Dr Michael Njume Ebong
By Dr Michael Njume Ebong
Following upon our earlier related article entitled “The Pursuit of Economic Growth in the Age of Sustainable Development” published in Cameroon Business Today in its edition of 24 January 2018, the present article traces the origins of the current economic model, its increasingly self-evident threats to the human race and the biosphere, the absence so far of a robust emergency response by the international community to those threats, and finally some alternative, environmentally-friendly alternative lifestyles beginning to emerge in some parts of the globe.
Origins of growth economics: While the universal pursuit of GDP growth is considered indispensable to the creation of employment, raising of living standards, and reduction of poverty rates, accumulating evidence shows that humankind has already reached the safe limits to economic growth in terms of the most pressing threat to the human race and the Earth’s ecological balance – that of a stable and clement climate system.
In his book Beyond Growth, the American economist Herman Daly remarks the following: “in microeconomics every enterprise has an optimal scale beyond which it should not grow. But when we aggregate all microeconomic units into the macroeconomy, the notion of an optimal scale, beyond which further growth becomes anti-economic, disappears completely”. But how did we get to this point? As we know, it all started with the Industrial Revolution in 18th Century Britain when economics of growth came into vogue. That period decisively marked the switch from the traditional, self-sustaining organic economy that had been the norm for humanity on all continents since Neolithic times, to a technology-intensive, mineral resource depleting, and inorganic economy that was to characterize the Industrial Revolution. The latter thus represented a tectonic shift in relations between humans and their environment. By mid 19th Century when Britain practically ruled the world, over land and sea, the benefits to her of the Industrial Revolution were plain obvious to all other nations. Thus, by virtue of its systematic emulation by other countries, including in the British colonial empire that straddled the world, the British industrial model progressively emerged, to this day, as the global standard of economic progress. Virtually all industrialized countries of Europe and North America as well as in Asia have more or less used the script of the British Industrial Revolution (including its technological inventions and carbon dependence – especially coal and oil) to attain their present status. Figure 1 depicting economic growth trends since the 17th Century also shows by inference how this fossil-fuelled growth pattern progressively damaged the environment well beyond the industrializing countries, as we know better today. Figure 2 on greenhouse emission trends shows how the Asian countries, in their economic efforts to catch up with the West, are repeating almost the same script of the Industrial Revolution in terms of their ever rising levels of pollution emissions into the atmosphere – with worldwide climate-change consequences. But what has been the international response to these threats to humanity?
The international environment agenda: Over the past fifty years and particularly since the United Nations 1992 Earth Summit (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the international community has certainly not been short of initiatives, conventions and global conferences aimed at finding and codifying solutions to save the environment from human depredations. But a review of the corpus of measures produced on the subject so far by the United Nations system, including the 2016 Paris Climate Accord, suggests business as usual, that is no emergency response to what clearly is an environmental emergency for humanity and mother Earth itself. Firstly, United Nations conferences generally tend to resemble something not unlike a football match between the developed and developing countries. While the developed countries see bulging population growth and poverty in the developing countries as main threats to the environment, the developing countries see production and consumption patterns in the developed countries as the main peril to the environment. The developed countries focus on nature conservation imperatives including conservation of forest ecosystems that serve as carbon sinks in the developing countries, while the latter insist on “climate justice” materialized by ever more resource flows from the industrialized countries to the rest of the world. Moreover, compliance with negotiated international agreements tends to be more voluntary than mandatory, and the agreements themselves are not without artful escape valves, such as the requirement for countries to implement agreements “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions…”. Besides recommending mitigation measures such as use of renewable sources of energy and building more energy-efficient engines and production systems, international agreements only timidly approach the subject of how to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions, or how far scientific ingenuity can lead to a new “dematerialized” industrial revolution that would save planet earth. As such, the inability of UN system processes to acknowledge the fundamental flaws in the currently dominant economic and political system, and to envision a transformative agenda for sustainable development, must be judged disappointing in a world context in serious need of alternative development narratives.
The search for alternatives to growth economics: In his Encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis has been explicit on the need to redefine progress: “There is a need to change ‘models of global development’; […] Frequently, in fact, people’s quality of life actually diminishes […] in the midst of economic growth. In this context, talk of sustainable growth usually becomes a way of distracting attention and offering excuses. It absorbs the language and values of ecology into the categories of finance and technocracy, and the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced to a series of marketing and image-enhancing measures.” A number of initiatives for environmental justice and new worldviews about development are emerging in various regions of the world. As noted by one author, “deconstructing development opens up the door for a multiplicity of new and old notions and world views. This includes buen vivir, a culture of life with different names and varieties emerging from indigenous peoples in various regions of South America; ubuntu, with its emphasis on human mutuality (“I am because we are”) in East and Southern Africa; radical ecological democracy or ecological swaraj, with a focus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; and degrowth, the hypothesis that we can live better with less and in common, in western countries. These worldviews differ sharply from today’s notion of development, challenging the dogmatic belief in economic growth and proposing in its place notions of wellbeing. They are diverse, but express common fundamental values, including solidarity, harmony, diversity and oneness within nature”.
Geostrategic competition: One reason why it would be difficult to secure binding international environmental agreements is competition among nations and private companies, especially in the developed countries, for economic, technological and military parity if not superiority. Competition among nations and companies is the spark for the scientific and technological breakthroughs powering industrialization and its stupendous appetite for natural resource consumption. No amount of mitigation and adaptation fixes to the global climate change agenda is likely to change that fundamental fact of inter-state and inter-corporate competition for parity or dominance. If some automobile companies can deliberately cheat on gas emission tests, governments can do likewise to protect or advance their national and global interests.
The cruel irony for Africa is that it should be receiving counsel and technological knowhow from that part of the industrialized world primarily responsible for causing the global climate crisis, and which could not only prevent such crisis in the first place but had also previously rubbished, for centuries, Africa’s environmentally-friendly traditional ways of life and cyclical world view. Environmentally, Africa today has become something like a global dustbin for the discarded products and nature-protection concepts from the rest of the world, be it clothing, household appliances, or the automobiles fouling our atmosphere. Accordingly, the climate crisis raises to perfection the fundamental paradox blocking Africa’s development: we have the resources and traditional life-support systems needed for our development but other continents and nations must first use them for their advancement and then sell the scrap to us. That’s no way to build development. So we must return to the drawing board and start charting our development path and strategy all over again, from the village level upwards.