choose a democratic political future" (161). The legitimate scope of both State and popular action is a key concern. "Only a principle of sovereignty which places at its centre scepticism about both State and popular sovereignty can be an acceptable principle", implying constitutional thinking, a regulatory structure which is both enabling and restraining (p.162), institutional arrangements to protect the individuals' or minorities' position, i.e., constitutional rules and safeguards, a bill of rights.
The result is a definition of the principle of autonomy: "Persons should enjoy equal rights (and, accordingly, equal obligations) in the framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them; that is, they should be free and equal in the determination of the condition of their own lives, so long as they do not deploy this framework to negate the rights of others" (Held, 1991, p.162).
Of great importance for the strategy in opening the doors towards sustainability is the explanation of 'being free and equal in the determination of the conditions of life': "Process of deliberation" is the key concept, open to all on a free and equal basis, about matters of pressing public concern. A legitimate decision within this framework is not one that follows from the 'will of all', but rather one that results from the 'deliberation of all' which is accordingly compatible with procedures and mechanisms of majority rule. Ultimately, the principle of autonomy requires on one hand, the reform of State power and, on the other hand, the restructuring of civil society. A process of double democratisation is indispensable, meaning the interdependent transformation of both State and civil society. "The international form and structure of politics and civil society must be built into the foundations of democratic theory....democracy within a nation-State requires democracy within a network of intersecting international forces and relations. This is the meaning of democratisation today" (165).
As a result, the boundaries of systems of accountability need to be changed. Thenotion of a relevant constituency must be expanded to include the relevant domains and groups of people significantly affected by such interconnectedness. In principle, this requires an expanding framework of democratic states and agencies to render decisions accountable. Thus environmental questions, monetary management, health policies, which escape the control of a nation-State can be brought under better control. Second, the interlocking frameworks of the international civil order need being democratised, together with the states system. In sum , this would alter the territorial boundaries of accountability.
Third, I would add as an important dimension not discussed by Held, changing the time boundaries of systems of accountability. Free and fair elections, meant as a mechanism of power balance and limitation within representative democracy, offer a feed-back mechanism through the party system roughly every fourth year. Some of the problems which go with this will be discussed below. The most obvious discrepancy is the dramatically longer time horizon many decisions concerning the eco-system imply, one of the better known examples being the storage of nuclear waste which requires stable conditions throughout tens of thousands of years. In the line of divided sovereignty, a change of the time boundaries of decisions of democratically elected governing bodies is a prerequisite. Physically and institutionally this is complex to achieve, as there can always be only virtual representation of coming generations. The proposal of a "Council of Seven Generations" and likewise ideas have been voiced, when discussing a new constitution for Germany in 1990/91. If is to be taken seriously, such a Council need to have overruling power or at least very clear rights to solicit Court Judgement in case of doubts.
One of the power questions behind is who imposes the governing speed and what is the quality of the deliberation process which goes with it. Does it allow for the spiralling up of the seven vital steps for democratic governance ? From the signalling of a problem, to the identifying of choices, through broadly based deliberation to consultation and decision making, followed by the monitoring of effects, feedback and correction, as necessary. Compared to the eco-social struggles around the high tech projects of the 70ies and 80ies who took twenty to thirty years (airport sites, irrigation dams, nuclear and fast-breeder power plants etc.), today we are facing the systematic acceleration of structural decision making : The readjustment of the German health and social insurance system was pushed through in two years, the biotechnology debate in three.
Back to Held's proposal of a Federal Model of Democratic Autonomy: The Institutional basis it presupposes, in the first instance, is an enhancement of the role of sub-regional parliaments (e.g. European, Latin American, Southern African), so that they become recognised as legitimate independent sources of international law. Anticipated could be the possibility of general referenda of groups cutting across Nations and nation-States, with constituencies defined according to the scope of controversial transnational issues.
The opening of international governmental organisations to public scrutiny (freedom of information acts, ombudspersons) as well as the democratisation of international 'functional' bodies (e.g. through election of a statistically representative supervisory board of the constituency) are further items. To strengthen enactment and enforcement of key rights, the expansion of the influence of international courts is required so that individuals and groups have effective means of suing political authorities. At issue is here the curtailment of the power of multinational corporations and the construction of an array of social spheres as privately and co-operativelyowned enterprises, independent communications media and health centres which allow their members control of the resources at their disposal without direct interference from political agencies. In short, a civil society, that is neither simply plan- nor merely market oriented but subject to the constraints of a common structure of action and democratic process.
IV. Sustainability and Democracy
Taking up the lead question from the IBASE-WEED Dialogue in February 1995, we have to examine further to which degree currents of the competing discursive matrices will accumulate forces to deepen democracy building. This clarifies the field rather quickly, as indeed the first requisite is to bring the notion of sustainability to the realities of social relations and struggles, in order to examine options for political regulations of conflicts. Who wants to sustain what, at the expenses of whom?
In his criticism of the notion of sustainability as the prolongation of the development discourse, Wolfgang Sachs denounces the hegemony of globalism and comes to the conclusion: "It is inevitable, that the claims of global management are in conflict with the aspirations for cultural rights, democracy and self-determination. Indeed, it is easy for an ecocracy which acts in the name of 'one earth' to become a threat to local communities and their life-styles" (Sachs, 1993, p. 19). Unless the potentially far reaching effects of an efficiency revolution will be coupled with an intelligent restraint of growth, nothing much will change. "Efficiency without sufficiency is counterproductive; the latter must define the boundaries of the former" (Sachs, 1993, p.17). De-celeration, dis-entanglement, de-commercialisation and clearance of junk are the four sign-posts he offers (the four 'E's in German: Entschleunigung, Entflechtung, Entkommerzialisierung, Entrümpelung).
In our debate, the most far reaching bridge building between democracy and sustainability has been achieved by the vivid debate about 'Vorsorgendes Wirtschaften', literally translated 'the providing for the future in and through the economy of the house' (Busch-Lüthy / Jochimsen /Knobloch / Seidl, Politische Ökologie 1994). It is by no means a coincidence that the oldest parliament of the world still today is called House of Commons. It enlarges the notion of sustainability by the economy of caring and the socio-economic dimension, all closely linked to the development process of society, respecting paid and unpaid labour alike. Providing for the future, co-operation and limitation to the essential life needs are guiding concepts, the very success concepts from evolution, twinned with responsibility, well-being and solidarity. They explicitly relate to communitarian traditions and the social constructing of networks as well as to newer forms of planning , decision making and consensus building, including mediation. Taking the current state of democracy, this requires new means and legal norms to develop forms of co- operation.
It recalls the principle of sustainability in the meaning it had for the last three hundred years in the German speaking forestry tradition. Here it marks a enduring, cautious and regenerating use of natural life resource by human society, hence a complex life principle of economy bound by social justice and responsibility. Economic thinking today must learn that there may be accommodation of differing interests through democratic procedures, but there is no bargaining and compromising with nature. Sustainability in this understanding cannot be more than a vision, an orientation for societal development. "It cannot come up with general recipes, but should assure the best possible process of consensus finding and decision-making in a participatory, self-organised way for a given community" (Busch-Lüthy, 1994, p.16). The strong point of this argument is that it includes automatically polity, social communication, life realities and a local capacity for regeneration in its notion of sustainability. However, it cannot give openings how to deal with the mix of boundaries, territorial and timewise, which need to be taken into account.
We see currently a renewed debate about the pushing of boundaries of limited resources of raw materials, energy, clean air etc. by multiplying the efficiency of their use. This concept tries to get out of the expansionist model not by self-limitation or by an 'economy of enough' orientation (Marcos Arruda, 1992), but by rechanneling its expansionist drive and energy to the in-put side, making it a major ambition to cut down the use of raw materials and reorienting towards a mode of qualitative growth (compare Von Weizs"cker/Lovins/Lovins, 1995). It offers rich empirical evidence of already existing modes of production and distribution which operate at this scale, mainly from North-America and Europe, but partly also from urban industrial pockets in the Southern hemisphere. The underlying visions which set of social forces brings about a change of this kind and scale differ. Incentives of a profit principle turned 'upside down' and elements of political regulation and public framework interference (taxation, municipal services) are both offered as influencing elements. This approach certainly grasps the mood of the general public rather well, who is not too open towards a culture of self-limitation, but may open up to the idea that it won't hurt too much to change for high quality goods and services produced with reduced materials and energy and an extended life span.
Are there trends or pulling factors in representative parliamentary democratic systems and societies with enabling power towards sustainable modes of production, consumption, distribution and lifestyles?
The last years saw a renewed debate about governing principles, including constitutional renewal, stimulated by the German unification process and the constitutional ideas put forward by democratic groups in Eastern Germany. A civic coalition (Verfassungs- kuratorium) organised a broadly based deliberation process in civic society (1990-1992) with intentions of innovation, both concerning goals and institutional means of democracy and constitutional goals as ecology and gender relations. In the wake of the mobilisation leading up to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, expectations had been rather high that there may be a chance to inscribe ecology and sustainability as basic constitutional values, the strongest possible commitment a parliamentary democracy is able to express. However, in the specific unification reality of drastic social transformation, change of the industrial power base, consumer values and aspirations, the social basis for such a far reaching project was not given. The Constitutional Reform Commission of the German Federal Parliament was only ready to include this idea in the weakest possible form: Narrowed down to 'protection of the environment', it was only retained as a goal of state politics subject to legal reservation depending on changing political majorities.
Since the mid-eighties, we have been seeing several waves of intense debate about legitimacy of rule and limitation of power, including mainstream thinkers of the political class as the former President of the Republic, Richard von Weizs"cker, and the former State Minister Hildegard Hamm-Brücher. Main issues were the role and functioning of political parties vis-à-vis the communication and deliberation process of civic society on one side and vis-à-vis the power of the executive level (government and administration) on the other. Oligarchic rule of political parties and the diminishing influence of MPs were major issues.
With the potential of freedom and autonomy given with the individualisation and plurality in society, we witness the de-composition of traditional social groups and their homogeneity. As a consequence, the social base of political parties is transformed, showing less cohesion and a growing cultural distance. In the discussion about the organising of democratic culture and governance the construct of "professional framework party" was introduced when analysing the changing nature of the Green Party (Raschke, 1993, p. 866). The identity of a 'professional framework party' is constituted by self-limitation, it is aware of the necessity of intermediary communication processes to bridge the gap between civic society and political process. Behind is the basic idea of the limitation of power by communication ("herrschaftskritische Grundidee", following Habermas). The role of political parties is then both to organise the political discourse and to mediate the self-organising civil society with state structures and other sectors of society.
The question is how to envisage and organise the self-expression of civic society and the intermediary process, and its role concerning change towards sustainability. The debate on communitarianism looks into the same questions from the view of social fabric and cohesion (compare Fechter, 1995). Hardly any effective mechanisms have been designed so far.
Major NGOs as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Pro Asylum, BUND (Friends of the Earth) fulfil partly the roles of intermediary agencies, seeking political influence without competing for decision making power. A specific German feature are the existence of political foundations who are reaching out to a broader social constituency than the party membership. Their activities include the classical examples of signalling and protest functions, indicating relevant problems of common public concern, offering positions and options, organising the public discourse and trying to make the voices of stake-holders heard. In this process, occasionally there have been re-discoveries of specific elements of citizens participation in some federal states as municipal citizens assemblies (a dormant feature of the Baden Württemberg municipal order) and local or state referenda (Bavaria, 1990 and 1995).
Key economic decisions (Gross-projekte) with their modes of planning and consultation process (declaratory judgements, right to object) are monitored and usually delayed, sometimes considerably (e.g. 25.000 objections against the new Munich airport in its almost thirty years of construction). There has been no effective analogy in civil society concerning the important deregulation decisions of the last years, touching social constitution and taxation (health system, unemployment benefits, the financing of German unification) and the production base of the former GDR.
These protests are predominantly non-violent (e.g. Gorleben in spring 1995, with a last wave of major mobilisation against the transport of nuclear waste), partly also violent, primarily against material goods (railway tracks, transportation lines). There are pockets of violent action against key decision makers who are held responsible for un-sustainable structural adjustment (e.g. the murder of Rohwedder, president of Treuhandanstalt, in charge of handling the former GDR State property).
After the 1991/1992 wave of arson attacks against homes of people, Bertelsmann, Daimler Benz and other big corporations initiated campaigns against violence out of a concern for their public imagery, and as a message to their multi-national work force. Given the heavy power position of TNCs in the hybrid web of divided sovereignty (ca. 400 world wide) and their push towards the prevailing mode of organising global governance, the question raises under which circumstances they would rather opt for deepening democracy than for anomy and non-mediated violence.
NGOs have legitimacy in the eyes of the younger generation (more than half of them are in favour), but only 1,5 % would consider joining this type of organisation. Political parties do not have legitimacy in their eyes, and only 1% are interested in joining. With the well known overall trend of an ageing population, our industrial societies become ageing societies, with the risk of slowing down innovation processes as the energy and impatient power of the young pushing for innovations both in civil society and the party system is more and more missing.
Here may be an additional reason for the renewed attractiveness of the Bürgergutachten approach (citizen expert opinion, Dienel, 1994) and likewise concepts from the 70ies. This is a consensus and proposal finding method in the planning stage of infrastructure and industrial projects, also applicable to other conflict situations. It does not require a stable organisational mould, but works with a professionally facilitated temporary constituency, chosen with a random method from the residents concerned. Although criticised for this from a democracy point of view, it is a major challenge to the current shape of civil society, as it takes up some elements of Held's deliberative aspects and has some potential for moving beyond territorial boundaries, maybe even time-boundaries.
V. Conclusions
Democracy and sustainability cannot be separated from each other, if one is ready to look beyond the mainstream notions of both. As in a Jigsaw Puzzle on the move, all components require new answers at the height of our times. True, this is a very complex task, a major mental process, in for headache. The media and technology debate is making a big effort to create a reign and reality of confusion. We are far from satisfying avenues but nevertheless find a solid tool box of ideas of democracy and innovative practise. And, let's not forget: Who would have imagined in 1815, the year of the Vienna congress, a directly elected European Parliament (by women and men alike !) being able to stop a continent wide life patent directive in 1995 ?
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"Sustainability - Discourses and Disputes"
Henri Acselrad
Sociologist, Rio de JaneiroIntroduction
Since the Brundtland Report (1987), but more intensively after UNCED 1992, the notion of sustainability occupied increasing space in the debate on development. On the one hand, within developmentalist discourse - put forward by multilateral agencies, technical consultants and development ideologues - there was concern for correcting the course, greening projects, and adjusting decision-making processes. With adjustments, those actors believe, the development proposal can be recovered, its autophagic dimensions overcome, its permanence ensured, its relevance sustained.
On the other hand, in the NGO field, in the midst of criticism of the limited content governments and official institutions have been assigning to so-called sustainable development, some regard sustainability as a new belief destined to replace the idea of progress, constitute a new "organizing principle of a people-centered development", and be able to "become the mobilizing vision of civil society and underlying principle guiding the transformation of societies' dominant institution" (People-Centered Forum, 1992).
However, there is prevalence of recurrent interrogative expressions, in which sustainability is viewed as a "an evolving principle", "an infinite concept", that "few know what it is", and "that requires a lot of additional rese arch". Manifestations of frustrated positivism - sustainable development would be an objective fact, although it cannot yet be aprehended. But how to define something that does not exist? That when realized will undoubtedly be a social construction, and as such may encompass different contents and practices that claim its name. This clarifies why distinct representations and values have been associated to the notion of sustainability - they are discourses disputing the allegedly most legitimate expression - insofar sustainability is a notion one can utilize to actualize different representations and ideas.
The alleged inaccuracy of the concept of sustainability suggests the absence of hegemony among the different discourses. Ecologists seem to be poorly positioned to dispute the discourse on this ground sown with the values of Fordist productivism and material progress. The sociopolitical view has been restricted to the NGOs' efforts, more specifically by prioritizing the equity discourse, particularly in the framework of international relations. However, the economic discourse has so far made better appropriation of this notion, even claiming its preexistence in Hicks' theory of capital and income.
Contrary to analytical concepts geared to explaining reality, the notion of sustainability is submitted to the logic of practices - it is linked to desired social results, to practical functions that the discourse intends to transform into objective reality. Such considerations reminds us of legitimization of practices and social actors. On the one hand, if sustainability is viewed as something good, desirable, unanimous, the prevailing definition will gain authority to separate, in its name, good practices from bad ones.
Therefore, a symbolical struggle is underway to decide who has the authority to speak in terms of sustainability. For this, it is necessary to constitute the adequate audience, a field of efficient interlocution where approval can be met. In this manner, one will be able to speak on behalf of (and to) those who want the survival of the planet, sustainable communities, cultural diversity, etc. However, the struggle over such representation expresses the dispute of different practices and social formations, claiming to be compatible with or bearers of sustainability.
Nevertheless, to ascertain that something is sustainable - be it a thing or social practice - it is necessary to compare attributes of two moments in time: between past and present, present and future. As the comparison past-present in the framework of the current developmental model well expresses what is deemed unsustainable, the comparison present-future is adopted. Therefore, sustainable practices are those allegedly compatible with the future quality postulated as desirable. This relationship between a known present and an unknown and desirable future places the notion of sustainability in the field that some refer to as "teleologic causality" - "which has as sufficient cause for a behavior an occurrence that has in its description the requirement that another one, called its end, happens" (C. Taylor, apud J. F. Costa, 1994). That is, the cause is defined by its end; the order of the sequence of occurrences is built-in in the preceding condition defined as cause. Today is sustainable that set of practices that are bearers of sustainability in the future. Resorting to this "teleologic causality" is particularly doubtful when it implies rebuilding the present in light of allegedly future requirements.
Historical experience has questionable examples of this political actualization of the future: "it is necessary to achieve economic growth in order to distribute", "stabilize the economy in order to grow later", "sacrifice the present to conquer the future", etc. Risks are even greater when one considers that "the efficacy of the discourse that intends to actualize what it enunciates during the very enunciation is proportional to the authority of whoever enunciates it" (Bourdieu, p. 116). That is, those in dominant positions in the social space are also in dominant positions in the field of production of representations and ideas. If state and business - hegemonic forces in the developmentist project - incorporate the critique of unsustainability of the developmental model, they also occupy a privileged position to provide the content to the very notion of sustainability.
However, this does not mean that the issue is settled once and for all. On the contrary, authority and legitimacy, decisive attributes for all those actors disputing the power to define what is sustainable, are also a function of the ways in which those actors elaborate their alternative discourses on the issue, and of the relative strength they accumulate in the field of ideas. In the following section, we will map out the main discursive matrices associated to the notion of sustainability in the debate on development.
1. Discursive Matrices
Sustainable practices and institutions are social fictions. However, they are not less real because of this. Their existence depends upon some proposition becoming hegemonic among alternative views, upon a belief in the "sustainability" contained in those alternative practices and institutions. Around which lines those beliefs are being built? What discourses are being elaborated and what logical linkages are being built? In the following paragraphs, we analyze some of the main discursive lines.
1. 1. Efficiency
The search for efficiency in the utilization of planet's resources is the central proposal of the sustainability discourse. Adopting a practical and utilitarian view, the logic of efficiency inserts mankind in cultural processes of adaptation between means and ends. Seeking to satisfy private interests, the dominant process is the economy of means to reach established ends. Efficient resource allocation would be the one respecting consumers' preferences adjusted for their individual paying capacity. Its institutional space is the competitive market where relative prices determined by supply and demand would prevail.
This matrix can shelter from cornucopian representatives - those technological optimists, who believe in the capacity of price system to induce clean technologies, or the action of an "intergenerational invisible hand" that would guarantee maximum fulfillment of current interests and would pass on a more productive world to future generations - to supporters of free market as a means to create resources to protect environment, and those who believe that correction of "market failures" and governmental "distortions" in the price system would guarantee global efficiency.
Assumptions of economic rationality having been established, free market would be the instrument for an efficient allocation of planetary resources. Internalization of externalities according to Pigouvean rates or reform of the tax systems would correct distortions causing environmental degradation - a dissociation between scarcity and price, benefit and remuneration, damage and cost. The goal of efficient allocation via tax reform (increasing taxes on resources use and waste production) is sometimes associated to subordinate purposes of equity, with the argument that less taxes on labor and capital would result in increased levels of employment and income. Efficiency can also be linked to a subordinate ethical discourse, which points to the self-destructive character of economic irrationality: microeconomic inefficiency would mean loss of competitiveness, but projected to the planet as a whole, it would irresponsibly compromise humankind's survival. However, the key motivation for sustainability in the framework of efficiency is actually the fight against wasting the material base of development, establishment of economic rationality in planetary scope, in sum, market sustainability as regulatory process for the welfare of individuals in society.
1. 2. Scale
Neo-Malthusians, ecological economists, technological pessimists, and all who conceive of a "full world economics" - an open subsystem of a closed ecosystem - associate sustainability to the establishment of quantitative limits to economic growth. For them, efficiency without sufficiency is not enough. When limits are mentioned, one is imploding the liberal promise of universal plenty through continuous growth of demand and a market in permanent expansion. Now, in addition to an optimum allocation of resources, it is also necessary to optimize the scale - the pressure of aggregated productive effort on the material base of development should be compatible with the planet's "carrying capacity". Only microeconomy takes into account optimum scale, corresponding to that point where corporate marginal costs equals marginal profits.
To clarify the limits of macroeconomic scale, it will be necessary to resort to noneconomic rationalities. Aggregated scales are not determined by prices, but by social decision reflecting environmental limits. In formal terms, reduction of global consumption can be attained by diminishing the level of per capita consumption of resources or by reducing the total population. For this, instruments presented are population control and "intelligent self- limitation" of individual levels of consumption - on the one hand, resorting to a neo-Hobbesian authority to quantitatively control production and population, on the other, culturally questioning social ends. However, while in corporations there are people who make the decisions related to microeconomic scales, there is no global actor capable of imposing limits to aggregated economic growth. Bretton Woods institutions function at the financial and monetary level, not at the level of global production scales.
Consideration of macroeconomic scales can also be subsumed in social and ethical issues. Limitation of global growth would bring forward issues related to international inequality of living and income levels, as well as differentiated interregional pressures on the planet's resources. Therefore, reduction of levels of economic growth in wealthy countries is prioritized vis a vis the right to development of less- developed countries. The need to arbitrate choices among objectives of scale, efficient allocation and distribution evokes ethical criteria about the pattern of social relations. Contrary to dominant economic thought, ethical choices cannot be reduced to the level of willingness to pay adjusted for individual incomes (H. Daly, 1992). Production of sustainability is therefore subordinately linked to a clear expression of ethical of standards.
1. 3. Equity
For some, emphasis on the needs of the poor or the assertion that they are the main victims of environmental degradation justify establishing equity as the principle for sustainability. However, logical articulation of such a discourse results from the affirmation of analytical inseparability between justice and ecology. The basic cause of environmental degradation would be the same of social inequity. Issues of scale and efficiency would be used in the discourse of "a single world". Nevertheless, despite being environmentally interconnected, the world is socially fragmented. For the many worlds in which the planet is subdivided by social inequalities among classes and regions, the issue of aggregated pressure on environmental resources is crisscrossed by the themes of distribution inequality, financial dependence, and inequalities in control of trade mechanisms and technological flows. Such mechanisms result from unequal relationship of economic forces and from policies that regulate access of social classes and countries to development material base. They derive from this inequality and also provide constant feedback to it.
However, to assign to equity the status of autonomy instead of subordination in relation to the scale of growth (the problem of distribution comes up because of the need to limit growth), conflicting social relations are made explicit in which market logic simultaneously destroys Nature's reproductive base and that of social groups depending on it. Sustainability would then derive from submission of the market tolaws controlling natural yields, upon which depend, in turn, peoples' subsistence economy (Shiva, 1992).
Simultaneously, discourses with high level of political realism enunciate utilitarian purposes to obtain negotiated compensation in order to justify that, without global justice and co- participation in prosperity, it will be impossible to involve poor countries in the joint management of global environment (the "global commons"). Here, equity is just an instrument. Preservation of natural resources that future populations would benefit from is also presented as a process of intergenerational justice. Such formulation cannot be seen as legitimate if not presented in subordination to the current and readily perceived issue of intragenerational injustices.
Finally, clearly ethnocentric arguments, according to which poverty is simultaneously cause and consequence of environmental degradation, contribute to actions implicitly situated in the field of equity - combating poverty or "poverty alleviation" - but do not take equity as their discursive matrix.
1. 4. Self-sufficiency
Simultaneous to the equity discourse, there emerge proposals for preserving and building economic self-sufficiency in communities of producers threatened by homogenizing diffusion of mercantile and monetary relations. Communities would be sustainable because they have developed traditional relationships with the natural world, on which they depend for their sustainable livelihoods. All action to protect domestic units - characteristic of traditional societies situated in frontier regions of expanding capitalist relations - from threats of economic or cultural instability would contribute toward sustainability.
Another line of the discourse of self-sufficiency goes against the goals of free market. Increasing economic globalization, through expanding trade deregulation, would tend to stimulate spurious competitive mechanisms - low wages and overexploitation of the environment. Otherwise, erosion of national borders would tend to weaken national states, the potential strategical actors for executing domestic environmental policies and implementing international agreements for the protection of global ecology (Daly, 1994).
1. 5. Ethic
Sustainability is also articulated as a discourse of Ethics, which elaborates human conduct in the face of values of good and evil. Intentions of actions which are geared to a biophysically common material base interconnecting space, humankind and time are particularly stressed. It is equally acknowledged that such actions and the judgments applied to them are carried out under conditions of substantial juridical, economic, and political inequalities of access to the environmental space by the different social agents. Once economic concerns about means are abandoned, issues related to socially desirable ends are brought forward. The possibility of alternative ends limits the desirability of ever-increasing material production as the ultimate end.
The ethic of rational limitation of desires leads, therefore, to introducing, at the source of choice, wisdom founded on prudence. On the other hand, interactions between the material base and conditions of livelihood are emphasized. "There is no wealth which is not life" - as associated by Ruskin. "Maximum quantity of life requires minimum rate of exhaustion of natural resources", adds Georgescu-Roegan to justify the proposals for self-limitation (Ruskin and Georgescu-Roegan apud Daly, 1984). However, ethical concerns particularly come forward because of the magnitude of potential consequences in advanced industrial systems of the technical risks associated to the use of nuclear energy and manipulation of genetic materials with new biotechnologies. Although frequently subordinated to the discourses of equity and responsible limitation of growth, the ethical proposal associates to sustainability an updated discourse on moral duties and obligations related to conditions of life existence.
1.6. Gender
In the recent trajectory of organized civil society, women's movements have occupied a privileged position for establishing international linkages and producing knowledge, including the debate on sustainability.
[...]
Reflecting on development from the starting point of the gender issue has already a certain history. Recently, it can be noted an expansion of that reflection, from a WID (women in development) approach to a WED (women and environment and alternatives to development) one. According to Wendy Harcourt (Harcourt, 1994), "the primary argument of the WID position is that current development policies fail to recognize gender relations despite the fundamental roles women play in maintaining the household in informal, rural and even market economies and in their management of natural recourses. WED, instead, mounts a profound critique on the whole development process" (Harcourt, 1994a, p. 3).
The reflection on gender, therefore, is inserted in a broader framework of critique of Western developmental model. In this context, incorporation of ecological debate by feminist thought is a two-way process: on the one hand, it approaches the ecological debate from the gender perspective; and on the other, utilizes the ecological critique of the developmental model. The result is a multiple understanding of the current crisis. "Development theory and practice founded on Western biases and assumptions", continues Harcourt, "excludes both women and nature from its understanding of development and, in so doing, has contributed to the current economic and ecological crisis. "
Identification of common points between the gender and ecological reflections also result from an exchange of actors: not only there are women elaborating the ecological thought, but also ecologists in the women's movements.
Those common points do not mean identical approaches. There is a broad range of approaches to the issue of development within both groups.
[...]
It is important to emphasize the plurality of feminist visions within the gender reflection. There are currents adopting an "essentialist" feminism, identifying women as personifications of Nature. According to this eco-feminist group, the "very essence of development is contaminated by the germ of male violence. This violence would affect both environment and women" (Sen, 1994). Others have a mystic notion of Nature, or adopt the premises of Western science, not to absolutize them, but in an effort to identify the positions in debate and the origins of their own reflection.
All currents have in common the fact that they consider the gender dimension in ecological debate to be a basic element for the concepts of sustainability and equity, and a permanent praxis to design a joint agenda, contributing to transform society and the women's condition. Although a lot was produced on the relationship woman/nature, this issue is no longer central to the reflection on gender and environment. Accepting the plurality of values, it is also acknowledged that this relationship varies in different cultural, religious or ideological contexts. In the current debate, "the question is no longer what is the `correct' position on the woman/nature relation, but rather how we situate ourselves as women and agents committed to fundamental change of the Western development model within the present crisis and how our actions and struggles can be most effective" (Huesler, apud Harcourt, 1994).
[...]
2. New Institutionalities
Taking into account the main discourses on sustainability, we now ask: to what extent they are leading to institutional change? Is it possible to identify any transformation in society's conditions of reproduction built into the sustainability discourses, particularly in dominant discourses?
2. 1. Environment as Capital
The broad spectrum of approaches to sustainability is a symptom of what some consider to be a problem of legitimacy in environmental policies. Processes of representation of the environment as a common asset for which social actors elaborate general principles and forms of coordination socially acceptable are underway (Godard, 1990). However, the logic that led to conceiving the idea of sustainability was, undoubtedly, the logic of the economic discourse. Even in its strictly ecological conception, the idea results from an economic view of natural processes. We are dealing with a representation of productivity of the "economy of nature", capacity of soils, forests and fish stocks to yield surplus, recover from stress, and avoid the collapse of its productive flow (Worster, undated).
This discourse can be associated to a well-known line of interaction between social and ecological sciences, characterized by a move to culturalize nature and naturalize culture. Since Hobbes placed the bourgeois society of his days in the state of Nature, conceived as an image of the market system, nature was used to explain human social order and vice versa, in unending reciprocal exchange between social Darwinism and natural capitalism (Sahlins, 1990). Natural selection and the model of competition were thus projected on the natural order since their inception in the historical social order of modern capitalism. Therefore, historical human societies become "natural" ones and "laws of nature" are based on conceptions of humankind's social action. However, sustainability of the economy of nature does not reproduce the images of any economy, but of a specific one - an economy that produces surplus; more specifically one that intends to view nature as one of the forms of capital.
[...]
In the field of NGOs, there are also echoes of this expanded reproduction of the concept of capital. Earlier, capital only assumed the form of merchandise, money, and production goods. Now, it is accepted that it provides meaning to every element on the planet. Lack of capital, not capitalism, is one of the causes of the environmental crisis. Social processes that produce actual or symbolic capital are deemed legitimate. Nature, knowledge, society are capitalized. Everything that deserves to be valued and conserved is capital. That is, capital is the paradigm of global sustainability.
Ecological economists affirm that natural capital is the soil and atmosphere, vegetal and animal biomass, etc., which taken as a whole are the basis of all ecosystems. This stock of natural capital uses primary inputs (solar energy) to produce ecosystem services and flows of physical natural resources (Constanza, 1991).
For El Serafy, capital is a stock of real goods, capable of producing more goods in the future, and nature, by extension, is capital as source of raw material and receiver of waste from economic activity (El Serafy, 1991). Constanza provides an example: natural capital is fish stocks, uncut forests, underground oil reserves, atmospheric capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, etc. In sum, economists have been awakened to a new meaning of economic time. Thinking on development has been immersed in a tragic linear time, in which "everything that happens compromises future, and what terminates usurps eternity" (Goldsmith apud Vernant, 1990).
That is, it is acknowledged that development duration depends upon duration of the objects required by development - not only the material configuration of objects, but also its social one. They must last as capital, elements in the growing production of value. Reduction of capital stock over time, "deaccumulation" of capital in general, is negation of capitalism itself. However, as noted by ecological economists, an optical illusion has so far hindered capitalists from perceiving, when accounting for their capital, that what they earned in profits, they partially lost in "natural capital". Daly urges corporations and multilateral funding agencies to stop entering in their accounting consumption of natural capital as profit (Daly, 1994). Resorting to a representation of nature as capital translates the so-called "intergenerational equity" problem into a fictitious issue of loss of capital for individual capitalists, of tendency to have their respective competitive power reduced in a temporalized market. In this fashion, they try to motivate capitalists to assume "deaccumula- tion" of capital in general in the long term, as an individual loss of capital and to change their accounting procedures to their own advantage. Therefore, general "deaccumulation" of capital is travestied into a problem of distributive justice between generations. However, to actually face it, one turns to the interests of individual capitalists. To guarantee equipotence for capital in general over time, there is an effort to convince capitalists to adjust their economic calculations in the name of preserving their effective capital - the sum of "natural" plus "artificial" capital.
Historically, capitalism has tended to accelerate the speed of capital circulation, and "abolish space with time". Nowadays, it is realized that elements of space pose limits to time compression. Capital time would be out of whack. In those cases, ecological economists tell us that capital time must bend in the face of space; or, as geographers would have it, post-modernist perspectives emerge to prioritize "spatialization" of time, observing local determinations, regional resistances, "spatialized" alterities (Harvey, 1992).
Perception of the future was a basic element in building the economic psychology of capitalism. At the inception of this economic system, substantial pedagogical effort developed capitalist rationality grounded in the spirit of calculation and forecasting. In order to guarantee the ability to calculate and forecast, a determined concept of time and particularly of future was disseminated. Weber called this a "cosmos", made up of techniques of remuneration and commercialization, accounting methods, ways of calculating and organizing the economy. Rationalization of the economic conduct assumes that everything is organized in relation to an imaginary and absent point (Bourdieu, 1979).
Such a construction of future was totally absent in precapitalist economies. In those, one only observes a spirit of providence, saving part of the direct goods for future consumption. However, this future is within the current perception of the known material conditions of livelihood that constitute tradition - saved goods will be directly used through consumption. On the contrary, capitalist future implies accumulation of indirect goods, which may contribute to future production of direct goods. Precapitalist providence, therefore, is based on inherited conduct models, while capitalist forecasting reflects desire for a projected future (Bourdieu, 1979). Now, what ecological economists have been stressing is that rationality based on capitalist forecasting and calculation was not fully actualized. To this extent, they point to areas in which capitalist accounting has proven to be improvident - that is, natural capital. It is as if they were trying to demonstrate the presence of precapitalis residues in the modes of capitalist management of nature, insofar as in those modes the present day is lived with total disregard for the next one. To make things worse, this unpredictability not only occurs in the framework of simple reproduction of noncapitalist economies - with constant production capacity - but also in expanded capital reproduction, that is, with systematic expansion of production capacities, resulting in increasing pressures on resources.
In the perspective here proposed, consideration of the environment as capital integrates an effort to update Weber's capitalist "cosmos", the extension of rationality, predictability, and spirit of calculation of capitalism to new spaces. The central proposal of the discourse of ecological economists opens up a dialogue with the owners of capital, pointing to the dissemination of a new subjectivity, that will make those owners respect nature's rhythms in the name of their private interests.
2. 2. Internalization of environmental costs
The prevailing discourse on environmental policy, from academic manuals to documents of multilateral funding agencies, insists on the relevancy and superiority of so-called market instruments for combating environmental degradation. Based on neoclassical economic matrix, environmental technicians and planners organize their action proposals around a central concept - the so-called "internalization of environmental costs". This central concept is the inspiration for a set of policy instruments, from introduction of levies and taxes to correct market "dysfunctions" in regulating the environment to monetary evaluations of environmental impact and green reforms of fiscal systems.
Among NGOs, the mention of "internalization" has been recurrent, despite its rhetorical character, aimed above all at exposing the shortcomings of the prevailing development model in taking into account the "real costs" of economic growth. More recently, however, confronted by the challenge to propose alternative measures to shape a new policy framework, a number of NGOs have resorted to the notion of "internalization of costs", as a concrete tool capable of reorienting the developmental process towards socially and environmentally benign patterns.
This shift, intended to transform an element of denunciation into a public policy instrument, requires more detailed reflection. It's indispensable to work at the conceptual level trying to better establish the aim of the debate and to prioritize building joint strategies.
We have examined some critical approaches to the internalization of costs. Kapp states that "any attempt to adjust the concept of social cost to incorporate it into existing formal economic theory can only have the effect of narrowing, and therefore, neutralizing the concept's critical implications, depriving it of its capacity to call attention to the collateral effects of productive activity" (Kapp, 1970).
Martin O'Connor, suggests that "the main result of the process of capitalizing and assigning a price to nature is the valuation of natural items as means for capital accumulation. Therefore, its incorporation into the exchange value sphere occurs within capitalism as the prevailing social form" (M. O'Connor, 1992).
Both Kapp and O'Connor situate their critiques at the ideological level, the former questioning the bases of the neoclassic economic theory, and the latter trying to assert that the environmental degradation is intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. However, we cannot find in them the political mediation that could turn these critiques into pathways for new practices. Therefore, in these approaches the possibilities of social movements resisting the prevailing pattern of nature appropriation are obfuscated.
On the other hand, J. Martinez-Alier believes that, because they are weaker in the market, the natural resources belonging to the poor will be undervalued in the hypothetical monetary valuation in a context of an ecologically expanded market (J. M. Alier, 1993). Therefore, Alier's concerns are at the political level, but outlining pragmatic reasons which also do not point towards alternative pathways. One would have to ask, in order to consider the "internalization of costs" a relevant strategy, would it be enough for the poor to sell their resources at "higher prices"? It makes sense to improve the terms of exchange, for resources that are already in the sphere of merchandises, to benefit social groups or communities who control them, provided the political configuration of the markets is clear. But would not the strategical issue be the distribution of the control over natural resources between market and non- market? That is, would not be at stake the criteria to base the social mode of appropriation of the natural environment?
The neoclassical paradigm deals with the relationship between people and things - the "efficient allocation of resources". In this theoretical framework, "externality - social relations among people established through things - is considered as an extra-economic phenomenon which should be incorporated into economic paradigm. Therefore, "internalizing" is a way of dealing with social relations among people as if it were a relationship between people and things - travestying an issue of power into a question of efficient allocation. As A. Lerner asserts, "this solution would consist of transforming conflict - a political issue - into an economic transaction; and an economic transaction is a resolved political problem" (Lerner, 1972). In the field of social appropriation of the environment, there is much to be done in order to reveal the nature of the political conflicts at stake before considering them resolved through their insertion in the economic sphere.
In the conceptions that intend to reach a "right price" for commodities through the "internalization of costs", we find three associated theoretical traditions: the classical notion that costs ("natural values") determine prices; the neoclassical idea that market prices promote an efficient allocation of resources; and elements of the medieval theory of a "fair price". The notion of "right price" would extend to the environmental domain the scholastic idea of promoting justice via the price system.
Starting from the Aristotelian notion of "commutative justice", Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that things exchanged should have the same value - based on the "fair price" - otherwise, one of the parties would lose out. Born as a reaction to the interference of the market in the traditional political society, this concept of economic justice was abandoned in the XVII-XVIII centuries, as incompatible with market determination of values (MacPherson, 1991).
On the other hand, Hobbes' notion of economic justice has led to the adherence to contracts of purchase, sales, rent, loan, etc. - economic relationships which fall beyond any intentional action based on ethical criteria. For Hobbes, the "fair" value was that one agreed upon by the contracting parties (Hobbes apud MacPherson, 1991) Therefore, the market was running over the ethical criteria of scholastic economic justice and prices started to express the relationship of forces among the different actors in the market - sellers and buyers, creditors and debtors.
In the XIX century, the Ricardian socialists (Thompson, Hogdskin) believed that the value of wages was lower than actual "labor value". Therefore, they would denounce the existence of a fraud to be corrected by a fair payment ("integral") of the work performed by wage earners. Marx, separating the concept of labor from labor power, sought to deny any fraud, suggesting that wages were paid according the value of labor power (that is, according to what the workers "cost" and not according to their production). He demonstrated, in the words of Joan Robinson, that the "system was not unfair within its own rules" (Robinson, 1979). Therefore, simple wage increases, although relevant, would not eliminate the workers' exploitation.
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