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Scott, William, and Gough, Stephen. (2003). Sustainable Development and Learning: Framing the Issues. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Pp. xviii + 173
ISBN 0-415-27648-9

Reviewed by Mitiku Adisu
Peabody College of Vanderbilt University

September 23, 2005

Twenty years ago "sustainable development" was a newly-minted notion. Unlike theorists of modernization and economic growth, the proponents of sustainable development promised that growth and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive and that one can have the cake and eat it too. Therein lay the charm—and the risk. The risk is in overlooking the fact that humans had, from time immemorial, a sense of the benefits of coexisting with the natural world and with each other (Chapter 5). The charm is in that the new term engendered great optimism and created space for multiplicity of voices. Twenty years later, however, the promise remains as ambiguous and elusive as ever. Today, the respectability of the phrase is being contested by emerging definitions and by variant terms (p.12). Then as now, the focus of such inventiveness was decidedly to create awareness and improve the quality of life in a world of disparities and limited resources. Unfortunately, the minting of new phrases also favored those better disposed to set the global agenda.

Not wasting collective wisdom

Scott and Gough readily admit that their project is built on the best available research in development practice and theory. (p.xi) This alone is a commendable start in that the world of development agencies and education reformers is littered with impracticable, re-packaged and increasingly non-participatory propositions.

The authors also attempt to make the “essentials and complexities” manageable for both the professional and the layperson (p.xiii). Indeed, the pressing challenge has always been how to bridge the widening communications, resource, and time gap while highlighting the indispensability of one sector to the other. Scott and Gough envision a multidisciplinary route in order to offset the tyranny of any one discipline to address the complexity and risk that affects us all.

In a mere 147 pages (not including the references and index), the authors succeed, to a remarkable degree, in bringing together an immense strand of information in an effort to make sense of the contradictory, the inconspicuous, and the time-constrained features of our individual and collective lives.

Chapter One posits that the way humans relate to the environment is a two-way activity; that it takes piecing together the jigsaw-puzzle of our respective experiences and that the certainty of change could become the means by which we learn about ourselves and the natural world. In other words, our knowledge is evolving and hence, only in sharing this knowledge do we come to grips with what is an appropriate response in any given moment or situation. The rest of the book explores the practicability of the proposition, the transmission of generational and contemporary wisdom, the challenges of broad-basing such efforts, the mechanism for gauging them and, finally, which tested values should under gird and inform local, regional, and global practices.

Resurrecting Schumacher

A little over thirty years ago, E.F. Schumacher (1973) wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. The subtitle is telling. In it, Schumacher endeavored to present a coherent philosophy of life that explained how humans could relate to the environment, to the world of business and to "appropriate" technology. Heretofore, technology only made workers redundant and their escalating costs disallowed self-employment. For workers to remain productive and fulfilled, argued Schumacher, the use of an "intermediate" and ecologically-friendly technology was imperative.

Schumacher was a first-rate economist who dared to defy some of the propositions of his own tribe. He rejected the underlying tenets of both capitalism and Marxism on the grounds that these did not respect the dignity, community and well-being of the human person. He understood that reducing humans to the material alone is unfulfilling and, ultimately, dehumanizing. For Schumacher, religious notions could and should inform economic practices and that distributist ideas should not be thrown out on flimsy charges of some socialist plot (Chapter 1). The perennial question is, however, how much socio-economic restructuring should be allowed before it impinged on individual freedoms and rights.

Our world is a sphere of intense religious activity. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project (2002), those who responded to the importance of religion in their lives represent more than 80 percent of the population in Africa, 90 percent in Muslim nations, 60-80 percent in Latin America. Except for the U.S. (59 percent) attitudes toward the importance of religion fall to between 11 and 33 percent in the G-8 nations. What do these figures tell us about wealth disparity and the locus of global policy decision-making? Is secularism capable of comprehending religious sensibilities?

In 1977, a little-known theologian by the name of Ron Sider came up with Rich Christians in an age of hunger (249p). That book was to have a profound effect in sensitizing the otherwise complacent evangelical Christians of America to the plight of the rest of the world and to their own consumption habits. Considering the influence of the U.S. evangelical community on the outcome of recent domestic politics and its current interests in international issues, one could expect increased engagement in the areas of poverty and debt relief, HIV/AIDS, and human rights. Will this be a transitory event? What are the possible unintended consequences?

Change, no change

The world of the seventies has changed radically. Today, the effects of wholesale market liberalization are being felt everywhere. There is no consensus on the efficacy of this global phenomenon (p.134). The premier multilateral institution, the World Bank, now advances Faith and Development and Knowledge Bank. Will the faithful learn to have faith in the Bank? Or worse, will they be pressed into the awkward position of having to choose between God and Mammon? Will the world know anything it did not already know? The Bank may have chosen to work with religious institutions because the State and its institutions are deemed inert and corrupt. After all, goes the argument, in a post-Cold War world, weakening the State to strengthen private, non-government organizations is a necessary good. Consequently, education, especially higher education, is increasingly being privatized and internationalized.

The idea of a Knowledge Bank hints at the rise of a class of experts and points to a trend towards institutional and cultural homogeneity and, in the process, to the sidelining of local expertise (Samoff and Stromquist, 2001). Education has become a consumer item. Grants, endowments, and current politics continue to influence the direction of research programs, course restructuring, library subscriptions, and the like in institutions of learning. Students are continuously challenged by fluid value systems. Though conflict could be conducive to learning and development, neglecting “core values” to adapt to a fluid environment could also undermine the practice of locality and community cohesion (Chapter 13).

International aid to education is increasingly tied to the proposition that efficient use of resources requires that curricular design be labor-market sensitive (see also Chapter 7). That is, in a world of limited resources, issues of cultural and environmental studies will see fewer days in the classroom. Certainly, that is not the best way to raise an engaged and informed citizenry; education, in the final analysis, should lead one to become a responsible user and preserver of common and scarce resources.

The history of poverty

With rapid changes in our world, it seems little has changed. In the sixties, the global agenda was "poverty eradication." Later, it was subtly toned down and replaced by "poverty reduction." The poor are still with us—and more of them. Once again, we have come full circle to Making Poverty History (see Chapter 14). That poverty should receive greater attention is not the issue here. The reality and causes of poverty have always been known. On the other hand, aid disbursements are often excused on the premise that corrupt local officials siphon off some and the rest is suspended for lack of absorptive capacity. That's only half the story. According to ActionAid and the World Bank, consultants and donor businesses absorb 40-60 percent of global aid budget. Is the current occupation with global poverty simply the new face of the "Lords of Poverty" (Hancock, 1989)? Have we learned much in terms of caring for our "neighbor" and the environment? Has globalization delivered an improved quality of life? Do communities now have greater say in matters meaningful to them? Why is aid not working as it should?

Perhaps it is time to revisit Schumacher's “meta-economic” values of “smallness within bigness” and the importance of regional development and local production to satisfy local needs. Indeed, there will be disagreements on how we respond to these queries. But consider the following: global poverty is real, deep and extensive; wars, pollution and diseases are reducing the quality of life for the majority world. For those who live on less than a dollar a day, chopping down a tree to build fire is of immediate relevance than hugging it. Local and international authorities routinely break their promises; or if they kept, it is often for reasons that advanced the collusion of local elite and foreign interests. The few enjoy a great harvest of borderless labor, non-taxation and a fat bottom-line. We can go on.

To catch up or not to catch up

The Chinese and the Indians are modernizing at a breakneck speed. With a third of global populations within their borders, it is not difficult to imagine the costs to the environment consequent to their chosen path to production and consumption. Energy security is becoming the burning issue of the day. Whole communities are being displaced in the search for energy sources. The UN Security Council could not put sanctions on the Sudan over Darfur because China has a veto power and a significant oil interests in the Sudan. Will Africa be seeing the re-emergence of coups d'état, and despots to keep “law and order” for the energy-thirsty?

China is building the world's largest hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River and 13 more over the pristine Nu River. With over 4,300 dams in place, India has one of the world's largest dam construction projects. Russia's oil pipeline will soon be running to a Pacific outlet. Environmental concerns over such grand projects are simply taken as petty posturing and hypocritical. The problem is further compounded by the refusal of industrialized nations to ratify and duly implement international agreements. The new giants are poised to repeat past economic blunders. Perhaps a significant aspect of the book under review is that it will generate lively debates that could result in greater mutual trust and understanding. The fact that the UN held World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 and declared 2005 a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development only adds to the relevance of the book and the companion volume, Key Issues in Sustainable Development and Learning: a critical review [2004, London; New York: RoutledgFalmer].

Development and learning

Formal and informal learning is at the heart of sustainable development. “To be environmentally literate…is to read and write the world… to be taught how to learn and how to be critical” (pp.29, xiv). These statements touch upon several issues. First, as expounded by Schumacher and now affirmed by Scott and Gough, market-driven education is not always conducive to a critical orientation of what is just and “meta-economic.” Second, the majority world is distinguished by dislocation and rampant illiteracy. The illiteracy is not only in the three R's but also in democratic processes and institutions. Hence, an Amazonian or Ethiopian may well be a fluent "reader and writer" of the environment without having much influence on local or global policy-making. Indeed, this situation harkens to failures of the present past; policies flourish to the extent that they are inclusive and represent stakeholder interests. Despite the arguments for diffusion and globalization, power is still concentrated at the top and in few mega-cities of the developed and developing world (Sassen, 1998). What must happen for de-concentration to flourish trans-nationally?

Moreover, the political elite in those countries may have all the necessary training but lack the will to be inclusive or simply fall for the seduction of power and money to sustain their short-term interests. Third, institutional life-long learning may produce negative socio-ecological results in different contexts. For example, Chevron-Texaco or Shell Oil may establish sustainability in its overall domestic business strategy (p.3). Internationally, however, Chevron-Texaco had to be "shamed" by Nigerian village women into making environmentally-friendly policy concessions; Shell Oil's activities have been a source of ethnic and economic conflicts; Bechtel in Bolivia had to bow to the wrath of the Cochabamba desert people when it attempted to marketize God's water. Respecting local input and ownership is a matter that cannot be left to any one agency. Finally, there is a culture of consumption that needs to be steered in the direction of responsible pleasure. Eco-tourism often divorces Nature from people and their communities; Bali, Cancun, Mombassa remain the pleasure backyards of the developed world, even though they generate badly needed revenues.

Learning to be sensitive

That is why some tourist destinations following the Tsunami disaster carried on their operation without much thought or sensitivity. By the same token, wrong government policies pit local communities against each other and the immediate ecology. The result is unsustainable livelihood, conflict and massive rural-urban migration. The fact that the 2004 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the Kenyan environmentalist, Dr. Wangari Mathai, speaks volumes in recognizing the importance of women in development, the interconnectedness of the socio-ecological world to shape economic and social attitudes, and the effectiveness of civil societies to build, define, and protect their stakeholder roles.

In other cases, the same governments that are entrusted with protecting the rights and welfare of their citizens have been known to withhold critical information. In Thailand, for example, the Tsunami death toll could have been minimized (even averted) and scarce global funds allocated for other purposes had the responsible government officials shown care for the people over the booming tourist business.

Conclusion

Sustainable Development and Learning superbly frames the salient features of sustainability, development, and pedagogy and the importance of engaging stakeholders. The challenge now is finding an acceptable resolution to issues raging between the political and the scientific community, within the community of environmental activists, and between those who understand sustainability as a present but also a long-term proposition and those who trust in human ingenuity to find alternatives and thus prefer profit now (Chapter 12). For the poor majority, organizing and networking with global allies has been found to be working. In the end, not acknowledging that we share the world and its resources only hastens our undoing. As Hamm and Muttagi (1998) stated, sustainability demands that we constantly adapt and organize in order to strike a balance that will ensure long-term benefits.

References

The Economist. (June 30, 2005). Saving Africa, the conservative way. Economist.com

Hamm, B and Muttagi, P.K. (1998). Sustainable development and the future of cities. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Hancock, Graham. (1989). Lords of poverty: the power, prestige, and corruption of international aid business. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Marshall, Katherine and Keough, Lucy. (Eds.) (2004). Mind, heart, and soul in the fight against poverty. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

The Nation. (December 31, 2004). What if an early warning had been given? http://www.nationmultimedia.com

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. (December 19, 2002). http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=167

Sachs, Jeffrey. (2005). The end of poverty: economic possibilities for our time. New York: The Penguin Press.

Samoff, Joel, Stromquist, N.P. (2001). Managing knowledge and storing wisdom? New forms of foreign aid? Development and Change 32(4), 631-656(26).

Sassen, Saskia. (1998). Globalization and its discontents. New York: New Press.

Schumacher, E.F. (1973). Small is beautiful: economics as if people mattered. New York: Harper & Row.

Sider, Ronald. (1977). Rich Christians in an age of hunger. Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity Press.

Silverstein, Ken. (Jan 20, 2003). Oil boom enriches African ruler. Global Policy Forum. http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/2003/0122gui.htm

About the Reviewer

Mitiku Adisu was for many years involved in youth training and development in Ethiopia. He has a doctorate in Higher Education Leadership and Policy from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Email: mitiku_adisu@hotmail.com.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

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