Conflict and Sustainability in a Changing Environment: Through the Eyes of Communities
208
Conflict and Sustainability in a Changing Environment: Through the Eyes of Communities
208eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783086092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2017 |
| Series: | Strategies for Sustainable Development Series , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Elena P. Bastidas, associate professor at the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Nova Southeastern University, USA, is a development practitioner in conflict analysis and resolution in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Read an Excerpt
Conflict and Sustainability in a Changing Environment
Through the Eyes of Communities
By Gwendolyn Smith, Elena P. Bastidas
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2017 Gwendolyn Smith and Elena P. BastidasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-609-2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: LOCAL COMMUNITIES AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The concept of sustainable development has been debated for decades now. Although the definition of development has been a major area of controversy, certain characteristics were evident early on. After World War II, when the world was struggling with extreme poverty, food scarcity and chronic diseases, development initiatives were commonly defined in terms of socioeconomic structural transformation in pursuit of economic growth, and the objective was to create improved conditions for people existing in a precarious state and to provide better health care, education and job opportunities. This typical model of development was well accepted during the mid- to late 1940s because people were looking for a way to move out of the deplorable conditions in which they existed. The promise was Émile Durkheim's concept of a scenically modern, technologically advanced society (Ritzer 2008). In this sense, development implies a clean transformation from a starting point, a state that is not preferred, to an end point or a desired state. The 1940s change process was accompanied by the establishment of the now leading development agencies such as the World Bank, United Nations Development Program and many others (Hulse 2007). Such multilateral institutions developed a variety of global programs and worked intensely with governments to implement them at the national and local levels.
By 1972, the concept of sustainability was formally introduced, as it pertained to development at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden. The question of maintaining sustainability in the wider context of economic growth and development was being contested: how can the rate of economic growth be maintained with earth's finite resources? Although the discussion commenced, however, it didn't gain momentum for the course to change. The development strategies employed at that time continued until the well-known environmental conventions were adopted by the world's nations in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The undivided motivation for this agreement was the massive pollution coming from factories that contaminated water sources and soils — yes, ironically, the same factories that had provided advancement in jobs and income after World War II. The pollution was soon perceived as an invisible killer surrounding and affecting everyone. Yet instead of tackling the source of the problem, that of growing industrialization and human consumption, the world decided to draw a new portrait of sustainable development.
The most common definition of sustainable development is the one coined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Brundtland1987, 41). In the general sense, sustainable development is a process of progressing toward a combination of economic, social and environmental goals that at the same time seeks to eliminate poverty, strengthens local governance and protects the environment from overuse of resources by humans.
The new global goal was to take good care of our environment. The Rio conventions were the first essential step toward lessening the use of fossil fuels and the corresponding global warming (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), toward protecting our ecosystems that provide us with food and many other goods and services (United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) and toward preventing massive deforestation and alterations of landscapes (United Nations Convention on Combat Desertification). After this time, sustainable development was generally understood to have three dimensions. The first two, social and economic, were inherited from the post–World War II era, while the third dimension — environment — was a new reality. The three dimensions made up the new desired state: economic and social advancement without the overexploitation of resources that would cause future environmental problems.
So where do we stand with sustainable development in current times? To answer this question, I try to identify the change process, and how people are proceeding from the so-called undesired state into the desired state. Compared to the situation in the 1940s, more than 80 percent of the world's estimated seven billion people possess a certain comfort level by living on more than $10 a day and, thus, there is a lack of a specific or well-defined, confined state from which people want to escape (Rahim et al. 2014).
An essential question is to understand what the desired state has become. Sovereign countries seem to be in a race to expand the economy as fast as possible so they can keep up with the swiftly growing demand of citizens for energy, jobs, health care, education and, let us not forget, luxury. The majority of the world's citizens wish to encourage the use of technology not only to achieve significant wealth but also to easily solve environmental problems. Yet these advanced technological solutions, such as wind and solar power generators, only seem to address environmental problems for the short term in times of growing human consumption patterns (Ife 2013). For now, such technologies are just a quick fix and dubiously contribute to global sustainability, mainly because the root cause of excessive human consumption remains unaddressed.
Today, people also tend to feel less accountable for global development. They are more and more comfortable in delegating their human and environmental responsibility to their respective governments and locally operating development organizations. And these bodies, in turn, appear increasingly to hand over their tasks to global forums and networks (Habermas n.d.). What makes the issue much more complicated is that dialogues on a global level have become quite inflexible so that they no longer deliver the expected results. In the negotiations on climate change, for example, the participating countries deliberated six more years, following the meeting held in Copenhagen in 2009, to approve an agreement on greenhouse gas pollution in Paris (Smith 2010b).
Putting sustainable development into a so-called paradigm of economic growth also led to a change in its definition. This means that the formerly agreed-upon understanding of sustainable development has scattered into different fields and disciplines. Novel and rising concepts such as "sustainable mining" have suddenly emerged. This type of mining employs practices to reduce the use of pollutants, reduce water and energy consumption and minimize land change and waste generation (Fraser Institute 2012). It means reducing the environmental impact, while extractive mining is known as being a priori one of the most devastating practices to the environment. Another example is the concept of climate-compatible development, which means a type of "development that minimises the harm caused by climate impacts, while maximising the many human development opportunities presented by a low emissions, more resilient, future" (Mitchell and Maxwell 2010, 1). The designers of this concept apparently made, hopefully subconsciously, the environmental goal subordinate to the economic goal.
Thus, as demonstrated here, it is very difficult to understand what sustainable development means today. It seems to be operating on two distinct levels. On the global level, there are intense negotiations over global policies for mitigating all sorts of pressing economic, social and environmental problems. Here governments are, somewhat paternalistically, deciding what sustainable development should include and how it should be implemented by all the nations in the world. The second level of sustainable development operates locally and is more directed toward the one billion poor people living on less than $1 a day (Rahim et al. 2014). It aims to structurally align these less fortunate people with the system created and supported by global policies. But this goal may be far-fetched. Pessimists say that greater social and economic inequality is now seen as compared to 20 years ago, while optimists observe a gradual but steady improvement in poverty levels (Rahim et al. 2014). Although there is no explicit consensus on the causes and magnitude of inequality, there are still many people without food, water, housing and sufficient health care in this world. And the environmental problems have notably expanded, especially global warming, which is now the biggest threat to life on earth.
It is not surprising that there has been a strong and urgent call for new approaches to sustainable development since the Rio+20 world conference held in 2012. The call comes from indigenous peoples who are seeking development opportunities at the local level. These groups, currently living in 22 percent of the global land area, successfully protect more than 80 percent of the world's plants and animals (Nakashima et al. 2012). They have noticed an immense intensification of resource use leading to overexploitation of the world's ecosystems, and are worried that this will cause problems with sustaining life on earth (see the Kari-Oca2 Declaration, United Nations 2011).
Indigenous peoples argue for a more holistic approach to development. Instead of implementing a development process from the modern economic perspective, they propose using more cultural-appropriate methodologies that have the right values and ethics to take care of the environment (Tebtebba 2012). These distinguished peoples promote a development model that goes hand in hand with the conservation of nature and its resources. With this ambitious model of "development with conservation," they foresee a more organic practice of social change characterized by a slow process along a broad set of social structures in society.
Indigenous peoples have often been thought of as natural conservationists because they seem to protect the forest more effectively than any other group in the world. A tight connection with nature is generally perceived by indigenous peoples as a part of their existence, and animals, plants and other elements in the system are seen as equals (Pierotti 2011). Each indigenous group has a traditional knowledge system, some more extensive than others, which allows them to survive in the forest and exist independently from mainstream society. Their all-embracing knowledge system is direct evidence of hundreds of years of interaction with the environment, amid influences coming from modern cultures.
There also is evidence that indigenous groups have substantially destroyed the environment they once inhabited. Because each group faces challenges specific to its home environment, these groups must make livelihood choices by constantly trading off between different needs (Berkes 2008). An indigenous group that has to choose between income-earning jobs and volunteer conservation programs will likely choose the first option. Even though conservation is an intrinsic part of the indigenous life script, it will not provide the money necessary for buying popular goods such as clothes, toiletries and electronics. It is thus true that, with increasing acculturation and the introduction of technology and markets, indigenous peoples are every so often regarded as having become less harmonious with nature.
Practitioners are still learning how to align the conservation interests of indigenous peoples with development. The way indigenous peoples operate conflicts with the heavily structured cause-and-effect analysis promoted in standard development efforts. Even up until today, practitioners witness sustainable development projects that seem to lack in optimally recognizing the needs and rights of these communities. Evidence comes from projects that undermined their human rights and livelihoods through displacement and the denial of access to valuable resources (Smith 2010a). Disappointing outcomes of projects ultimately pushed some practitioners to further examine the lifestyle and the needs of indigenous communities, and so they adopted a new approach known as community-based conservation.
Community-based conservation is a strategy that became popular in the 1990s. It seeks to achieve two things simultaneously: the protection of biodiversity and the improvement of the livelihoods of indigenous communities. Throughout the years, community-based conservation has run into difficulties in the actual implementation of projects. One widely used argument is that development organizations are unwilling to share power and authority with the local community, which, in turn, results in communities with hardly any responsibilities and little accountability (Berkes 2004). The other argument is that the primary goals of development and conservation are very difficult to link at the local level because people living in nature will always have a choice between protecting the environment and deliberately using it for their livelihood. This healthy tension has hindered community-based conservation from ever taking off as a large-scale conservation or development approach.
Conservationists went one step further by trying to create mechanisms in which indigenous peoples would help in the management and decision making of conservation areas. This approach is called comanagement (De Beer 2013). The principal objective of comanagement is to have indigenous peoples share management responsibility and be involved in a continuous process of negotiation over a resource targeted for protection (Armitage et al. 2007). In fact, in working with indigenous peoples, comanagement projects tend to be more successful than community-based conservation.
Comanagement projects usually entail a knowledge partnership where indigenous peoples and a government reach an arrangement for joint decision making regarding a natural resource (Berkes 2009). These projects typically build on the indigenous knowledge system and then skillfully bridge some useful parts with Western concepts to support a future protection effort. Although the projects envisage power sharing, they do not necessarily ensure that indigenous peoples will share power equally with the other partners. Sometimes comanagement arrangements can become very bureaucratic and then jeopardize the equity and fair distribution of assets, and the partners with more power suppress the less powerful (Armitage et al. 2007).
Views of Sustainable Development
From the view of the development organization
Lining up indigenous communities with development initiatives still seems a tricky task today. In this section I review the main reasons why projects may not be as successful as expected. A pragmatic review starts by looking at the perspective of the organization that has initiated and generated development, such as governments, aid institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These institutions often believe that when communities share their local knowledge, they potentially have a greater stake in and better ownership over the project (Mansuri and Roa 2004). The underlying assumption is that increased participation facilitates the success of a project (Corbera et al. 2007; Walker 2011).
A genuine discussion on participation started when disenfranchised populations began advocating strongly for equity in development projects in the 1970s. Participation was then understood as "telling groups what is going to happen" (Erni 2011, 18). Although some organizations still adhere to these paternalistic practices (Box 1.1), today the concept of collaboration with local communities has evolved into a much more inclusive process. The call for improving participation came from Robert Chambers (1983), a leading scholar on participation from the development field. Chambers writes that development organizations use power to impose their reality on others by using "top-down, north-south, centre-outwards patterns of administration and control give personal and financial reasons for conforming to professional and bureaucratic norms, and imposing these on others. This gives rise to a spectrum of distortion" (1997, 85). Chambers earnestly argues for communication that is visual and group oriented and discusses issues based on comparison rather than measurement. His valuable work has led to a movement for local communities to have an acknowledged stake in the planning (not design) and implementation of projects.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conflict and Sustainability in a Changing Environment by Gwendolyn Smith, Elena P. Bastidas. Copyright © 2017 Gwendolyn Smith and Elena P. Bastidas. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
1. Introduction: Local Communities and Sustainable Development,
Views of Sustainable Development,
Communities under New Pressure,
Contents of the Book,
2. Researching Views in Community Development,
Researching Community Views: Existing Frameworks,
Researching Views through Conflict-Resolution Frameworks,
3. New Framework for Researching Views in Community Development,
Construction of a Community View,
The Life Story: Values, Meanings and Sustainable Decisions,
The VIEW Framework,
4. Social Polygraphy: An Approach to Obtaining Information through Mutual Learning,
What Is Social Polygraphy?,
Theoretical, Conceptual and Methodological Basis of Social Polygraphy,
The "How-to" of Social Polygraphy,
Limitations of the Social Polygraphy Approach,
Alternative Forms of Communication and Mutual Learning,
5. Exploring the Underlying Values,
The Trio Indigenous People,
Values Related to the Collective,
Values Related to Social Behavior,
Values Related to the Environment,
Values Related to Development,
Applying the VIEW Framework,
6. Making Sense of the World,
The Trios' Interests,
The Rules for Survival,
The Strategies for Adaptation,
The Real Attitude,
Applying the VIEW Framework,
7. Sustainable Decisions,
Conflicting Views,
Decision Making under Uncertainty,
Applying the VIEW Framework,
8. Working with Community Views,
Promoting Sustainability under Uncertainty,
Bridging Differences in Views,
Principles for Researchers and Practitioners,
A Message for Policy Makers,
References,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
"“This accessible volume offers practical tools to help outsiders who work with indigenous communities to understand how these people’s history, values and aspirations for the future shape their view of climate change, and illustrates how conflict management approaches can engage indigenous and scientific knowledge to address climate change challenges.”
—Marianne Schmink, Professor Emerita and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, University of Florida, USA "
“It has been quite some time since I read a book that so easily integrated the art and science of development work into a new and coherent methodology and framework. Smith and Bastidas do what few have managed to do––that is, to jump the proverbial fence and examine the views and values of an indigenous group of people and make that the starting point of a persuasive, healthy and successful development project.”
—Brian Polkinghorn, Distinguished Professor, Department of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution, and Executive Director, Bosserman Center for Conflict Resolution, Salisbury University, USA