Whither Sustainable Development?

INTRODUCTION Whither Sustainable Development? It has now been almost 10 years since the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) published Our Common Future, the report that popularized the concept of sustainable development. The concept did notoriginate with the work ofthe Brundtland Commission. In 1980 the World Conservation Strategy, commissioned by the United Nations EnvironmentProgram, argued eloquently for policies to ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems, and for an approach to managing living resources that emphasizes caution in dealing with uncertainty about the long-term impacts of human activity on the environment.' The subsequent career of sustainable development has been intriguing. In 1985, while the Brundtland Commission was still conducting its ambitious worldwide schedule of hearings, excitement was widespread about the emergence of a conceptual framework that integrated ecological concerns with a critique of exploitative political and economic relationships, particularly at the international level. Over the ensuing years the aspirations attached to the concept of sustainable development became more modest, with the increased realization that it presented a genuinely profound challenge to existing economic development and resource management practices and their beneficiaries. By 1996, the malleable nature ofthe conceptand the divergent ways in which it had been defined and interpreted led one Canadian scholar to suggest that since the idea of sustainable development "was never very clear to begin with" and is "always being reformulated to suit particular purposes," a temporary moratorium on its use might be in order.2 However, the perceived desirability of such reformulations can also be viewed as reflecting the power ofthe concept and subversive nature of the questions it can generate when invoked in the political realm. Hence the focus of this issue not on theory but on Canadian case studies in the real world ofsustainable development. The articles collected here describe various responses to those questions. One response is simple denial, as described in Raymond Rogers's article on federal policy toward the northern Atlantic fishery. Denial in this case led, as it often does, to disaster: unemployment and a precarious and disheartening economic future for some 40,000 people; social devastation for communities economically reliant on the fishery. Another response is the use ofeconomic power, wielded by means ofthe legal system, to silence critics ofexisting practices when these voices become too persistent. Joan Sherman and her colleagues describe a relatively mild example of this response, and Chris Tollefson outlines a much more aggressive variant: the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). It Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 31, No. 1 (Pri11temps 1996 Spring) 3 is important to note that in all these cases, the response to critics was motivated by a desire to protect existing distributions of wealth and power or existing political arrangements. A less confrontational stance involves assimilating the critical dimensions of sustainable development into existing discourses. This is what happens when resource managers overly reliant on neoclassical economics as a description ofthe world argue that if society would only assign property rights reliably and consistently , many problems ofresource overconsumption and environmental degradation (the so-called negative externalities) will sort themselves out. There is a great deal of value in this argument, particularly in the context of the private appropriation of public resources such as rangelands and mineral reserves, a conspicuous feature ofresource managementin the United States. At the same time, at least by implication the work ofAnders Sandberg and Peter Clancy warns us about being too sanguine on this point. Market-oriented approaches to sustainability also merit caution to the extent that they legitimize a broader political agenda of imposing the market and its meanings on almost every area ofsocial and economic life, leaving unasked (and increasingly unaskable) the question ofwhether some decisions about how to allocate a society's resources and efforts simply should not be made on the basis of access to purchasing power. Assimilation has the effect ofdisguising value conflicts, or at least ofdeferring them. The response described by Jeremy Rayner in his comparative study of forest management in British Columbia and the U.S. Pacific Northwest recognizes those conflicts. Despite the undeniable institutional accomplishments he outlines, this approach is perhaps best described as uneasy accommodation - uneasy not only because the short...