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ISSN 0306-8293
Volume 34 Number 1/2 2007
International Journal of
Social Economics Living in common and deliberating in common: foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security Guest Editors: P.B. Anand and Des Gasper
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International Journal of
ISSN 0306-8293
Social Economics
Volume 34 Number 1/2 2007
Living in common and deliberating in common: foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security Guest Editors P. B. Anand and Des Gasper
Access this journal online _________________________
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Editorial advisory board __________________________
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Guest editorial ___________________________________
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Goods and persons, reasons and responsibilities Des Gasper ___________________________________________________
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Public goods, global public goods and the common good Se´verine Deneulin and Nicholas Townsend _________________________
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Destabilising identity structures: the impacts of domestic and international policy programs in the 1994 Rwanda genocide Je´roˆme Ballet, Franc¸ois-Re´gis Mahieu and Katia Radja _______________
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Education in pre- and post-conflict contexts: relating capability and life-skills approaches Jean-Luc Dubois and Mile`ne Trabelsi ______________________________
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS continued
A deliberative ethic for development: a Nepalese journey from Bourdieu through Kant to Dewey and Habermas John Cameron and Hemant Ojha _________________________________
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Sustainable livelihood approaches and soil erosion risks: who is to judge? Tim Forsyth __________________________________________________
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Allocating responsibilities in multi-level governance for sustainable development Sylvia I. Karlsson ______________________________________________
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Note from the publisher _________________________________
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Call for papers ___________________________________________
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr James Alvey Massey University, New Zealand
Professor Stylianos A. Sarantides University of Piraeus, Greece
Dr Josef Barat Minister of Transportation, Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil
Professor K.K. Seo College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii at Manoa Professor Udo E. Simonis WZB Science Centre, Berlin, Germany
Professor Y.S. Brenner Department of Economics, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands Professor Tan Chwee-huat Faculty of Business Administration, National University of Singapore Dr Floreal H. Forni Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales del CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina Professor Patrick McNutt Patrick McNutt & Associates, Dublin and Visiting Fellow, Manchester Business School, UK Dr Daniel O’Neil Department of Political Science, The University of Arizona, USA Professor Doktor Manfred Prisching Karl-Franzens-University, Graz, Austria
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 p. 4 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293
Professor Clem Tisdell University of Queensland, Australia Dr Matti Viren University of Turku, Finland Professor Jimmy Weinblatt Department of Economics, Ben Gurion University, Israel Professor Zhang Wenxian Fudan University, Shanghai, China Professor Laszlo Zsolnai Director, Business Ethics Centre, Budapest University of Economic Sciences, Hungary
Guest editorial This set of papers derives from a joint workshop of two study groups of the Development Studies Association of the UK and Ireland – the Group on Development Ethics and its sister on Environment and Sustainable Development – which was held at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, on 26-28 March 2006. It is the first of two sets of papers from the meeting. The second set will appear in the Journal of International Development later in 2007. The two study groups had long seen strong connections between their core interests and are very satisfied by the outcome of the cooperation. A call for proposals brought a large response, from which a selection was made with reference both to inherent promise and to the interconnections between the two groups’ concerns. This led to a workshop programme with 20 papers under four headings: (1) goods, rights and well-being; (2) security and insecurity; (3) public goods and the millennium development goals; and (4) governance.
Guest editorial
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All papers had relevance to at least one other of these headings, which contributed to rewarding discussions at the workshop and in the follow-up. In this set the papers respond singly and collectively to the challenge identified in the title: “Living in common and deliberating in common – foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security”. The opening paper, “Goods and persons, reasons and responsibilities” draws out the main themes and lines of argument. We gratefully acknowledge the warm hospitality and contribution in organising the workshop from Flavio Comim and Angels Varea of the Capability and Sustainability Centre, St Edmund’s College. We also acknowledge with thanks the contributions of all those who participated in the workshop and the financial sponsorship of the Development Studies Association. P.B. Anand Bradford Centre for International Development, University of Bradford, UK, and Des Gasper Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 p. 5 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0306-8293.htm
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Goods and persons, reasons and responsibilities Des Gasper Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands
6 Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present exploration of themes that interconnect six studies in environmentally and socially sustainable human development. Design/methodology/approach – The article presents an overview of the papers included in this special issue. Findings – As humanity threatens to undermine its habitat, a social economics returns to core concepts and themes that became expunged from neoclassical economics: serious examination of persons, seen as more than given points of desire; a broadened perspective on types of good, including a non-neoclassical conception of public goods as publicly deliberated priority goods that are not well managed through free markets and “common goods” as shared bases vital for everyone; study of what commodities and goods do to and for people; a central role for public reasoning about which are public priority goods, rather than using only a technical definition of a public good; an acceptance of notions of ethical responsibility and responsibilities concerning the provision and maintenance of public priority goods determined through public reasoning; and attention to institutional formats for such deliberation. Amongst the greatest of public priority “goods” are the concepts of common good and responsibility. Research limitations/Implications – The findings reinforce the agenda of socio-economics for central attention to the mutual conditioning of economy, society, polity, and environment, including analysis of the sociocultural formation of economic actors and of ideas of “common good”. Originality/value – Cross-fertilization of theorization with cases from Costa Rica, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, Rwanda, sub-Saharan Africa and global arenas. Keywords Sustainable development, Socio-economic regions, Social economics, Social responsibility Paper type General review
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 6-18 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723336
Introduction At the start of the twenty-first century, humankind faces “interesting times”. Global climate change linked to a carbon-rich lifestyle threatens to eliminate various small island states, destabilise many countries and bring spillover effects that will rock even the richest. Distress and ambition, widening comparisons and growing expectations fuel global-wide drives for respect, for consumption, for status and even predominance. These factors can fuel angry conflicts, intra-national and trans-national. The potential for larger conflagrations seems to increase. Presentday violent conflicts are already frighteningly large in impact: an estimated three to four million people have died prematurely since the mid-1990s in the wars in the former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo. In its small neighbour, Rwanda, following a fall of around 40 per cent in national income per capita (in US dollar terms) as a result of world market shifts (Eriksson et al., 1996) some Rwandans suffered yet greater declines, for example losing The author wishes to thank to P.B. Anand and the contributors to the special issue, particularly Sylvia Karlsson, for their comments on an earlier draft.
their land or job, as an IMF-designed economic programme enforced “structural adjustment” on this fragile society. Many lost their lives, or their souls, as the country was then led into an Armageddon of scape-goating; between half a million and a million people were chopped and bludgeoned to death in a matter of weeks in 1994. A metaphor used locally was “crushing the cockroaches”. Ballet et al. (2007) show how “economic adjustment” contributed to “identity shift” followed by ethnic “cleansing”. The effects of such disintegration will not be kept for ever far from the fortresses of the rich, suggests the human security paradigm (UNDP, 1994): discontents, diseases, drugs, criminal networks, weapons, violent practices and refugees are all liable to spread. Living together in peace requires deliberating together, and some acceptance of being participants in a common human enterprise. Not only should rules and agreements be kept concerning foreseen cases and contingencies; but also people must be able to together constructively face unexpected risks and challenges. Living together involves more than is assumed in many “rational choice” models of the interaction of myriads of calculating individuals, each considered to be completely pre-formed and purely self-interested. The standard picture in prominent strands of business and management thinking, and in the associated social science, is a world of “Missing Persons” (Douglas and Ney, 1998). People are treated purely as economic agents, acquisitive individuals whose primary characteristic is a personal set of given preferences, which they calculatedly seek to fulfil. They are not real persons, formed from birth within society and potential participants in its processes of political management, including concerning the formation and negotiation of preferences, processes that involve far more than a bargaining between fixed packages of desires. The title of this overview paper reflects two studies that appeared in 1984 and have helped to bring some reorientation of thinking in social economics and social philosophy, coincidentally both written by Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford: the Economist Amartya Sen’s Goods and People and the Philosopher Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Through a series of conundrums, about for example how we should consider future generations, Parfit forced analysts to review the natures of rationality, identity, and moral reasoning. He introduced a classification of existing conceptions of “What makes someone’s life go best” – hedonistic theories, desire-fulfilment theories, and objective list theories – which helped to trigger and organise some of the subsequent investigations into the nature of well-being. His work employed perhaps a subtler conception of persons than Sen’s – note his very use of the term “persons” rather than “people” – yet Sen’s work as a whole has pushed the conceptualisation of well-being and its determinants further. Goods and People made a claim about ends, namely that what is important is not the amounts of economic goods sold but how people live and can live. In a classic sister paper, “Rational fools” Sen (1977) discussed the persons who hold and pursue ends. Parfit was a pure Oxford philosopher, applying a sharp intellect in the seclusion of his study and the cloisters of his college – in intensive interchange with other such thinkers – to query and illuminate basic concepts and premises. Sen represents a marriage of that tradition with the wider and richer materials of the social sciences, drawn not only from the armchair, but also the cloister and the seminar room but from organisations, movements and experience around the world. “The world” is understood here in the full sense, not only with reference to economically rich countries.
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The papers in this collection follow in the same spirit: probing and reworking basic conceptions in the light of attention to wideranging experience and wideranging theory. The papers are by social scientists whose work is stimulated, tested and enriched both by philosophical investigations, such as exemplified by Sen and Parfit, and by a commitment to interdisciplinary and international comparison and communication, such as represented by Sen amongst others.
8 Overview of the papers The papers are organised and discussed here in relation to two central themes: living in common and deliberating in common. Nearly, all the papers deal with both; the emphasis gradually moves from the first to the second theme. Two more strongly theoretical papers take the lead in, respectively, the first and second parts: Deneulin and Townsend for the theme of living in common; and Cameron and Ojha for deliberating in common. Deneulin and Townsend show the difference between conventional economics concepts of public goods and an older concept of “the common good”. While the former are necessary so is the latter, which may rest on a more sophisticated understanding of human personality and interaction. This is particularly important for current discussion of global public goods. Two papers on intra-societal violence, by Ballet et al., and by Dubois and Trabelsi, illustrate the breakdown of life in common and conversely the requirements of sustaining a life in common, including for some elements of shared identity, acceptance of mutual responsibilities, and appropriate life-skills including for discussion and deliberation. Ballet et al. focus on how people have partly distinctive identities and how these are constituted and can be reconstituted: in other words, how people are persons and can become monsters. Dubois and Trabelsi explore how education could help to consolidate people’s formation as responsible citizens who are able to listen and debate in public fora, as opposed to a formation as ready recruits for genocide. Cameron and Ojha extend this theme of deliberation in common. They head a set of three papers on environmental governance, including also those by Forsyth and Karlsson, that develop methodological and normative themes that have wider relevance than for environment alone. Both Cameron-Ojha and Forsyth look at deliberation in natural environment arenas: at the political frameworks for reasoning that set who are included or excluded, on what terms, and by what means. Karlsson looks at alternative principles for allocating responsibilities for public bads. Her focus on issues that cross national borders returns us to Deneulin and Townsend’s concern with global public goods (and bads). Her conclusion reiterates the central importance of a sense of common good, in order to secure these global public goods. The papers show the broadening of a “sustainable development” perspective to cover social, cultural and political environments and values and not only physical environments. Ballet et al. for example apply the precautionary principle to the social environment of markets and polities. Sometimes called a “sustainable human development” perspective (Banuri et al., 1995), this broadened view is nowadays often and perhaps more effectively described as a “human security” perspective (CHS, 2003). We return to it at the end of the paper. The intervening sections consider in turn the themes in the paper’s title: (public) goods, persons, (public) reasoning, and allocation of responsibilities.
Goods Most introductory economics textbooks present a picture of the organisation of “the material aspects of social life” that runs as follows. “Factors of production” are supplied by “Households” and offered in factor markets where the buyers are the “producers” of “goods”. These goods are then sold in product markets, to other producers (as intermediate goods), or to Households in their role as Consumers which in turn allows the households/consumers to sustain their roles as suppliers of factors. This simple perspective provides the framework for hundreds of pages of instruction, and indeed typically for several years of university study. Economics is treated as centrally the study of a system of market activity, a system of flows of commodities. Cameron and Ojha mention the attempts to extend such a model into the management of Nepal’s currently more community-controlled forests. Some major limitations of the framework are that: first, it directs primary attention to monetized outputs regardless of their impacts on people; second, it ignores the environments of the system of market activity, and leads to their subsequent admission only in marginal and subsidiary roles; third, it leaves a hole where persons should have been partly malleable agents who seek to understand and in turn mould their environments, including through constructing and reconstructing discursive orders; and fourth, it suggests by default that a social order is or can be a bargain between a set of preformed individuals. Goods and the good A market-centred perspective can give the impression that the social world consists of individuals who exist prior to society and then interact in markets and quasi-markets. In the theoretical model of a perfect market system there is no need for individuals to jointly deliberate, as opposed to self-referentially calculate and bargain, because firstly, goods (commodities, including time) are the good, and secondly, market mechanisms provide all necessary coordination in the world of goods. Sen’s Goods and People built in contrast on an Aristotelian insight. Rather than presume that Goods are good – let alone take a monetized measure of the circulation of commodities as the central measure of human welfare – we should examine how people live: how long, how healthily, how peacefully, how far in accordance with reasoned values; in other words, we should consider what people do with goods and what goods do to and for people. This is, in part, an invitation to deliberate jointly. Such a perspective has been absorbed into discussions of sustainable development and is why they interface easily with discussions of development ethics, other than in “deep ecology” views. It makes us ask: sustainability of what? and why? Rather than assuming that maintenance of a particular form of land use is essential, for example, we should look at the sustainability of particular “environmental functionings” (Tim Forsyth, at the St Edmund’s College Workshop) and valued human outcomes. This connects to a conception of public goods as publicly deliberated priorities for maintaining a society. Public goods and the underlying notions of the nature of a public realm Economic activity relies on a social basis and an environmental basis, and also affects both of these. Figure 1 shows the nesting of systems, and hints at the myriad of interactions. An economic system that undermines its social and environmental bases is
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PROCESSES IN THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SOCIETY OTHER MONETIZABLE ACTIVITIES (but some should never be monetized)
10 MONETIZED ACTIVITIES
Figure 1. The economy in context
Source: Gasper (2004)
unsustainable; for example if it promotes such strong forms of self-interested behaviour that cooperation in providing necessary (global) public goods is undermined or never attained. And while there is considerable tolerable variation concerning what can be managed by market rules, some things which are monetizable should never become subject to the market – body parts, for example, can be bought, as can lives via hiring of contract killers – on grounds both of ethics and, possibly, social sustainability. Economic theory addresses the possible effects of the commodity system on its social and physical environments via the category of externalities, one type of “market imperfection”. Part of the neoclassical economics definition of a public good, by Samuelson (1954), concerns non-excludability: I cannot feasibly exclude you from the benefits (or costs) of the commodity I produce, even when you have not purchased it. The other part of the definition concerns non-rivalry: your consumption of the good does not reduce its availability to others. Such a definition of public goods thinks about what is needed for a pure market system to function efficiently: namely, goods that are rivalrous and excludable, such that the prospective consumers have an incentive to pay for them and the prospective producers have an incentive to exclude those who do not pay. “Public goods” are defined as the opposite, in terms of the same technical dimensions. “Problematic commodities” would be a better label. The need for public deliberation is not central in this conception. Many of the “public goods” which rightly lie at the centre of public attention do not well match Samuelson’s definition. Schooling, for example, is both excludable (one can feasibly keep children out) and often rivalrous (more children in the classroom means less attention from the teacher and less share of the resources; and the classroom can become full). Use also of a public facility like a city square or a cathedral is both excludable and potentially rivalrous. Wuyts (1992) points out that public economics covers thus much more than neoclassical public goods. It concerns goods which are deemed of public priority yet not sufficiently supplied through free markets, for example because they have large favourable externalities; regardless of whether they well fit the neoclassical definition. Conversely, “public bads” can include things which have large negative externalities and are oversupplied. The services of
well-functioning law courts are a public good – though people could certainly be excluded and the use of courts is rivalrous – if and because they are publicly deemed a priority which is not appropriately supplied on a market basis, and which furthermore has high favourable externalities for those not directly involved. This alternative conception of public goods – social priority goods that are not well managed through free markets – directs our attention to issues of social prioritization and to who is involved in the deliberations to set priorities. As Sylvia Karlsson noted at the St Edmund’s College Workshop, behind the often starkly diverging views between developed and developing countries on what are global public goods and global commons lie value differences, not merely different judgements about excludability and rivalrousness. While peace may be seen as a global, regional, national, and local public good, views differ about the priority of peace in specific locations. Peace in the Congo has received no priority from the dominant global powers. Common good and common goods Severine Deneulin and Nicholas Townsend’s paper revives the idea of the common good, and shows that it overlaps with but is not reducible to the neoclassical economics concept of a public good, which does not suffice for analysis of the environmental and institutional bases of human society. Neither irrelevant nor in itself erroneous, the neoclassical concept yet excludes centrally important matters and potentially misdirects our attention. Even the richer category that we have just seen, clarified by Wuyts, de Swaan (1988), Gray (1993) and others, is not designed to embody all the social analysis and varied categories that we require. Should we for example call political and family structures – which can indeed be affected by forms of commercial activity – public goods? We should connect economics to the other social and human sciences, rather than imagine that it can swallow them. Deneulin and Townsend provide part of the required extension of vocabulary, through returning to the classical notion of “the common good” – the goodness of the life that humans hold in common – and in fact identifying various specific “common goods”. We noted a type of individualistic vision that neoclassical economics is often associated with: individuals/households exist prior to society, with exogenous preferences; social interaction consists of their bargaining and resultant cooperation and competition; the measure of societal good should be the sum of the fulfilment of the exogenous preferences. This vision takes as exogenous what are in reality endogenous: individuals and their conceptions of the good, of benefits and costs. It thus generates an inadequate conception of the good and of goods, inadequate both for explanation and for human flourishing, perhaps even for human survival. In contrast, Deneulin and Townsend draw on an alternative vision in which people are more profoundly social beings. Let us draw it out explicitly. It contains a series of interconnected but separate ideas, each of them significant, including the following. . Individuals can only emerge and exist within a society. Requisites for the society’s viability, continuation or flourishing might be called elements of “the common good”. . Some of these are “goods” with generally high favourable externalities which are not merely nonrivalrous but which increase in supply when “consumed” like friendship and love and trust.
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.
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Many vital elements of life in a society can be called “irreducibly social goods” – Charles Taylor’s term, employed by Deneulin and Townsend – including most of its culture: language, norms, institutions. People’s conception of their own good is moulded by social interaction; their values typically flow from a community and from life in that community. Further, their conception of “themselves” is in part – often in large part – social, in that they do not see themselves purely or perhaps even predominantly as individuals, but rather or also as a family member and a member of various groups: of a locality (often more than one), of a profession, of a country, of an ethnic group, of a religion and/or a political tendency, and so on. Using Ballet et al.’s term, their “identity structure” is complex and social. Further still, people’s conceptions of the good are social: despite the historical emergence and growth of more individualistic identity structures, these conceptions contain besides a person’s own good also the good of others, the good of the community, and a favourable valuation of the life in common. In particular, people put value on: the construction and maintenance of a community or communities; certain values that define the community, including a conception of the right, and of justice, not only of the individual’s good in isolation; and affirmation of those values. This is in contrast to the neo-classical conception where, if the exogenous individuals happen to have no concern for their fellows and their descendants, that is viewed as a particular lifestyle choice, rather than as a sign of personal and social pathology.
Just as the public goods concept includes the possibility of “public bads” so the common good concept must cover “common bads”. Community itself is not automatically morally good. It is a source of effects, some good, some not. In discussing the nature of goods we have been forced to consider the nature of the people for whom they are goods. With individuals understood as members within a society, we connect to the Aristotelian conception of well-being for humans: participation in the life of the polis, a conception that is given form in contemporary theories of social inclusion and in Doyal and Gough’s (1991) influential A Theory of Need. Persons People are not calculating machines, idiots savants or “rational fools” who assess everything except a set of ends that they happen to arbitrarily, idiosyncratically and individually hold. They are imperfectly reasoning, malleable, diverse persons: who become socialised and live within societies, and work within and through sets of cultures, partly discursively constructed systems of meanings; who have limited knowledge and some potential for cooperation and concern for the next generation(s). The societies possess means, less or more democratic or informed, for identification and prioritization of public goods and assignation of social responsibilities. As we saw, Je´roˆme Ballet, Franc¸ois-Re´gis Mahieu and Katja Radja’s paper refines the picture by noting that people have multiple aspects of identity, being members of not just a single “society” for example the grouping which sets formal laws, but of multiple groupings; a point emphasised too by Sen (2006). Sen stresses the choices in prioritisation that people thereby have, and how people highlight different aspects of
identity at different times. Besides, those sorts of situational emphasising, there can be structural moves of identity: long term trends such as to more individualization, and even relatively sudden shifts. Ballet et al. show how persons’ identities can be dangerously re-formed during periods of socio-economic crisis, such as preceded the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Their paper distinguishes successive aspects of that tragedy: . Tensions grew within Rwanda, stemming from increasing demographic pressure, reliance on unstable agricultural export markets, widespread loss of access to land, and extreme and rising inequality. . Thus, after the coffee market declines of the late 1980s could no longer be cushioned by government subsidies, IMF financial shock therapy in the early 1990s administered shocks that were far more than only financial. . Political leaders and aspirant leaders turned to appeals to one aspect (ethnic) of felt identity, as a way of mobilising or retaining support, in response to loss of other forms of support as well as an increased felt threat from 1988 in the light of inter-ethnic conflict in neighbouring Burundi. . The mechanisms of escalation included dehumanization of the other, “snowballing” of commitment in oppression, and fear of sanctions if one did not participate; leading to hardening of the identity shift and to the move into a “shock therapy” of another kind: genocide. . Safety mechanisms failed. “The international community” so assiduous in imposing financial “discipline” ignored warnings of imminent disaster, and even long ignored and minimised reports of the actual genocide. Ballet et al. consider the issues of responsibility, and we can ask about the types of “identity structure” that conduced to irresponsibility. Jean-Luc Dubois and Mile`ne Trabelsi point out how armed conflicts have legacies that conduce to further violence. Violence violates people emotionally as well as bodily; it can destroy good social capital, undermine positive capabilities and build negative ones. They discuss how appropriate schooling and education could reduce the danger of exclusivist, and explosive, types of attitude formation; and more generally how the public goods of appropriate life-skills could support the common good of human security. Ideally, the response to crises could include favourable re-forming of identities. Appropriate life-skills figure in UNESCO’s agenda that education should cover “learning to be” and “learning to live together” not only acquiring knowledge and learning to do. “Learning to be” includes, amongst other things, strengthening of a sense of personal responsibility and of skills of resilience. “Learning to live together” includes understanding interdependence and gaining skills of co-operation and co-determination. Such skills are often especially neglected in secondary and tertiary education. Dubois and Trabelsi are inspired by Sen’s capability approach (Sen, 1999). On specific life-skills Sen’s generalized treatment says little (Gasper, 2000), but there Martha Nussbaum’s more substantive capabilities approach has much to offer (Nussbaum, 1995, 1997, 2001). In addition a body of work in British education in the 1980s and 1990s that emerged without connection to Sen or Nussbaum also called itself the capabilities approach.
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Dubois and Trabelsi remind us that efforts to strengthen positive personal and social capabilities can be readily undermined and outweighed by national and international forces and policies, such as Ballet et al. described. Education on learning to be and learning to live together is therefore not only for direct combatants or potential combatants. National and international decision-makers are priority target groups. They are also key agents for fulfilment of one of the sets of conditions that Dubois and Trabelsi highlight: provision of a common vision for the future that can attract a majority of the people. Uganda offers perhaps a partial recent example, although flawed and fragile. The paper warns that for many leaders the allure of the prizes of war can outweigh training in social responsibilities. The responsibilities of international decisionmakers must then, on the basis of the capacity principle discussed by Karlsson, be activated. In an interconnected world, offering broad economic and educational support – rather than government-assisted export of arms and landmines – is an accumulated obligation as well as a prudential investment. Reasoning, risks and governance John Cameron and Hemant Ojha’s paper considers more fully than do Dubois and Trabelsi the requirements for a society which treats all members with respect. They apply Kant’s ideals of non-coercion and non-deception, but supplement that with reference to realities of social stratification and of encapsulation in group worldviews and practices, where they draw in particular on the insights and formulations of Pierre Bourdieu. Their centrepiece is Jurgen Habermas’s vision of reasoned collective deliberation, as an extension of Kant’s ideal but also as a possible motor for change. They correspondingly adopt a richer, more realistic, picture of persons than as a set of presocial, fixed atoms of desire. Collective deliberation influences participants and their preferences: From the perspective of communicative rationality, political agency (or citizenship) is an intersubjective enterprise, as people are connected to diverse networks of communication in society. In that sense, they are not autonomous rational beings in themselves, as the ways through which they understand, interpret and channel resources are mediated by intersubjective processes. This reasoning questions aggregative models of liberal governance, which merely add up individual preferences without regard to deliberative principles and collective ethics . . . Deliberation is a conscious exercise of communicative competence by social beings to understand, negotiate and transform human relations and ethical norms (Cameron and Ojha, 2007).
Cameron and Ojha apply their system of complementary ideas from Kant, Bourdieu and Habermas to forest management in Nepal. They conclude: This [Nepal experience] demands reframing of public debate both in procedural and substantive terms – procedurally to enhance the agency of the poor and marginalised groups to effectively participate, and substantively to expose deceptive elements in the claims to ethical authority on the part of the dominant technocratic habitus, and the associated element of deception utilised to reproduce social inequality.
Tim Forsyth’s case study complements Cameron and Ojha’s. He shows in more detail the mechanisms of technocratic distortion and veiled elite domination in agencies that supposedly defend the common good. Environmental planners and land managers do go beyond a commodity focus to look at effects on environments and, in principle, on
people; but they often employ widely generalized “narratives” about environmental threats, which sustain perceptions of environmental crisis and are used to justify the acquisition or control of natural resources by the State or by capitalist agents, or typically by both in alliance. Research in the past generation has shown that these narratives have often been highly overgeneralized and misleading. Forsyth warns for example of a strong unjustified tendency to assume that physical changes such as erosion and land-cover-clearance automatically constitute problems. His case study from Thailand shows how the orthodox narrative of watershed degradation has been defined by dominant social groups from the lowlands. Yet those social categories – upland and lowland – are too crude to well reflect biophysical reality. Even the currently popular sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), which looks at the diverse ways in which rural people construct livelihoods with use of a range of “capitals” (“natural” “social” “financial” “human”, etc.), appears flawed by its imposition of overgeneralized external categories. Critically, Arce (2003) argued that institutional analysts of SLA have confused “assets” with “capitals” and have consequently reduced local deliberation because the different kinds of capitals are predefined and imported (Forsyth, presentation to the 2006 St Edmund’s College Workshop). Bourdieu talks of economic, cultural, symbolic and political capitals, but for purposes of broad understanding not for prescription in specific cases. In contrast, mainstream economics is in key ways a generalized, generalizing discourse – with its grand narrative of “consumers” and “producers” and its generalized categories of types of capital – which can conduce to the types of top-down control that Forsyth, Cameron and Ojha criticize. Forsyth proposes closer attention to the social inclusions and exclusions in the preparation and stabilization of truth claims: who is involved, who is not. The choices of and within intellectual frameworks can either be made with public deliberation included or be concealed within inherited disciplinary formats that often provide cover for the interests of predominant groups. Forsyth makes a case for granting local people, including poor people, epistemological respect and involvement in governance of natural resources, given their close experience with specific local realities. “Thou shalt ensure that the number of voices that participated in the articulation of propositions has not been arbitrarily short circuited” (Latour, 2003, p. 106; cited by Forsyth at the St Edmund’s College Workshop). Cameron and Ojha share this view and, drawing on John Dewey, go further. Participation in analysis and decisionmaking can be fruitful in several ways: for reliable and insightful knowledge, for communication and absorption of knowledge, for representation of the interests of the disadvantaged, for building cooperation, capacities and even community, and as ethically valued in itself. Such social learning processes have to be institutionalised. We saw how Cameron and Ojha embed an idealist analysis within Bourdieu’s sociology of power and culture. They move towards an enriched conception of Human Development that not merely stresses human agency but sees it as socially moulded, constrained and discursively articulated. Correspondingly, progress through consensus is far from guaranteed, as many environment cases show. Aware of this, Cameron and Ojha adopt from Bourdieu a second model of change: in addition to change via deliberation, change via crisis, notably cognitive crisis and rethinking. Material crisis sometimes brings rethinking, other times not. The Rwanda experience ominously reminds us that environmental crisis narratives are sometimes in part true, exclusive community affiliations are
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dangerous, risk and insecurity are subjective and manipulable as well as objective categories, and that the dangers that arise cover not only direct environmental damage, but also violence leading to multifarious social harm. Nepal is in a longstanding crisis (Blaikie et al., 1980). It rests at a crossroads between alternative authoritarianisms and also the perspective of more democratic deliberation that Cameron and Ojha expound and endorse.
16 Responsibilities Using a less painful case, the effects of agricultural pesticides, as suited for development of theory, Sylvia Karlsson considers the allocation of responsibilities for public goods and bads in national and transnational systems. What should be done about transnational public goods? She compares three criteria: culpability, capacity, and concern. Her conclusion is striking: the principles are complementary, but indispensable and for her case central is a sense of living in common and of mutual concern. By culpability Karlsson refers to causal responsibility, noting though that identifications of culpability involve both a cause-effect analysis and a moral analysis of responsibility. Out of the myriad of contributory conditions to an event only some will be deemed morally relevant. You drive sedately in the correct lane and block my way as I overtake at speed in the wrong lane; you causally contribute to the collision but do not share culpability. Assignations of culpability reflect underlying choices of situation-framing, as shown by Forsyth in his discussion of environmental narratives. The principle of culpability has major limitations in practice, due to the disputes over both cause-effect linkages and moral relevance. To some people the question of IMF co-responsibility for societal collapse in Rwanda is absurd; to others that responsibility is clear. (Within the IMF itself there was some disquiet and rethinking, though unfortunately no cognitive crisis.) This leads us to consider also the principle of capacity. Here, in contrast, the capacity of “the international community” to have prevented and/or to have later stopped the genocide is indisputable, as indicated by Ballet et al. A combination of capacity, mandate and inaction implies culpable irresponsibility. Lack of responsibility for producing a problem does not mean one lacks responsibility for responding to it. Suppose actor A did not do act D which would have prevented G from happening; that he was capable of doing D or had sufficient chance and capacity to develop that capability (thus one can be responsible for not being able to respond); and that he had the relevant formal responsibility – then his inaction is culpable. While there are dangers of analysing organisations as if they were individuals, one can inquire into the “identity structure” in governments and international agencies that sit idly by during genocide and similar disasters (McNeill and St Clair, 2006). Concern – whether directly for others or indirectly for oneself (as in “enlightened self-interest”), is the necessary partner and supplement to the principle of capacity. Given the uncertainties in cause-effect chains at global scale, enlightened self-interest too has limited impact. Karlsson concludes that direct concern could be the most powerful criterion, and thus adds an instrumental argument for building of a global ethic, or more modestly put, for strengthening our awareness of and commitment to common goods.
Conclusion As humanity threatens to undermine its habitat, a social economics returns to core concepts and themes that became expunged from neoclassical economics: to serious examination of persons, seen as more than points of desire; to a broadened and situated conception of types of good; to study of what commodities and goods do to and for people; to a central role for public reasoning about which are public priority goods, rather than trying to operate with only a technical definition of “public good”; to an acceptance of notions of ethical responsibility and responsibilities, concerning the provision and maintenance of public priority goods, determined through public reasoning; and to close attention to institutional formats for such deliberation. This paper’s outline of the concepts suggested that social persons share some “common goods” some vital common bases; and that amongst the greatest of public priority “goods” are the very concepts of common good and responsibility. Much of this is eloquently expressed in Human Security Now, the report of the Commission on Human Security chaired by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen (CHS, 2003). The set of papers that follow present arguments and cases – including from Costa Rica, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, Rwanda, the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and various global arenas – that sustain and elaborate these contentions. References Arce, A. (2003), “Value contestations in development interventions: community development and sustainable livelihoods approaches”, Community Development Journal‘, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 199-212. Ballet, J., Mahieu, F.-R. and Radja, K. (2007), “Destabilising identity structures: the impacts of domestic and international policy in the 1994 Rwanda genocide”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, (In this issue). Banuri, T., Hyden, G., Juma, C. and Rivera, M. (1995), Sustainable Human Development, From Concept to Operation: A Guide for the Practitioner, UNDP discussion paper, United Nations Development Programme, New York. Blaikie, P., Cameron, J. and Seddon, J. (1980), Nepal in Crisis, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Cameron, J. and Ojha, H. (2007), “A deliberative ethic for development: a Nepalese journey from Bourdieu through Kant to Dewey and Habermas”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, (In this issue). CHS (2003), Human Security Now, Commission on Human Security, New York, NY. Douglas, M. and Ney, S. (1998), Missing Persons, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Doyal, L. and Gough, I. (1991), A Theory of Need, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Eriksson, J. et al. (1996), The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience – Synthesis Report, Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, Copenhagen. Gasper, D. (2000), “‘Development as freedom’: moving economics beyond commodities – the cautious boldness of Amartya Sen”, Journal of International Development, Vol. 12 No. 7, pp. 989-1001. Gasper, D. (2004), The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Gray, J. (1993), Beyond the New Right – Markets, Government and the Common Environment, Routledge, London.
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Latour, B. (2003), Politics of Nature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. McNeill, D. and St Clair, A. (2006), “Multilateral institutions, ethical discourses, and the ascription or avoidance of responsibility”, paper presented at GARNET Workshop, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Nussbaum, M. (1995), Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Nussbaum, M. (1997), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Nussbaum, M. (2001), Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge Univresity Press, Cambridge. Samuelson, P. (1954), “The pure theory of public expenditure”, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, pp. 387-9. Sen, A. (1977), “Rational fools: a critique of the behavioural foundations of economic theory”, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, reprinted in 1982, pp. 84-106. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Sen, A. (2006), Identity and Violence, Penguin, London. Swaan, A. de (1988), In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era, Polity Press, Cambridge. UNDP (1994), Human Development Report 1994, United Nations Development Programme, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Wuyts, M. (1992), “Deprivation and public need”, in Wuyts, M., Mackintosh, M. and Hewitt, T. (Eds), Development Policy and Public Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 13-37. Further reading Deneulin, S. and Townsend, N. (2007), “Public goods, global public goods, and the common good”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, pp. 19-36. Dubois, J.-L. and Trabelsi, M. (2007), “Education in pre- and post-conflict situations: relating capability and life-skill approaches”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, pp. 53-65. Forsyth, T. (2007), “Sustainable livelihood approaches and soil erosion risks: who is to judge?”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, pp. 88-102. Karlsson, S.I. (2007), “Allocating responsibilities in multi-level governance for sustainable development”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 Nos 1/2, pp. 103-26. Parfit, D. (1984), Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sen, A. (1984), “Goods and people”, in Sen, A. (Ed.), Values, Resources and Development, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Corresponding author Des Gasper can be contacted at:
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Public goods, global public goods and the common good
Public goods and the common good
Se´verine Deneulin University of Bath, Bath, UK, and
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Nicholas Townsend University of Kent, London, UK Abstract Purpose – Public economics has recently introduced the concept of global public goods as a new category of public goods whose provision is central for promoting the well-being of individuals in today’s globalized world. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which introducing this new concept in international development is helpful for understanding human well-being enhancement. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers some implications of the concept of the common good for international development. Findings – The concept of global public goods could be more effective if the conception of well-being it assumes is broadened beyond the individual level. “Living well” or the “good life” does not dwell in individual lives only, but also in the lives of the communities which human beings form. A successful provision of global public goods depends on this recognition that the “good life” of the communities that people form is a constitutive component of the “good life” of individual human beings. Originality/value – The paper suggests that the rediscovery of the concept of the common good, and identification of how to nurture it, constitute one of the major tasks for development theory and policy. Keywords Social responsibility, Globalization, Public interest Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction Globalization is a term that now permeates everyday language. Old concepts are being revised in the light of the reality of the world as a global village. The concept of public goods has not escaped this global remake. In their seminal book, Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Kaul et al. (1999) underline that people’s well-being does not depend only on the provision of public goods by national governments, but increasingly depends on the provision of global public goods that only international cooperation can secure. They argue that the concept of global public goods helps us respond to the new global challenges of the twenty-first century. The book discusses a wide range of global public goods which national governments alone cannot secure, such as financial stability, peace, the environment, and cultural heritage. For example, the well-being of Bangladeshi people might be affected by severe flooding caused by climate change which their national government can do nothing to prevent. Only international cooperation among governments at the global level can provide the Preliminary versions of the paper were presented at the DSA workshop “Peace, Security and Sustainability: Exploring Ethics in Development” Cambridge, 27-28 March 2006, and at the “Capability and Education Network” meeting at the Institute of Education, London, 19 May. The authors are very grateful to Des Gasper for his careful comments, as well as to Ian Gough. They also thank the participants for helpful suggestions.
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 19-36 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723345
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global public good of climate stability. Recognizing the existence of global public goods, and securing their provision, is central for promoting the well-being of individuals in today’s globalized world. This paper examines the extent to which introducing the concept of global public goods in international development indeed helps us to better respond to the new challenges of this century. It argues that the concept of global public goods could be more effective if the conception of well-being it assumes is broadened beyond the individual level. “Living well” or the “good life” does not dwell in individual lives only, but also in the lives of communities which human beings form. A successful provision of global public goods depends on this recognition that the “good life” of the communities that people form is a constitutive component of the “good life” of individual human beings. The second section examines the concept of public goods and discusses some problems generally associated with their provision. It underlines that in the literature public goods are considered as instrumental to individual well-being and to be provided to this end. However, there exist public goods which defy the assumption that collective action, and the ensuing public goods provision, is always instrumental to individual well-being. The third section contrasts collective goods and “common goods” and goes on to show that human action is sometimes undertaken for the sake of the good life understood as intrinsically in common. This has been referred to by the term “the common good” in the history of Western political thought. As the political community has traditionally been the highest form of community, the fourth section analyzes the concept of the political common good and clarifies some conceptual ambiguities related to it. The final section considers implications of the concept of the common good for international development. The paper concludes by suggesting that rediscovery of this concept, and identification of how to nurture the common good, constitute one of the major tasks for development theory and policy. 2. Public goods and global public goods Public goods have long been a central concept of public economics[1]. They are characterized by non-excludability and non-rivalry in their consumption. A good is non-excludable if a person’s consumption of it cannot practically be excluded. The good can in practice not be provided while keeping some customers out. It is non-rival if a person’s consumption does not reduce the benefits of someone else’s consumption of the good. A typical example of a public good is street lighting. It is there for all to benefit from, irrespective of the consumers’ contribution to its provision. The good is non-excludable as nobody passing on the street can be excluded from the lighting, and it is (more or less) non-rival as each individual on the street benefits from it without the benefit for one detracting from that for others. The literature discusses the “purity” of public goods and shows there are relatively few wholly pure examples. Street lighting is not pure to the extent that there can be rivalry in consumption, i.e. crowding out of some people from the benefits. There are less pure public goods, such as free health emergency services. A certain number of people using an emergency service does not detract from others’ access to the service, but, more obviously than with street lighting, there is a saturation point where too many people using it prevents others from doing so. Given the non-excludable and non-rival nature of public goods, they cannot be provided satisfactorily through a market mechanism but have to be provided through
some form of public action (e.g. via taxation). Public provision does not necessarily entail government provision. Public goods can be provided by other actors than governments. For example, even if a beach cleaning service is ensured by a private water company through water user fees, a clean (and publicly accessible) beach remains a “public good” (although an impure one). It is non-rival in the sense that some people using the beach do not prevent others from using it, and it may be not excludable in the sense that nobody can be acceptably excluded from using the beach, whether users have contributed to the cleaning costs or not. Our aim is not to undertake an extensive review of the literature on public goods[2]. For the sake of our argument, we would like to underline two points: that the provision of public goods is central to securing human well-being, and that, given their characteristics, public goods are open to free-riding and vulnerable to what is known as the “failure of collective action”. If we take Sen’s (1999) definition of human well-being in terms of the freedoms that people have reason to choose and value, or if we take Nussbaum’s (2000) list of central human capabilities, it is obvious that human well-being would not be secured without the existence of public goods. For example, the “freedom to be healthy” depends on the existence of basic infrastructure such as hygiene campaigns, access to basic sanitation facilities and drinkable piped water. Hygiene campaigns are a public good in the sense that posters or widespread advertising about, e.g. the spread of HIV/AIDS are available to all. My seeing the advert and receiving the information does not reduce another person’s possibility of seeing the advert (non-rival), and nobody can be excluded from seeing the posters on the street (non-excludable). The provision of a sewage system is another example of a good whose public health benefits for a city cannot exclude anybody living there (even if some lack finance needed to access it individually), and whose use by one individual does not reduce the benefits of someone else’s use of it (assuming it is adequate for the population it serves). We could go on listing all the public goods whose provision is central for human well-being. The second aspect of public goods which we would like to underline is the absence of correlation between a person’s contribution to its provision and her use of it. Consider such public goods as street lighting, road maintenance and clean beaches. Holidaymakers enjoy the use of these goods while not contributing to their provision through council taxes. Given this absence of correlation between pay and use, it has been a well-known problem that public goods are open to free-riding, that is, one can use the good while not making any contribution. Some residents in the south-west of England resent paying the highest prices for water supply in the UK on the ground that their payments cover the cost of cleaning beaches used mainly by tourists, who are in this respect free-riders. Another consequence of the characteristics of public goods is that often they are better supplied through public provision, which individuals can influence through public action[3]. If governments fail to provide the public good of accessible courts or a well functioning police force, individuals acting alone do not have power to secure their provision. What is needed is “collective action” that is, action which “arises when the efforts of two or more individuals are needed to accomplish an outcome” (Sandler, 1992, p. 1). Yet Olson’s (1965) pioneering study of The Logic of Collective Action underlined the tragedy of the absence of such action that arises from individuals balancing the costs
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of participating in it against the uncertainty of its benefits. For example, the fact that millions of people protested against the Iraq War in 2003 did not change the outcome. Given the uncertain benefits of collective action, rational individuals might prefer staying comfortably at home rather than enduring the costs of travelling to London to protest and spend a whole day in the cold and rain. This argument is also often used to explain the lack of political involvement of people living at the edge of existence. Given the uncertain benefits of political protests or campaigns, it is more rational for people to keep on working long hours for subsistence pay than to bear the costs of collective action, such as union organizations, which might not bear fruit. All benefit from a successful outcome of collective action, even if some have not participated in it. The concept of public goods has recently acquired a global dimension. Kaul et al. (1999, p. 16) define global public goods as those which “tend towards universality in the sense that they benefit all countries, population groups and generations”. They have the following characteristics “at minimum”: . their “benefits extend to more than one group of countries”; and . they “do not discriminate against any population group or any set of generations, present or future”. Anand (2004, p. 216) extends this by proposing three criteria by which a good qualifies as a “global public good”; it should: (1) cover more than one group of countries; (2) benefit not only a broad spectrum of countries but also a broad spectrum of the global population; and (3) meet the needs of the present generations without jeopardising those of the future generations. Like other public goods, global public goods vary in “purity” a pure global public good being one whose non-excludability and non-rivalry characteristics have a truly universal dimension. Some aspects of the natural environment fall into this category of pure global public goods, such as sunlight and a climate in which human habitation is possible. The benefits of such goods are accessible unevenly in different locations, but despite this they benefit the earth as a whole and, therefore, all countries, without (at least in the short or medium term) “consumption” by some preventing or reducing consumption by others, and without consumption by any country being excludable. Impure global public goods are marked by a lesser universality. Kaul et al. (1999, p. 453) arranged global public goods according to the following typology: . natural global commons (such as the ozone layer and climate stability); . human-made global commons (such as scientific and practical knowledge, principles and norms, and cultural heritage); and . global policy outcomes (such as peace, health and financial stability). Thus, global public goods are goods whose characteristics are such that their provision cannot be left to market mechanisms (unlike private goods) or national government action (unlike domestic public goods). In the absence of an international body endowed with the power of levying taxes to finance global public goods or endowed with the power of making enforceable laws to provide them, voluntary co-operation and global
collective action are currently two ways of ensuring supply of global public goods (Anand, 2004, p. 223). Voluntary donations of governments towards international development aid are one way of financing the global public good of increased knowledge of how to prevent malaria or HIV/AIDS. Global social movements, such as the green movement, are another form of action aimed at securing the global public good of a non-polluted environment. The creation of a “Global Fund” distinct from international development aid, is another way which has been proposed to provide global public goods[4]. Some authors have questioned whether the definition of public goods given in neo-classical economics (as outlined above) is adequate. They have argued that the extent to which a good is perceived as “public” does not depend as much on its inherent characteristics as on prevailing social values within a given society about what should be provided by non-market mechanisms. There are goods which possess a non-excludable and non-rival character but which societies do not value as “public”, i.e. they do not value the good as something to be provided by public provision. Wuyts (1992) gives the examples of sanitation in nineteenth century Europe and twentieth century South Africa under apartheid (Gasper, 2002). While in Europe, sanitation became a “public” issue which concerned both rich and poor – sewage systems were valued as necessary in order to prevent the spread of diseases from marginal to privileged areas – South Africa did not value sanitation as a “public” good. Instead of public provision of sanitation facilities in marginal areas, it relocated poor black people to remote townships and valued transport from the townships to privileged white areas as a “public” good worthy of state provision. Wuyts (1992) concludes that public goods are socially defined and constructed according to what is perceived as a “public need” rather than containing certain inherent characteristics of non-excludability and non-rivalry. Given this, we might call these “public priority goods”. In this way, Gasper and Wuyts point out a misleading aspect of the standard economic definition of public goods given earlier. A good which is non-excludable and non-rival might still be perceived as not worthy of public provision and hence non-“public”. In addition to this, there is another important shortcoming of the economic concept of public goods, namely that these are seen only as instrumental to each individual’s well-being. We argue that the mainstream international development theory faces a major challenge not only to incorporate the concept of global public goods into its ethical underpinnings but also to conceive of human well-being beyond the frame of reference given by individualistic socio-economic theory. The recent literature on global public goods assumes that they are instrumentally essential to a flourishing human life, and that, therefore, there is a strong case for putting mechanisms in place to provide them. Indeed, climate stability is essential to the well-being of billions of people, if not everyone, on the planet. Without it, innumerable human lives are at risk of flood, drought and or increasingly frequent extreme weather conditions. Scientific knowledge is another example of a global public good crucial to individual human well-being. The discovery of penicillin and antibiotics enabled millions of lives to be saved. Given this assumption, current debates focus on the design of the institutions necessary for their provision. Kaul et al. (1999, p. 450) conclude their study with the following policy recommendations:
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creation of international laws which address the global nature of public goods; promotion of participation of civil society at the global level; and giving people and governments the necessary incentives to take action for the provision of global public goods.
While research is being done about various ways of providing global public goods, there is little research examining the justification for their provision. Their instrumental value for individual well-being seems a sufficient justification. However, whether we look historically or trans-culturally, we can find examples of public goods which defy valuation as only instrumentally beneficial for individuals. Consider the place of cathedrals in their medieval civic settings and equivalent buildings in non-Christian societies. As well as expressing belief in a realm that transcends immediate time and place, they are an example of such human-made or natural features of a city that give it beauty and, over time, contribute to defining its identity. Cathedrals are public goods to the extent that, first, no one can be excluded from the complex combination of benefits that they give, including such identity formation and architectural beauty, and, second, the appreciation of them by some does not reduce the possibility of others receiving the same benefits. Such civic events as carnivals give a partly similar range of benefits. Such benefits accrue to people as participants in a city’s life, not to individuals conceived of as distinct from this. Moreover, often medieval cathedrals did not have an immediate favourable instrumental effect on their builders’ well-being, as these did their work for negligible monetary reward and at great health costs. Why did people put such collective effort into buildings that they would not even enjoy in their lifetime? Writing about cathedrals as among the remaining puzzles of collective action, Sandler (2001, p. 74) asks the question, “What makes generations work collectively in an effective manner for some goals and not for others?” He concludes that the existence of collective action depends on answering that question. Surprisingly, the literature on global public goods has dealt very little, if at all, with the goals underpinning collective action and the provision of global public goods. The next section argues that, when human actions are undertaken for promoting people’s well-being, it is not only the “good life” of discrete individuals which matters but also the goodness of the life that humans hold in common, which has been referred to as the “common good”. While the concept of the common good has been central in the history of Western political philosophy, it is in recent literature subject to some conceptual confusion. Before discussing the relevance of the concept of the common good for international development, we first need to seek conceptual clarity. This is what the next two sections aim to do. 3. Common goods There are several definitions of the common good. In a recent articulation of its classical conception, Dupre´ (1994, p. 173) defines it as “a good proper to, and attainable only by the community, yet individually shared by its members”. For Maritain (1946), a major Thomist Philosopher of the twentieth century, the common good is constituted by goods that humans share intrinsically in common and that they communicate to each other, such as values, civic virtues and a sense of justice. Cahill (2004, p. 9) defines the common good as “a solidaristic association of persons that is more than the good of individuals in the aggregate”. In the major recent study on the topic, Hollenbach (2002, p. 81) describes
the common good as the good of being a community, as “the good realized in the mutual relationships in and through which human beings achieve their well-being”. While these various definitions need such clarification as we hope to give, let us say in light of them that the common good is not the outcome of a collective action which makes everybody better off than if they acted individually, but is the good of that shared enterprise itself. It is the good of the community which comes into being in and through that enterprise. As these definitions already suggest, those who use this concept speak both of “common goods” plural, and of “the common good” singular, the latter being in some sense overarching, macro as opposed to micro. No doubt the language of “common good” can be used imprecisely, vaguely and rhetorically. This section aims to show how it may be used with some analytical precision and thereby to spell out the meaning it tends implicitly to have even when used without clear elucidation. We proceed by distinguishing conceptually between collective action/goods and common action/goods. People produce very many goods by acting together rather than alone because it is instrumentally necessary or (even if not necessary) convenient or efficient to do so. Examples include buildings, roads, meals for workforces, waste disposal. Each of us could build a house, of sorts, alone but we could not do so very conveniently. So we use collective action. However, once such goods have been produced, we can (at least in principle) each benefit from them alone – live in the house, travel on the road. For such goods that are produced through collective action because of instrumental necessity, convenience or efficiency, there is nothing which means their benefits cannot accrue to individuals alone. Certainly people often benefit together from such goods: they live in a house together, they eat in the workplace canteen. But sharing such goods is incidental to what makes them good if, for example, those sharing a house are neither family nor friends but do so only for reasons of economy. In this case, both the production of and the benefiting from such a good is collective, but it is the latter accidentally. While the sharing is instrumentally beneficial for each recipient, there is nothing intrinsic to the good itself which requires it to be shared. Such goods are, rather, commodities whose supply requires collective action – this undertaken for instrumental reasons but not on account of the inherent nature of the goods – and whose consumption might or might not be shared. Let us for simplicity call all such goods “collective goods”. Most if not all public goods identified as such in economics literature fall into this category. There is another, rather different, kind of shared good, comprising those which intrinsically are common goods[5]. Compare with the examples above an orchestral or choral musical performance, a celebratory dinner, or a team sport. Taking the first of these, unless the various musicians each play or sing their particular parts, performing together for the audience, the good simply could not exist at all. Its “production” is inseparable from, indeed is exactly the same thing as, the good itself: the good lies in the action together which generates it. Moreover, benefiting from the good is by participating in that action, whether in the orchestra or audience. This is to say that the shared action is intrinsic, as well as instrumental, to the good itself and also that its benefits come in the course of that shared action. Goods of this kind are, therefore, inherently common in their “production” and in their benefits.
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Suppose a well has been dug in a village which means that women of the village no longer have to walk long distances for water. Despite the convenience of the well in the village, sometimes the women might decide still to walk together outside the village to get water, because this is a good opportunity to be together as a group, an experience the benefits of which are inseparable from its being shared. That is, their walking together is inherently a common good – they have no need to do it for any other end than being together and its “goodness” for them comes from the action itself being common. Their walk is analogous to the concert or team game. A characteristic of common goods is that they cannot be chosen by individuals alone. They can neither be constructed by individuals separately, nor are they a collectively generated “resource bank” available to individuals to choose, or not choose, from. Yet neither do they exist only because of some kind of forced co-operation. Common goods exist because of a tradition of shared action which makes them possible, and in which people participate freely, thereby sustaining and developing it. Of course particular people may freely choose to begin to participate or to cease to do so. But, rather than being attainable simply by individual choice of a pre-existing resource, such goods exist only in the common action that generates them. Collective goods and common goods are similar, then, in that to exist they both require shared action. But for collective goods, this is accidental to the nature of the good itself, whereas for common goods, it is intrinsic. Collective action that extends the range of commodities from among which individuals can choose to benefit cannot make available common goods to anyone. These require something qualitatively different, co-ordination of action with others because the good for each is found in this itself. To the extent that human wellbeing is constituted by benefiting from common goods, public policy may undermine rather than contribute to human wellbeing if it fails to recognise common goods and so is formed and implemented without such recognition. Its effects could make some very valuable common goods unsustainable or even directly destroy them. Relatively little attention has been given to common goods in development economics, largely because its ethical foundations have been articulated in terms of the preferences or free choices of individuals, as we will discuss in the fifth section. Moving beyond such “micro” common goods, we may speak of “the common good” when what is in view is not just a one-off common good (such as in the examples given, a concert, a team game, a shared walk) but is one that endures through time and, in particular, is a good for a group of people whose lives interact in multiple ways, usually because they share the same physical living space. This could be a monastery, a village or town, the ancient polis or the modern city. The common good of a town is analogous to a concert, but one that continues indefinitely. As the residents participate in the life of the town, they generate a good that could not exist otherwise and which is partly constitutive of the wellbeing of each of them. Consider the city of London: to the extent that in our work and travel and play we participate in the irreducibly common actions of, say, crowds, queues, rush-hour, Sunday afternoon on the London South Bank, and so on (ad infinitum), we help to engender an extraordinarily complex and obviously irreducibly common good – one entirely unavailable to any of the individuals concerned acting separately. The good of any communal or cultural entity cannot be reduced to goods which could in principle be enjoyed by each of its constituent
members alone. Such a common good is definitive of “community” as opposed to of a collectivity. The latter’s purpose is instrumental to production of goods such as public goods, whereas the former’s end is the common good its shared life itself generates. We speak of the common good because it is not just a discrete and passing common good, but is that of people together precisely as they form a community. In concluding this section, it may be worth emphasising two clarifying points. First, there are of course both common goods and common “bads”. Analytically, what makes a good common is not what makes it good. Many would see rush-hour as a “bad” even if at the same time it has some part in what people appreciate in a city’s life overall. Racism always corrupts a common good; the apartheid laws structured a common bad. At a “micro” level, it is obvious that what can be the great common goods of friendship, marriage and family prove often to be “bads” (although a reason for this could sometimes be that participants assume they are commodities and so misunderstand how they can be common goods). Our aim is not to romanticise common goods. The second point is related: to refer to the common good of a town, city, etc. does not imply for a moment that what this good actually consists in will be agreed by all; on the contrary, this may be and usually is highly contested. Yet recognising this does not nullify the claim that we may speak of “the common good” in this way. Indeed in the Aristotelian conception which more than any other has contributed to forming Western thought on this issue, deliberation together about what constitutes the good of the polis formed an inherent part of its common good. This leads us to a further conceptual clarification regarding the concept of the common good, namely that the common good is a specifically political concept which has implications for the role of political action. 4. The political common good Let us first notice that, just as speaking of the common good of a community does not imply that there will be agreement within it about the “content” of that common good, so also speaking of the common goods of various neighbouring or overlapping communities does not imply that these will be easily in harmony. On the contrary, dominant understandings of their respective common goods within such communities, and corresponding practices, may well be in sharp conflict. Consider a village in rural El Salvador from which many adult males have migrated to the US for work and send back earnings as remittances. Suppose, further, that such migrants pool a large proportion of the remittances in a common fund in order to finance services such as schools, roads, public parks and health centres. They do this given the state’s apparent inability to provide such services, motivated by concern for the “common good” of their community, as a “solidaristic association of persons”. However, the common good of the local community understood in this way might clash with the common good of another grouping. While migration might be good for improving the common life of the village, it might harm the common life of families who have to cope with the male members of the family abroad. While the solidaristic association of the local community is in this way reinforced through migration, the solidaristic association of the family might be under strain. It might also have negative consequences for the solidaristic association of the country as a whole. Migration may have perverse effects on redistributive policies, reducing the level of solidarity among inhabitants of the same country – the central state does not have incentives to finance public services for the poor or to implement redistributive policies since the poor
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finance these services themselves by migrating to Northern countries[6]. This example immediately draws attention to three levels of community – family, local and national – and makes clear that a recognition that we may speak of the common good in relation to all these (and other) levels is not naı¨ve about conflict. The pervasiveness of such tensions and conflicts in practice points to the potential benefits that a more central political authority may bring in seeking to resolve such tensions and conflicts justly. This brings us to what we could call the “special” sense that “the common good” has conventionally had in western political thought. It has been used especially of the one sovereign or “perfect” political community, in relation to which “lower-level” communities are seen as parts of a whole. Such an understanding stems from Aristotle and was given more developed expression by Aquinas (1981). The latter used the term “public good” to refer to the common good of the specifically political community in the sense of that which has sovereignty and, therefore, authority over “lesser” communities within it. He was taking inspiration from Aristotle for whom the highest good is that of the polis[7]. Aristotle understood this distinctly political community as one endowed with the power to deliberate about what is just and unjust, and the power to make laws on the basis of that deliberation[8]. Aquinas followed Aristotle’s definition of a political community. This public good may be distinguished in Aquinas’s usage from the private goods of individuals and the private common goods of families and households (Finnis, 1998b, p. 179). The common good of the political community, that is, the “public good” is related to individual goods but is not their sum[9]. Rather the relationship is that of the whole and its parts (ratio totius et partes): The common good is the end [purpose/goal] of individual persons who live in community, in the same way as the good of the whole is the end of all its parts[10].
The influence of Aquinas’s use of the term “public good” to refer specifically to the common good of the political community has given rise to some confusion in contemporary ethics: the economic and political definitions are often mixed together, with the “common good” sometimes used to refer to the modern economic understanding of “public good”. For example, Geuss (2001, p. 37) writes that, “The common good is [. . .] an increase in the number of temples and bridges usable by all”. Or: The most primitive notion of the common good is of some external state of affairs that members of a group would do well to bring about, such as building a dam or bridge (Geuss, 2001, p. 46).
What members of a group do well together is obviously to be distinguished from what they bring about (the commodity of a public good in the economic sense). The latter is external to, and independent of, the relationships which exist among the members of a society. In contrast, the common good inheres in the relationships themselves (Hollenbach, 2002, p. 8). It lies in their being and doing together, not in a separate outcome that this produces. It is worth noting that some writers have questioned whether the “public good” in Aquinas’s sense has intrinsic or only instrumental value. In interpreting Aquinas, Finnis (1998b, p. 187) argues that the common good specific to the political community is instrumental to individual flourishing, even if it is inherently inter-personal (for example, distributive justice and peace):
The specifically political common good is instrumental to make people good citizens. It is to assist individuals and families do well what they should be doing.
Other interpretations of Aquinas point in another direction. Pakaluk (2001) argues that Finnis’s interpretation of the political common good as instrumental to individual flourishing is internally inconsistent. On the one hand, Finnis holds that the private common good of marriage is inherently good. The union of two partners is not only instrumental to each other’s well-being. On the other hand, he holds the view that the specifically political common good is instrumental to the well-being of each of the members of the political community. According to Pakaluk (2001, p. 64), Finnis has not given sufficient reasons for this way of distinguishing between the two: If we say that one’s relationship to one’s spouse is somehow constitutive of a person’s happiness [or well-being], and thus not a mere means to it, why not the same of one’s relationship to fellow citizens generally?
While adjudication between rival interpretations of Aquinas is not the primary purpose here, Finnis’s reading sits very oddly against the background of the Aristotelian “civic humanist” tradition, of which the defining feature is the claim that human wellbeing is found in participation in the life of the polis and which finds expression deeply in Aquinas, in the context of a Christian theological worldview. Civic humanism’s claim is that the common action generated by such participation is where the good life is experienced or enjoyed; the “public good” so understood is not only instrumental to some other set of “private” goods. The shared life of the political community is a good in itself. It is what “enable[s] people both to participate actively in building up the common good and to share in the benefits of the common good” (Hollenbach, 2002, p. 201). Low political participation confines people to pursuing the good they can in their private lives, limiting their freedom to determine the conditions of the life they share together (Hollenbach, 2002, p. 100). Conceiving the common good as the good of the specifically political community raises the immediate question of what in practice the “specifically political” community is. Is such political community defined by the borders of a nation-state? Addressing this very important question would be the subject of another paper. What we would like to highlight here is that, just as there is potential conflict among communities at different levels about what constitute their common goods, there is also potential conflict among what members of different “sovereign” political communities understand to be their common goods. Some authors, such as Lisa Cahill, are increasingly aware of the limitations of conceiving the common good within the limits of the political community defined by the boundaries of the nation-state. Cahill (2005, p. 54) argues that the concept of the common good articulated by Aquinas and the Catholic social tradition is outdated. She proposes the concept of the “global common good” which she defines as “participation of all peoples in a diverse and differentiated, yet solidaristic and collaborative, world society”. Research on the concept of the global common good is at a very incipient stage, and is an avenue of inquiry which is beyond the scope of this paper. We have given attention to Aquinas’s understanding because of his use of “public good” for the common good of the specifically political community. This has created, as underlined earlier, some confusion with the economic concept of public goods. Let us
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clarify the conceptual differences between public goods in the economic sense on the one hand and common goods, both micro and macro, on the other. We note four points. First, in one important respect, public goods and common goods appear similar, namely that in the same sense in which public goods are non-rival, common goods are also. Consider the examples of the common goods of orchestral performances and team games. So long as all of the participants in the common action that generates the common good sustain their participation in this, all participants benefit from the good in question. It is not possible for some to consume some part of them so that less is left for others. This is because “consumption” is inseparable from “production”. Indeed, common goods appear to be more than non-rival, in the sense that their supply can increase when people “consume” them, as goods such as friendship and mutual love or trust show. A second point can be made about the non-rivalry criterion, this time drawing attention to a contrast. Whereas the purity of public goods is limited by the potential for saturation, that of common goods is threatened by a kind of opposite, non-participation. Their pure status is diminished to the extent that there is withdrawal from or distortion of participation in the common action that generates them. Adultery distorts marriage because, at least in the traditional Christian and Western understanding, the common good of marriage is constituted in part by mutual practice of fidelity. Divorce that might follow adultery means intentional withdrawal by at least one spouse from the participation that generates the common good. This “micro” example indicates that common goods are vulnerable to non-participation just as public goods are vulnerable to saturation. Third, in respect of the quality of non-excludability, there are senses in which common goods both share and do not share this with public goods. The latter is the more obvious: common goods, whether micro or macro, are almost always defined by reference to a specific group of people – a couple, family, town, nation-state, etc. – and they describe a good primarily for this group. Other people, therefore, are not only excludable but are, in a sense, excluded. To put this differently, given that common goods are generated by participation, non-participants cannot benefit from them in what might be called an “internal” or “immediate” way. However, the benefits of such common goods can “spill over” to others and they often do so, for example, through hospitality: some learn what good family life is like not through their own but through being welcome in another. While common goods are in that obvious way not non-excludable, for “internal” participants themselves they do share this quality of public goods. When someone is able to participate – to play in the orchestra, to take part in civic life – she benefits from the good (she cannot be excluded) because the good is received in participation itself. Evidently these contrasting features of common goods with respect to non-excludability mean that definition of the boundaries of the “community” in which the common good inheres is important. While full exploration of the issues is beyond the scope of this paper, we note two points. One is that at least some common goods depend on specifying who may participate, for example, members of the orchestra or two teams of 11 players. The second point is potentially more important for international development: in the case of macro common goods, if the good is to exist at all, then enabling those who theoretically are members of the relevant community to participate in practice is a prerequisite. While the concept of “social
exclusion” that is prominent in social policy discourse can be read simply in terms of exclusion from consumption, it can also be interpreted in terms of exclusion from the possibility of benefiting from the common good. This suggests the importance of a concept of necessary conditions for the possibility of participation in the common good. Fourth, the typology of global public goods presented by Kaul et al. and outlined above includes in its category of “human-made global commons” goods such as “cultural heritage” and “norms and principles”. “Cultural life” undoubtedly denotes a common good – it exists only as people participate in it. The degree of solidarity which inheres in a given society, or what Kaul et al. call “equity” is another instance of a true common good. We suggest that “global public goods” such as scientific knowledge (which is a product of collective action) need to be carefully distinguished from “common goods” which inhere truly in action in common, rather than being its product. When participation in the common good of solidarity ceases, the common good ceases to exist. When collective action to produce scientific knowledge ceases, knowledge produced remains available. Even if, as just indicated, there are ways in which common goods have a non-excludable and non-rival character like neo-classical public goods, these two features are presented in terms of participation and generation of the goods themselves and not in terms of consumption of a commodity. This suggests that the typology presented by Kaul et al. could be misleading in presenting some common goods as public goods. 5. Concluding remarks: well-being and the common good One reason for drawing attention to the concept of the common good in current development ethics is simply that widespread assumptions about human well-being among theorists and policy-makers lead to it being overlooked. A consequence is that the question of whether giving it attention in policy-making might lead to real benefits for people is not addressed. We suggest, in concluding, that the concept of the common good is of non-negligible significance for international development. Development ethics has tended in its underlying assumptions about human well-being to espouse, whether deliberately or by default, what can be called (following Taylor, 1985) “atomism”. According to atomism, society is conceived as a large number of distinct individuals, or atoms, each pursuing their own conception of the good life. They may see this in hedonist terms, as a matter of maximising pleasure, or in libertarian terms, as a matter of maximising individual free choice, or in “expressivist” terms, as a matter of each individual giving full expression to what is unique within him or her. Such atomistic conceptions of human well-being combine well with recognition of contemporary value pluralism: there is no longer a shared common conception of the “good human life” let alone the “good polity” so people just have to determine for themselves how they will live and what it means for themselves to live a “good life”. John Rawls’s theory of justice has been the most influential articulation of a political philosophy that appears to fit with atomism: endowed with a set of primary goods, individuals are free to pursue the good life as they each conceive it, provided they respect the two principles of justice[11]. Amartya Sen’s capability approach can be ranged alongside “atomistic” theories of the good in the sense that the end of development and political action is to expand the freedoms that individuals have reason to choose and value. Development is a matter of giving more opportunities for each individual to live a life of his or her choice.
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This does not mean that other people’s lives do not enter into an individual’s conception of the good life; indeed other regarding concerns such as sympathy and commitment can be central elements within what a person has reason to choose and value. This does not mean either that common goods such as family relationships do not enter as components of individual well-being (Sen, 2002). What this means is that no teleological account of the good that societies ought to promote beyond (individual) freedom is offered. While Sen’s capability approach has focused on the well-being of individuals as the end of development, the common good tradition outlined in the previous two sections leads to a conception of human freedom as oriented towards a telos which includes both the good of individuals and the good of the communities in which individuals live. One could argue that Nussbaum’s (2000) capabilities approach is an attempt to anchor the “freedoms that people have reason to choose and value” within the telos of the good human life. However, her version, with her list of central human capabilities, continues to situate the telos of all human actions in the freedom of each individual to live a life of her choice. One could also argue that there are traces of the common good tradition within Sen’s capability approach itself. Dre`ze and Sen (2002) emphasise the crucial importance of political participation as an intrinsic component of human well-being. Public debate is indeed central for articulating a society’s values and fleshing out the capabilities that people have reason to choose and value (Sen, 2004a, b). Despite these traces, the capability approach remains centred on the freedoms of individuals when it comes to assessing development and does not explicitly acknowledge the goodness of life in common in its ethical evaluation of states of affairs[12]. Introducing the concept of global public goods leaves the current foundations of development ethics unchanged. Global public goods are commodities which contribute to giving better opportunities for each individual to live a life she chooses to live. The global public good of climate stability enables individuals more fully to live lives of their choice with less risk of damage from extreme weather. The global public good of scientific knowledge such as of the vaccine against tuberculosis, enables millions of people not to have their life shortened or damaged by the disease and so increases their choices. The global public good of peace gives opportunities to people to live a life they have reason to choose and value without it being hampered by conflict and its consequences. Such global public goods can be understood, then, as serving to improve the lives of individuals by expanding their opportunities to live a life of their choice. The concept of the common good takes us beyond seeing the well-being of discrete individuals as the only proper goal or telos of human action. It enables recognition that there are goods, including many that are non-trivial for human well-being, the benefits of which may be received by people only in a common enterprise. Of course, the people who benefit from such goods can be conceived of discretely. The point is that it is only in relationships, structured as necessary to enable the common action that “produces” common goods, that lives which benefit from such goods can be lived. In this way, the good for each person can be conceived of only by reference to the good of the others with whom her good is possible. Analysis which focuses only on individual preferences or choices cannot capture common goods because what makes them good is
endogenous to the living of the life in which those goods are simultaneously generated and enjoyed. Seeing development ethics founded not only on the idea of the freedom of each individual to live a life she has reason to choose and value but also on the idea of the common good has different implications for our understanding of what governments should do to promote human flourishing. In the former perspective, political authority is limited to securing the right of individuals to choose and to enabling them to exercise their choice. For example, political authority should guarantee adequate provision of food so that people have the “capability to be well nourished should they so choose” (to take Sen’s well-known fasting monk vs starving child example). Nussbaum (2000) has strongly argued that the role of political authority is to give opportunities for each individual to exercise central human capabilities, should they choose so, but is not to require them to do so. Political authority is seen as enabling and coordinating collective action to secure public goods which are conducive to improving individual well-being. But collective action is not motivated by any other goal other than the instrumental value of the public good for each individual’s life. Individuals willingly pay taxes to finance an extensive road network and efficient refuse disposal service so that they can better live the life they choose to live. The community in which people live, such as the city or nation-state, is instrumentally useful for the generation of goods sought by separate individuals who consume goods together (bridges, sewage systems, the police). We have argued that, what international development crucially needs is not only another category of commodities such as global public goods, understood as securing or increasing the possibilities for individual choice, but also a conception of the good life in common. Recognising the life in common of a city or nation as a species of good unavailable to anyone except by the irreducibly common action which makes it what it is raises further questions. Among these are: how is the common good generated or nurtured and how can we ensure that the common life of a community is good and not bad? Addressing these questions would require again another paper. We emphasise here that there is no guarantee that participation in common action will generate something genuinely good. It might lead to bringing into power a government which might use nuclear weapons or which introduces unjust structures such as those of apartheid[13]. Human actions are always fallible because they are human. However, that the “possibility of moral evil is inherent in man’s constitution”[14] does not nullify the claim that the good for each of us is found and sustained in relationships, whether at the level of the family, neighbourhood, country or the world, and that public policy ought to recognize and nurture them if it is not to undermine human well-being. Notes 1. The standard concept was introduced in economic theory by Samuelson in 1954. See Hudson and Jones (2005) for a discussion of Samuelson’s concept of public goods, and the way voters perceive the degree of “publicness” of public goods. 2. For summaries of the literature on public goods, see Cornes and Sandler (1996), Cowen (1992) and Sandler (2001). 3. Dre`ze and Sen (2002, p. v) define public action as “policy and governance, on the one side, and cooperation, disagreement and public protest on the other”.
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4. For discussion of different modalities for financing global public goods, see Anand (2004) and Sandler (2002). 5. The term “common goods” is a synonym for what Taylor (1995) calls “irreducibly social goods”. We prefer to use the term “common good” instead in order to better render account of the linkages between a common good at the micro level and the common good at the macro level. This discussion owes much to Taylor’s work. 6. For a discussion on the linkages between migration and the common good, see Deneulin (2006a). 7. “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest good of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good” (Aristotle, 1995, 1252a1-6). 8. “Hence, it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. [. . .] Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. [. . .] The power of speech is intended to set forth [. . .] the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state”(Aristotle, 1995, 1253a1-17). “Justice is the bond of men in states; for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society” (Aristotle, 1995, 1253a37-40). 9. Summa Theologica Qu. 58 art 7. ad secundum. For Aquinas on the common good, see especially Finnis (1998a). 10. Summa Theologica IIaIIae qu. 58 art 9 ad. 3. 11. Note that this does not imply that Rawls’s theory is dependent on or entails atomism. 12. Nussbaum’s version does so to some extent; but see Deneulin (2006b, chapters 2 and 3) on the absence of a telos in both Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach beyond individual freedom. 13. For a discussion of unjust structures, see Deneulin et al. (2006). 14. “What is meant by calling man fallible? Essentially this: that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in man’s constitution” (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 133). References Anand, P.B. (2004), “Financing the provision of global public goods”, World Economy, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 215-37. Aquinas, T. (1981), Summa Theologica, Christian Classics, Allen, TX, Complete English edition, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Aristotle (1995) in Barnes, J. (Ed.), Politics, The Complete Works of Aristotle,Vol. 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, Revised Oxford Translation. Cahill, L.S. (2004), Bioethics and the Common Good, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, WI. Cahill, L.S. (2005), “Globalisation and the common good”, in Coleman, J.A. and Ryan, W.F. (Eds), Globalization and Catholic Social Thought: Present Crisis, Future Hope, St Paul University, Ottawa, pp. 42-54. Cornes, R. and Sandler, T. (1996), The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cowen, T. (1992), Public Goods and Market Failures, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ.
Deneulin, S. (2006a), “Individual well-being, migration remittances and the common good”, European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 45-61. Deneulin, S. (2006b), The Capability Approach and the Praxis of Development, Palgrave/Macmillan, Basingstoke. Deneulin, S., Nebel, M. and Sagovsky, N. (2006), Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach, Kluwer/Springer Verlag, Dordrecht. ` Dreze, J. and Sen, A. (2002), India: Development and Participation, Oxford University Press, Delhi. Dupre´, L. (1994), “The common good and the open society”, in Douglas, R.B. and Hollenbach, D. (Eds), Catholicism and Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 172-95. Finnis, J. (1998a), Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Finnis, J. (1998b), “Public good: the specifically political common good in aquinas”, in George, R.P. (Ed.), Natural Law and Moral Inquiry, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 174-209. Gasper, D. (2002), “Fashion, learning and values in public management: reflections on South African and international experience”, Africa Development, Vol. 27 Nos 3/4, pp. 17-47. Geuss, R. (2001), Public Goods, Private Goods, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Hollenbach, D. (2002), The Common Good and Christian Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hudson, J. and Jones, Ph. (2005), “‘Public goods’: an exercise in calibration”, Public Choice, Vol. 124, pp. 267-82. Kaul, I., Grunberg, I. and Stern, M.A. (Eds) (1999), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Maritain, J. (1946), The Person and the Common Good, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN. Nussbaum, M. (2000), Women and Human Development, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Olson, M. (1965), The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Pakaluk, M. (2001), “Is the common good of political society limited and instrumental?”, Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 55 No. 1, pp. 57-94. Ricoeur, P. (1986), Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley, Fordham University Press, New York, NY. Sandler, T. (1992), Collective Action: Theory and Applications, Harvester, London. Sandler, T. (2001), Economic Concepts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sandler, T. (2002), “Financing international public goods”, in Ferroni, M. and Mody, A. (Eds), International Public Goods: Incentives, Measurement, and Financing, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sen, A. (2002), “Symposium on development as freedom: response to commentaries”, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 78-86. Sen, A. (2004a), “Capabilities, lists and public reason”, Feminist Economics, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 77-80. Sen, A. (2004b), “Elements of a theory of human rights”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 32 No. 4, pp. 315-56.
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Taylor, C. (1985), “Atomism”, in Taylor, Ch. (Ed.), Philosophical Papers II: Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, pp. 187-211. Taylor, C. (1995), “Irreducibly social goods”, in Taylor, Ch. (Ed.), Philosophical Arguments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 127-45. Wuyts, M. (1992), “Deprivation and public need”, in Wuyts, M., Mackintosh, M. and Hewitt, T. (Eds), Development Policy and Public Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 13-37.
36 About the authors Se´verine Deneulin is a Lecturer in International Development, Department of Economics and International Development, University of Bath. Se´verine Deneulin is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
[email protected] Nicholas Townsend is a Lecturer in Christian Ethics, South East Institute of Theological Education/University of Kent, London. E-mail:
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Destabilising identity structures
The impacts of policy programs
The impacts of domestic and international policy programs in the 1994 Rwanda genocide Je´roˆme Ballet, Franc¸ois-Re´gis Mahieu and Katia Radja
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University of Versailles Saint Quentin, Versailles, France Abstract Purpose – To analyze the impact of policy on people’s identities, and the conflicts which can result from this. Design/methodology/approach – The case of the Rwanda genocide is used to examine identity disturbances related to policies. Findings – Identity adjustments generated by policies can have devastating effects such as genocide. This raises the issue of national decision makers’ responsibilities as well as those of the international institutions advocating and enforcing such policies. Research limitations/implications – This study implies that we need to consider the impacts of policies on people’s identities and to extend such empirical research. Practical implications – The issue of institutions’ responsibilities must be discussed, for both national and international institutions; and a precautionary principle in decision making must be set for expert advisors. Originality/value – The paper addresses the links between economic policies and their effects on individual identity, an area which has not yet been examined in economic studies. Keywords Public policy, Conflict, Social responsibility, Genocide, Rwanda Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction The question of individual identity is not new in economics but a growing number of studies have emerged recently (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000, 2005). However, the links between economic policies and their effects on individual identity have not been yet examined in economic studies. Our paper tackles this issue. It stresses the impacts of policies on individuals’ identity structures and the effects of such a change in identity structure. Consequently, it raises the question of policymakers’ responsibilities and proposes a social precautionary principle. In the first section, we stress the idea of “identity structure”. Each person is defined by an identity structure comprising several elements ranked according to circumstances. On the one hand, we consider that identity is arranged in several domains (family, work, friendship, etc.), forming a set of elements of the self; on the other hand, we assume that this set is structured and typically displays a stable ranking among its elements. In the second section, we illustrate our analysis with the example of Rwanda in the nineties. We underline that economic policies and programs may strongly affect identity structure, so much so that people may shape and modify the ranking of the The authors express their gratitude to Des Gasper and P.B. Anand for their comments on previous versions of this paper.
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 37-52 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723354
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elements determining their identity structure. In such circumstances, consequences can be disastrous, as seen in the Rwanda experience. In a third section, the vulnerability of the identity structure (and indeed of some other structures) leads us to argue in favour of a social precautionary principle which would be applied in economic policy programs. This principle involves the issue of the responsibility of national and international institutions for dramatic experiences which they have helped to cause. Identity and the structure of self-definition According to Moldoveanu and Stevenson (2001), we find two divergent approaches in relation to the issue of personal identity. On the one hand, to use their terminology, an “Aristotelian” approach designates the person as a unity; on the other hand, a “Heraclitian” approach considers “Self” as a broken up entity, comprising a set of elements without connection and in conflict. Between these two traditions, these authors try to solve the individual identity issue by reference to coordination[1]. In fact, the question of unity or multiplicity in individual identity has given rise to debates between these two approaches. According to Williams (1976), to speak about the multiplicity of the “Self” is a nonsense, but this assertion seems to rest on an Aristotelian presumption incorporated into language. Thus, on the contrary, other authors (De Sousa, 1976; Dennett, 1978; Hofstadter, 1981; Lycan, 1981) argue for the idea of a multiplicity of the “Self”. De Sousa (1976) illustrates this multiplicity through a simple and hierarchic structure of elements named “Homunculi”. Economic theory has also been confronted with this question. Through the conception of a multiplicity of the “Self” Steedman and Krause (1986) consider that the individual optimizes his behaviour and solves his “Self” conflict in the same way that he optimizes his choices by selection of a basket of goods. But most of the debate has dealt with the question of the unity of the person and of the “Self” across time in relation with the individual’s rationality. Elster (1977) interprets for instance the existence of time preference as a form of “akrasia”. Hence, he considers that rationality, in terms of economic meaning, is called into question since choices made in a given period can be later reconsidered in a hypothetical way and can cause regrets. In this perspective, Ainslie (1982, 1986) underlines the dichotomy of priorities between the short and the long-term. Thaler and Sefrin (1981) see the issue in terms of “self-control”. Then they analyze the achieved strategies by individuals to solve the tensions they face concerning the coherence of choices across time. For Ballet and Radja (2005), identity changes occurring over time are analyzed with reference to emotional shocks and changes which affect individuals. More recently, Ballet and Bazin (2006) adopt a static vision on the multiplicity of identity and develop a model of tensions within identity schemes. Following this model, our objective is to conceive identity as a multiplicity of ranked elements. However, two differences must be noted. First, the Ballet-Bazin model focuses on the motivations of economic agents and their links with the person’s choices, reflecting finally his/her identity. Here in contrast, we do not emphasize the motivations issue and we conceive identity through a set of objective and subjective elements to which the person refers in order to be identified. In other words, the person is characterized by a set of objective and subjective elements which are used for defining an identity. Also, the previous model is static and analyses identity tensions for a given time. We insist
here instead on identity transformations across time, through changes occurring in the ranking of elements defining identity. We propose an approach that treats identity as a ranking of characteristics. Let us consider that the person may be represented by a set of characteristics (V): V ¼ {c1; . . . ; ci; . . . ; cn} These characteristics are either of an objective nature such as the age and sex, or of a more subjective nature such as the fact of being selfish or not, risk-oriented or risk-averse, tolerant or intolerant, etc. We underline two aspects. Firstly, these characteristics are defined on domains. Secondly, and linked with the first aspect, these characteristics allow the person to become identified with other persons and so to form a community of membership (To¨nnies, 1944). So, a person will feel belonging to or become identified with the old persons community, women, and/or other forms of community. Of course we use the term “community” in the broad sense as a group of individuals recognizing themselves mutually. Moreover, the community is perceived as a subjective group with unstable borders since some characteristics can be used or not by any potential member to become identified. So, we do not consider the community as an objective entity defined by an outside look, but as a subjective group of individuals having a feeling of membership. In this intersubjectivity, the type of altruism is a key factor: altruism is related to the picture of everyone by others and the picture of others by myself (Ballet and Mahieu, 2003a). These forms of altruism can be volatile: depending upon events, they can be benevolent, malevolent or neutral, ranging across a spectrum. So, in the identity structure we find both structural (or permanent) characteristics and conjunctural (or temporary) features Because of the multiplicity of characteristics, every person will feel more or less close to some others, and therefore, becomes identified more or less with several communities of membership. These multiple memberships can bring no problem, but in a lot of cases, as soon as the individual comes to make choices, identity tensions come out (for instance, in spouse selection or choices of transfers, e.g. altruistic behaviour, among several groups). So every person comes to establish a ranking of these memberships according to how (s)he weights the characteristics. Let us consider the person k, and his/her ranked set of weightings of characteristics: ckj s ckn s · · · s cki where cki is the characteristic i of individual k. Note that these characteristics are individual and can be arranged according to community affiliations that can be multiple for a given period of time. Obviously, an individual can simultaneously value several characteristics in the same way. This ranking gives an identity structure. We argue that this ranking can be restructured when changes in environment and circumstances occur. In other words, the individual’s identity through his set of memberships is not frozen across time. Some characteristics or memberships strongly weighted in a given period can be downgraded compared to other characteristics or memberships in the next period.
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For instance, consider that the person k in period t has this ranking: k;t k;t ck;t n s cj s · · · s ci
and in period t þ 1 a new ranking:
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cnk;tþ1 s cik;tþ1 s · · · s ck;tþ1 j How and why do such changes occur? We undertake such an analysis in the following section for the specific case of Rwanda at the beginning of the 1990s. Identity disturbances and conflicts: the case of Rwanda Genocide begins with the reconsideration of identity. A person’s sense of self is embedded in a social context. Seeing oneself through the eyes of the others can be considered as a variety of altruism in the common sense. For instance, created signs – a yellow star in Europe, a blue scarf in Cambodia, differentiated housing (ghettos) – may refer to characteristics, even imaginary characteristics (persons’ height and religious origins in Rwanda and Burundi). In most of the cases identities are re-built and controlled by the State to marginalize some social groups. In 1994, the genocide of Rwanda caused the death of nearly 800,000 persons in a record time of three months. The ethnic conflict left stigmata for numerous generations. The identification with one camp or other is marked for a long time, giving definitely an identity for individuals. How could identity membership lead to such genocide? The simplest thesis considers ethnic membership as an objective datum and as an essential variable for understanding the conflict. In this exogenous vision of ethnocide and ethnic groups, economic fragmentation is postulated as if ethnic groups had a real existence. For instance, Easterly and Levine (1997) have constructed an indicator of ethnic fragmentation on the basis of data published by Soviet geographers. So an indicator may be conceived with the number of ethnic groups and the population of each ethnic group. Then regressions may be done between the number of ethnic groups and the economic performance. According to these authors, ethnic diversity helps to explain the relatively poor economic performances in Africa. The economic analysis of conflicts (Collier and Hoeffler, 1998) has shown faint relations between the numbers of ethnic groups and the frequency of conflicts. Under certain assumptions, risks of conflicts can be calculated according to the number of ethnic groups. Bates (2000) points out for instance that this risk follows a U curve in relation to the number of ethnic groups. We adopt some arguments which aim at rejecting this type of analysis. Ethnic identity is only one element among others in the definition of the individual’s identity. In the case of Rwanda, one of the mysteries is related to rugo, the basic economic unit which can eventually be subdivided into several rugos according to the natural increase of the initial family. Unions could have been tied with persons who issued from different ethnic groups. The community of blood is coupled with a community of membership, this membership being a representation of the person by the others[2]. Our analysis tries to understand how the ethnic variable has been weighted in persons’ identity structure. As De Lame (1996) and Verwimp (2003) underline, ethnicity played no role in the daily activities of the peasants in the past. As discussed above, we consider the identification of persons as a subjective process. Since, the 1930s, the introduction of the identity card in Rwanda explicitly assigned an ethnic origin and conduced towards a quasi-objective acceptance of an ethnic membership
categorization. But even in that case, ethnicity is not an objective datum, it is only the cultural product of a policy. We need also an analysis of the use of the ethnic variable in the genocide. We consider that ideological factors highlight the ethnicity variable in the identity structure so that this structure is V ¼ {c1,. . . c E,. . . cn} with cE the ethnic characteristic. At the same time, we also judge that ideological factors are not sufficient to understand the key role of this variable in the genocide. In other words, ideological factors do not by themselves explain the predominance of the ethnicity variable in the identity structure during the 1990s: cEk;1990 s c3k;1990 s · · · s ck;1990 1 We highlight the role of economic factors in the excessive valorization of the ethnicity variable. We examine two questions. The first one concerns the factors which have influenced the change of the identity structure. The second deals with the issue that individuals were finally influenced by this variable to kill their neighbours. These two questions are distinct because the ethnic variable, or any other variables, can become predominant in the identity structure without resulting in such a cataclysm. Uvin (1998), for example, offers a detailed study of the impacts of development policies implemented by NGOs and the international community. According to him, these policies had in most cases some consequences for peasants, of humiliation and frustration. Yet while his work is rich in terms of analyses, it does not sufficiently elucidate the question of participation in genocide. The link from frustration and humiliation to crime needs to be examined. Our objective is not to review all the factors having contributed to the genocide. It is recognised that the history of the ethnicisation started in the distant past and was transformed into conflicts and recurrent civil acts of violence leading to a real civil war in the 1980s (Eriksson, 1996). We focus on the economic factors in order to throw light on the responsibilities of politics and institutions in development. The economic factors that contributed to conflict Genocide emerged in a conducive economic context. We posit the conjunction of three main factors. This does not mean that other factors did not play an important role. But we consider that the three factors we introduce had in most cases the effect of changing the position of the ethnicity variable in the rank-order in the identity structure. In the following section, we introduce elements that contributed to genocide, principally linked to policies encouraged by international institutions, but that did not, in our view, contribute directly in the building of the identity structure, but rather came to destabilize and worsen the already dangerous situation. The first factor is demographic-economic. It concerns the scarcity of land and more particularly the density of population. Bonneux (1994) and King (1994) consider that overpopulation is the determinant of conflicts. According to these authors, the density of population was so strong that the youngest could not have access to land, which would have led them to extreme violence in their behaviour. Such analysis remains however very summary. Andre´ (2005) offered a more detailed view of the problem. She also underlines that land becomes comparatively scarce in comparison with labour. For instance, in the area which she more specifically studied, the medium size of plots
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passed from 9.4 ares per capita in 1988 to 8.2 ares in 1993[3]. In this context of scarcity, she underlines that land management was becoming more individual and private. A part of the population – those to whom in the past the use of a plot of land was granted in exchange for their work – was becoming more and more excluded. Access to land became expressed more and more through the claim of exclusive rights. The social system produced then the exclusion of persons who had experienced in the past a security through occupation of lands (Andre´ and Platteau, 1998). These processes of exclusion did not only affect young persons. As Andre´ underlines, there was a double restriction in reference to the lineage of the persons. A first restriction took place in relation to the members who did not belong to the lineage, notably foreigners and immigrants. Then, within a lineage, the rights of access were restricted to the members considered to be legitimate by the lineage. These processes of exclusion affected young persons, but also disabled persons, women and particularly widows (Andre´ 1996). According to Andre´ (2005), in this context conflicts over access to land increased, fuelled by the development of a land market and by the use of rights written in formal law rather than in the customary law. As she underlines, of the totality of lands transferred, the purchases of land passed from 29 per cent in 1988 to 40 per cent in 1993, meaning that transfers by customary law decreased. This increase in purchases corresponds to an increase in distress sales occurring during consumption or production shocks and when households had to face a series of unanticipated expenses. The formal and written law became then a weapon for a well-informed population having favoured relations with the administration or the judicial institutions. So, some lands moved under the control of rural or urban elites or under the control of persons close to these elites. Progressively, trust and reciprocity in terms of exchange and in social relations became eroded, leaving in place a mistrust and a more general social tension. In such a context, migrations undoubtedly exercised an additional pressure. For DeLame (1996), the ethnic variable which had earlier played no role in daily relations between individuals acquired a marked importance with the arrival of Hutu migrants from Burundi in 1988. The second factor concerns the changes in altruism and the destruction of social capital by the implementation of agricultural policies orientated first to coffee production, then to tea. Rwanda depends strongly on its agriculture which represents 40 per cent of GDP. The exports of coffee and tea represented 80 per cent of total exports at the beginning of the nineties (Marysse et al., 1994). Agricultural growth remained nonetheless deficient in comparison with the population growth (Maton, 1994). The national agricultural policy based on coffee experienced two different periods. The first period included the boom of 1976-1979 which coincided with a comparatively high international price of coffee. The producers were expecting some guarantees of a fixed purchase price. The substantial difference between the price paid to the producers and the international price was hoarded by the government of Habyarimana. From 1986, we have the second period, a period of decline marked by the liberalisation of the international coffee market and the abolition of the system of quotas. The production of coffee was then supported financially by subsidies to the producers. In 1987, 3 billion Rwanda francs (RWF) were injected in the form of subsidies, 1.6 billion in 1988, 2 billions in 1989, 4.6 billions in 1990, 1 billion in 1991, 2 billions in 1992 and 1 billion in 1993 (Tardiff-Douglin et al., 1993; Verwimp, 2003).
The Habyarimana regime encouraged coffee disproportionately in order to guarantee its own authority (Verwimp, 2003). This policy discouraged other forms of agriculture, notably the banana. The Habyarimana government tried to reduce strongly the cultivation of banana because it constituted a rival culture to coffee in terms of allocation of land[4]. Contrary to coffee, it was very difficult for the government to control the production of banana and to earn payoffs that could have been appropriated because the banana production was essentially intended for the local market. Moreover, Bart (1993) shows that the banana and particularly banana beer played a considerable role for the peasants. Banana beer constituted a not negligible part of income in a situation of survival, and skins of bananas were used to cover the soil as natural fertilisers. Besides, the cultivation of banana was less labour intensive than coffee, and gave peasants more time for other social activities. Particularly, banana cultivation is associated with strong social ties and bonds. Banana beer through its production, its distribution and its consumption, constitutes a culture and a way of life related to a strong social bonding process. From this point of view, agricultural policies mainly orientated towards coffee production had a destructive impact on social relations and reinforced antagonisms leading to conflicts. Such a point of view was expressed by Mahieu (2001) and Ballet and Mahieu (2001) for the case of Burundi. We can apply this analysis for Rwanda. Agricultural policy based on coffee not only affected the incomes of the peasants, it also destroyed the social structures, thus favouring the increasing reference to the ethnicity variable. The third factor concerns the policy of purchasing loyalty to the Habyarimana government in a depressed economic context. From an analysis of policies implemented by Habyarimana from 1990 till 1994, Desforges (1999) defends the idea that the Rwandan elite had knowingly chosen genocide as a political strategy to stay in power. Verwimp (2003) considers also that the political system had opted for genocide to solve these difficulties. This author provides an analysis of the loyalty supply to the government (Hutu) and an analysis of the repression towards others (Tutsi). Until 1990, the government had encouraged the loyalty of the peasants through a policy of a fixed purchase price for coffee. When the market crisis occurred for coffee, the government continued through subsidies to maintain the production. In 1990, Rwanda recorded the highest subsidies. From this period, subsidies declined very distinctly. In 1990, the price paid to the producers passed from 125 RWF/kilo to 100 RWF/kilo. One bag of coffee allowed Rwandan peasants in 1990 to buy only half of what they could buy in 1980 (Tardiff-Douglin et al., 1993 quoted by Verwimp, 2003). In spite of risks and repression, this economic situation led to the destruction of coffee plants by peasants (Willame, 1995; Uvin, 1998). Loyalty that had been bought at high cost declined seriously. To escape from this situation and to maintain power and authority, the Habyarimana government reorientated agriculture towards the production of tea. Policymakers did not hesitate to move thousands of households from their lands to implement the cultivation of tea in certain areas[5]. Especially, the government used the ethnicity variable to justify the difficulties. Politicians tried to retain Hutu loyalty by the grant of various rewards. These rewards not being able to be purely monetary (through the prices paid to the peasants), the price of loyalty took other material forms such the appropriation of Tutsi lands, cash theft from the victims, the slavery of Tutsi women, free beer distribution, etc.
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(Desforges, 1999; Verwimp, 2003). At the same time, the enemy (Tutsi) were to be subjected to the worst of repressions. These policies provoked a stronger identification of individuals as belonging to specific groups (the loyal and the enemies) and generated a large number of civil conflicts. These three factors exercised a joint force favouring the identification of persons with a particular group, destroying the former social relations and reinforcing antagonism. The ethnic identity variable which had before been unimportant in daily relations, became the central element governing the relations between individuals. Why did identity become a cause of violent crime? We must ask the question: how could persons who until then lived together with their neighbours have suddenly participated in such bloody conflicts? We saw that the identification with a camp could have been developed in a supportive economic context. But what about the participation of the persons in genocide? We can acknowledge in the other individual a person different from ourselves, but how can we explain the behaviour of killing this other person? Certainly, the policies of loyalty and repression set up by the Habyarimana government produced many crimes and acts of violence. But in a context of collective action, as in the case of genocide, it is necessary to find compelling reasons to act, for otherwise free rider behaviour undermines the collective action. The analysis which we provide is based on rational choice, so that the participation in genocide is the result of a rational (reasoned) behaviour and not a “temporary madness”. Two arguments are examined. The first argument deals with the logic of fright. Reyntjens (1996) and Lemarchand (2002) stressed the role of fright in the behaviour of Hutus. They show the rise of fright following the putsch in Burundi in 1993 where the Tutsi army killed the Hutu president. This event in the neighbouring country caused the growing radicalisation of the Hutu leaders in Rwanda and produced a shock in the Rwandan population. The murder of President Habyarimana in 1994 then provoked an immediate reaction of the extremists in order to protect their lives. These behaviours are rational because they refer to premeditated acts in a given situation. The fright of the Hutu population facing this event in terms of expectations for a political change in their disfavour, would have encouraged the Hutu mass in the massacre of the Tutsi population. For this reason, Lemarchand (2002) qualifies the Rwandan genocide as a “retributive” genocide rather than an “ideological” genocide. This point of view is not shared by Verwimp (2003). According to him, genocide remains basically ideological, even if it is related to the logic of fright. But according to this author, the fright of the Hutu population is not a fright towards perceived or expected predatory behaviours by the Tutsi population, but a fright of the Hutus towards the extremists within their own group. The risk of sanction by the elite and extremists of their own group hung over the Hutu population if they did not participate in genocide. So, Hutus would have been led to kill Tutsis. In that case, fright also appears as an incitation for acting, but its origin is strongly different. The fact that during genocide, the category of moderate Hutus was also victim of the extremist Hutus (Eriksson, 1996) pleads in favour of this interpretation. This last interpretation gives a special place to conformity behaviour by the population in relation to norms. Verwimp (2003) underlines that the organisers of genocide did everything in their power to persuade the Hutus that killing was the norm
and that this norm was dominant. By the use of propaganda on the radio, of violent displays on streets, and sanctions regarding the persons who did not want to join genocide, the organisers of genocide diffused the message of duty for Hutus. In accordance with the bandwagon effect (Gupta, 1990; Kuran, 1995), the more that the number of persons joining a massacre increases, the more the norm to kill is obvious and the stronger the risk of sanctions linked to deviance regarding that norm. Then it becomes rational for every person to conform to the norm and to participate actively in genocide. The bandwagon effect encourages every person to prove his responsibility towards his own group even if responsibility implies crime. This brings us to our second argument. The second argument deals with commitment. Bouvier (2004) and Ballet and Mahieu (2005) defend the idea that the participation of ordinary persons in dreadful acts such as crimes and ethnic conflicts can be explained by the necessity of coherence with oneself in relation to one’s obligations or opinions. Individuals are then strongly involved in criminal acts which they carry out with rationality in order to remain in conformity with their commitments. This argument is associated with two theories of commitment: the theory of commitment to oneself of Kiesler (1971) and the theory of joint commitment of Gilbert (1996, 2004). The theory of commitment in relation to oneself underlines that persons who engage in insignificant acts may be led to commit, for reasons of coherence with their initial commitment, and, consequently, with their identity, acts with more serious consequences. Being engaged in the first act, no matter how trivial it might be, pushes the persons to maintain their commitment in conformity with the first act, even though the subsequent acts are no longer insignificant at all. In a way this is a question of not going back on one’s decision in relation to the standpoint one has adopted in the first instance, and thereby of maintaining one’s identity. Hence, Bouvier (2004) suggests this as a reason for ordinary persons having collaborated with the Nazis, or young Europeans or Americans having joined the ranks of radical Islamism in Afghanistan. The theory of joint commitment, in turn, stipulates that the person recognises beliefs that are personal in the sense that the person accepts them and freely submits herself to accepting them, even though the beliefs are not genuinely her own. According to the principle of “silence means consent” the persons are induced to accept a number of collective beliefs. In so far as these persons do not express their disagreement with these beliefs, they finally feel committed and conform to them. They thereby accept and conform to their party’s or a leader’s decisions, in spite of not having openly expressed their opinion on these decisions. They feel themselves jointly committed by virtue of the absence of an initial rejection and feel an obligation towards their reference group. For the sake of responsibility in relation to the group, they can thus be driven to commit criminal acts. As a consequence, moral commitment can translate into criminal engagement. In both approaches, the commitment of the person, her feelings of responsibility and coherence – be it in relation to herself or in relation to her community – can push her to engage in criminal acts. At this stage, altruism figures as an increasing factor in social crisis, the picture of others changing very rapidly. Malevolent forms of altruism can rapidly grow. A population issued from the same rugo may divide itself until the onset
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of murder. This can be seen as a foolish “passion” but has in fact emerged “rationally” in terms of each individual’s decisionmaking. The fact that individuals participate rationally (i.e. had conscious reasons to participate) in genocide does not erase the responsibility of institutions which recommended during this period severe economic structural adjustment policies in Rwanda and thereby fuelled those reasons. This issue will be examined in the next section. The responsibilities of political leaders and policymakers and the principle of social precaution Eriksson et al. (1996), in their synthesis of the international evaluation of emergency assistance to Rwanda after the genocide, underline and insist on the responsibility of the international institutions in the genocide[6]. In particular, they note that strong signs indicated that a climate and structures were present that could encourage genocide and political crimes. But “the international community” largely ignored these signs. It showed lack of foresight and of responsibility, and by its hesitancy also gave a favourable signal to those who got ready to perpetrate the genocide. Eriksson et al. also underline that once the genocide started, the international community still showed hesitation that contributed to the development of the phenomenon. The international community was culpable for not intervening not only before genocide but also during the genocide. Eriksson et al. (1996, p. 11) consider that “the essential failures of the response of the international community to the genocide in Rwanda were (and continue to be) political”. This should not be read as putting aside the purely economic responsibilities of the international institutions and stressing only their political responsibilities. On the contrary, we argue here that the genocide arose in a conducive economic context which was partly due to economic policies recommended by the international institutions. Thus, international institutions have not only a political responsibility but also an economic responsibility in the Rwandan conflict. They failed to see or ignored the fragility and vulnerability of the social networks in terms of the volatility of altruism and the ability to rebuild ethnicity. This fragility of persons is linked to their social agency and frees the person to use a negative capability (such as the capability to murder). The question of responsibility The responsibility of the institutions constitutes a delicate issue since a certain “acting unity” should be accorded them, i.e. a personality, or else it is impossible to charge to them any responsibility. At best the responsibility will be carried by the leaders or the head of these institutions or decision makers. But for the individuals in the decision process, responsibility is not synonymous with culpability. In many law cases, this line of demarcation was used. In the case of Papon in France, Maurice Papon, a former Pre´fet (Higher State Civil Servant) during the period of Vichy in France, had signed acts of deportation. His defence underlined the fact that while Papon had not done nothing he had only applied and implemented the rules, instructions and the directives from the State institution. In that case, while Papon could have been accorded a certain responsibility, he would not be guilty of crimes. Thus, while culpability implies responsibility, the reverse is not true.
Karlsson (2007) distinguishes three categories of criteria for allocating governance responsibility: culpability, capacity and concern. Contrary to the culpability principle, the capacity principle rests on the capacity to address the problem. The concern principle is based on motivations concerning actions against suffering. The criterion of culpability is certainly most difficult to implement in a context marked by a long chain of causality. It is indeed necessary to define where the responsibility starts and where it ends within a whole set of interdependent actions. In the case of genocide, one possibility is to assign responsibility only to the people who committed crimes of violence. And as we underlined previously their responsibility seems clear since they acted with pure rationality. However, their acts result also from a deliberated policy promoted and pursued by a powerful leadership group. Desforges (1999) and Verwimp (2003) support indeed that the dominant political elite deliberately chose the the genocide to solve its problems. The policies of purchase of loyalty and of repression were both essential vectors. But it must not be forgotten that the destabilizing context was also the product of the policies favoured and even imposed by the international institutions. In this perspective, it is also possible to determine a certain culpability of the international institutions if we can prove that their policies contributed significantly to the situation. Economic policies recommended and implemented by the international institutions If the responsibility of the domestic political leaders is obvious, the international institutions have also a share of responsibility because of the policies they implemented and which contributed to destabilize the identity structure of the individuals. In particular, the structural adjustment programme imposed by the IMF and adopted by Rwanda in 1990 had two critical impacts for the economy that destroyed an already extremely vulnerable system. First of all, the reduction of funds injected into the Rwandan economy (which was an instrument of pressure employed by the international community to supposedly promote democracy in the country), and the budget restrictions imposed as a condition of aid, were translated into a net reduction of subsidies to the coffee producers and threatened the guaranteed price policy. In 1986 for a farmer 1 kg of beans could buy 1 kg of coffee, whereas in 1993 1 kg of beans only bought 1/3 kg of coffee (Verwimp, 2003). The policy of purchasing loyalty towards Habyarimana through agricultural pricing lost its force and led on to repression and ethnic scapegoating. Second, the double devaluation enforced by the IMF in order to relaunch the export products, notably coffee, compensated only partly for the fall of the coffee price following the liberalisation of the market imposed by the international institutions (Marysse et al., 1994). This devaluation had on the contrary a predominantly perverse effect by reducing the purchasing power of the peasants, contributing to a growing impoverishment (Andre´ 1997). For instance, the value of food exports in millions of US dollars was 104.7 in 1989 and only 88.6 in 1990; and GDP per capita fell in US dollar terms by 40 per cent in 1989-1993 (Eriksson et al., 1996. p. 15). This impoverishment strongly exacerbated the unequal distribution of land, via the operation of the land market favouring the rural and urban elite (Maton, 1994). The consumption habits displayed by this elite were simply inaccessible for the rest of the population (Uvin, 1998; Andre´ 2005), leading to feelings of frustration and envy, favouring malevolence among individuals.
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Both the elements which we have just seen underline the non-neutrality of policies imposed by the international institutions and the role they played in genocide. They destabilised an initially very fragile situation that was already under high pressure. The responsibility of institutions cannot be restricted to political aspects of intervention and non-intervention but also concerns the economic aspects, where there was massive preceding intervention via the punitive enforced structural adjustment.
48 Responsibility of experts and principle of precaution The strong responsibility of the international institutions, through their policies, leads us to propose three principles: a principle of culpability of the “experts” and policymakers, a principle of precaution and a principle of sanction. The first principle deals with the culpability of experts and policymakers. As underlined by Mahieu (2000), if the responsibility of the economists and international policymakers through their policy recommendations and their impacts on decision makers is obvious, yet it receives too little attention. Unfortunately, if the expert respects the dogma of his institution and expounds the supposed coherence of its program, he does not risk being worried and especially because he is concerned only with economic aggregates. Happiness and unhappiness of populations is not included as being the problem. However, consequences of the populations’ choices are sometimes dramatic, as was the case for Rwanda. For this reason DeMartino (2005) criticizes the policies that were implemented in developing countries in the 1990s and argues for a professional ethics code for economists based on two principles. The first one is “do no harm”. It means economists have to give great attention and weight to the potential harm done by any policy. This first principle permits us to recognize the culpability of economists when potential harm is not taken into account. The second one is the precautionary principle: precautions should be taken to avoid or mitigate possible harm. It consists in an enlargement of the principle of precaution associated with the social consequences of any economic policy and was entitled for this reason the “social precautionary principle” (Ballet and Mahieu, 2003a,b). According to Ballet et al. (2005) the overall implication is to examine all the likely and possible consequences (positive and negative) of policies. It pleads for the choice of a maximin criterion in economic decisions, at least when there is a significant chance of major negative consequences (Ballet et al., 2005; DeMartino, 2005). It means that once all the significantly likely negative consequences of the comparative scenario are established, political decision should choose the option which will produce the least bad possible consequences. The maximin criterion could be viewed as excessive, for instance in cases where there is a one in a billion chance of the major negative consequences. But if the negative consequence is the death of people this criterion seems reasonable because a compensation principle could not be applied. The dead will never come back and monetary compensation has no real sense. In other cases, we could imagine an application of the maximin criterion in terms of a lexicographic order with a ranking of situations from those with the worst consequences through to the best. Then responsibility leads to a sharing of responsibilities between stakeholders who contribute to consequences of the policy. As Ballet and Mahieu (2003b) underline, the social precautionary principle implies also an ethics of discussion and the priority of research on the likely impacts under alternative scenarios.
Third is the sanction principle. It is necessary to give a sense of responsibility to the experts and policymakers by providing procedures for punishment in cases of serious negligence. These procedures have to guarantee sanctions that match the responsibilities of each person. It will probably encourage more prudence in terms of decisions and a more serious valuation of consequences of policies. An ethics code without sanction would be unenforceable. Sanctions refer for instance to exclusion from the economists community, monetary compensation to victims, penal sanctions, etc. Conclusion The genocide of Rwanda can be analysed as the result of a domestic political strategy, but at the same time as the consequence of disastrous economic policies imposed by international organisations on fragile and vulnerable societies. We argued first that identity does not have a single dimension but is made from various elements classified by every person. But this ranking can be changed under political pressure. If genocide is partly the product of politics, then policies’ effects on individuals’ identity structures must be seriously taken into account. The destabilisation of social states comes from disturbances in these identity structures provoked by policies and especially their impact on altruist characteristics. The case of Rwanda illustrates this phenomenon well. The ethnicity variable, even when imposed by the ideology of the dominant politics, could not have been implemented as the only variable of inter-recognition between persons. But the national economic policies like the purchase of loyalty, amplified initially and then destabilized by the international organizations’ policies, profoundly favoured the crisis and contributed directly to the genocide. In a context where identity tensions had become intense, the recommendations of the international institutions contributed directly to the phenomenon of genocide, helping to drive the pressure towards explosion point. By not taking into account the stresses on the vulnerable Rwandan society, they destabilised and worsened the situation. We must tackle the responsibilities of policymakers and decision makers, especially the international community and international experts, and think about rules and sanctions to be adopted so as to avoid new disasters. The criterion of the social maximin appears here as a pertinent criterion in high-risk situations. Expectations may be made concerning the impacts of social policies, for instance on enhancing capabilities in a vulnerable society. Using a social precaution principle requires that we simulate the possible impacts of development policies and discuss how to share responsibilities. Notes 1. For a different approach, see Lester (2003). 2. The identification of a person by others leads to self-identification in this kind of society as this common sentence shows: “I do not know whom I am, but others know and wonder why I am still alive”. 3. One are is a hundred square metres. 4. For Pottier (1993), the government of Habyarimana also attempted to eliminate the banana culture because they feared informal rituals in the banana plantations.
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5. According to the NGO Human Right Watch, present and future gains from tea plantations (Mulindi region) were surrendered to Egypt for an amount of 6 million US Dollars. This income would have been used for arming. 6. Eriksson et al. drew this conclusion from the multi-volume Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, commissioned by the Scandinavian governments. They insisted on two aspects: firstly, significant risks of conflicts and genocide existed but international institutions did not draw attention to them. Secondly, when genocide started, the international authorities did not react and waited for a long time before deciding any intervention. References Ainslie, G. (1982), “A behavioral economic approach to the defence mechanisms: Freud’s energy theory revisited”, Social Science Information, Vol. 21, pp. 735-79. Ainslie, G. (1986), “Conflict among interests in a multiple self as a determinant of value”, in Elster, J. (Ed.), The Multiple Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 133-75. Akerlof, G.A. and Kranton, R.E. (2000), “Economics and identity”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 65 No. 3, pp. 715-54. Akerlof, G.A. and Kranton, R.E. (2005), “Identity and the economics of organizations”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 9-32. Andre´, C. (1996), “Acce`s et occupation des terres dans le Nord-Ouest du Rwanda”, in Mathieu, P., Laurent, P-J. and Willame, J.C. (Eds), De´mocratie, enjeux fonciers et pratiques locales en Afrique. Conflits, gouvernance et turbulence en Afrique de l’Ouest et Centrale, L’Harmattan, Paris, Cahiers Africains, 23-24, Bruxelles, Institut Africain-CEDAF, pp. 202-13. Andre´, C. (1997), “Economie rwandaise: d’une e´conomie de subsistance a` une e´conomie de guerre. Vers un renouveau ?”, in Marysse, S. and et Reyntjens, F. (Eds), L’Afrique des Grands Lacs, L’Harmattan, Paris, Annuaire 1996-1997, pp. 59-91. Andre´, C. (2005), “Inefficiences institutionnelles, re´cession et violence au Rwanda”, Le capital social en action: territoires et transferts, L’Harmattan, Paris, pp. 71-111. Andre´, C. and Platteau, J-P. (1998), “Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap”, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Vol. 34, pp. 1-47. Ballet, J. and Bazin, D. (2006), “A basic model for multiple self”, Journal of Socio-Economics, No. 35, pp. 1050-60. Ballet, J. and Mahieu, F.R. (2001), “Enlarged entitlement map and social capital indicators as capabilities”, paper presented at the first Conference on the Capabilities approach, St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. Ballet, J. and Mahieu, F.R. (2003a), “Le capital social: mesure et incertitude du rendement”, in Ballet, J. and Guillon, R. (Eds), Regards croise´s sur le capital social, L’Harmattan, Paris, pp. 41-56. Ballet, J. and Mahieu, F.R. (2003b), Ethique e´conomique, Ellipses, Paris. Ballet, J. and Mahieu, F.R. (2005), “Responsibility agency achievement as a recognition of personal identity”, paper presented at the Workshop on Identities and Capabilities, St Edmund’s and Robinson Colleges, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. Ballet, J. and Radja, K. (2005), “Emotional capabilities as identity roots”, paper presented at the Workshop on Identities and Capabilities, St Edmund’s and Robinson Colleges, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. Ballet, J., Dubois, J-L. and Mahieu, F-R. (2005), L’autre de´veloppement. Un de´veloppement socialement soutenable, L’Harmattan, Paris.
Bart, F. (1993), Montagne d’Afrique, Terres Paysannes, Espaces tropicaux, No. 7, YCEGET/Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Bates, R.H. (2000), “Ethnicity and development in Africa: a reappraisal”, American Economic Review, Vol. 90 No. 2, pp. 131-4. Bonneux, L. (1994), “Rwanda: a case of demographic entrapment”, Lancet, Vol. 17 No. 344. Bouvier, A. (2004), “Choix rationnel et identite´”, Revue de Philosophie Economique, No. 9, pp. 135-60. Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. (1998), “On economic causes of civil war”, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp. 563-730. De Lame, D. (1996), Une colline entre mille ou le calme avant la tempeˆte, Transformations et blocages du Rwanda rural, Muse´e Royale de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren. DeMartino, G. (2005), “A professional ethics code for economists”, Challenge, July/August. Dennett, D.C. (1978), Brainstorms, Harvester Press, Brighton. Desforges, A. (1999), Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch, New York, NY. De Sousa, R. (1976), “Rational homunculi”, in Rorty, A.O. (Ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Easterly, W. and Levine, R. (1997), “Africa’s growth tragedy: policies and ethnic divisions”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 112 No. 4, pp. 1203-50. Elster, J. (1977), “Ulysses and the sirens, a theory of imperfect rationality”, Social Science Information, Vol. 16, pp. 469-526. Eriksson, J. (1996), The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience, Synthesis Report for the Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, Copenhagen. Eriksson, J. et al. (1996), “The international response to conflict and genocide: lessons from the Rwanda experience”, Synthesis Report, Danida, Copenhagen. Gilbert, M. (1996), Living Together: Rationality, Sociality and Obligation, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD. Gilbert, M. (2004), Marcher ensemble. Essais sur les fondements des phe´nome`nes collectifs, PUF, Paris. Gupta, D.K. (1990), The Economics of Political Violence, the Effect of Political Instability on Economic Growth, Greenwood Publishers, New York, NY. Hofstadter, D.R. (1981), “Reflections”, The Mind’s I, Harvester Press, Brighton. Karlsson, S.I. (2007), “Allocating responsibility in multi-level governance for sustainable development”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 No. 1/2, pp. 103-26. Kiesler, C.A. (1971), The Psychology of Commitment: Experiments Linking Behavior to Belief, Academic Press, New York, NY. King, M. (1994), “Malthus and Medicus Mundi”, Medicus Mundi Newsletter Bulletin, p. 54. Kuran, T. (1995), Private Truths, Public Lies, the Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lemarchand, R. (2002), “Reconsidering Rwanda and the Holocaust”, Journal of Genocide Research, December, pp. 499-518. Lester, D. (2003), “Comment on the self as a problem: alternative conceptions of the multiple self”, Journal of Socio-Economics, Vol. 32, pp. 499-502. Lycan, W.G. (1981), “Form, function and feel”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, pp. 24-50.
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Mahieu, F-R. (2000), “De la responsabilite´ des e´conomistes et des agents e´conomiques”, Revue du MAUSS, No. 15, pp. 257-67. Mahieu, F-R. (2001), Ethique e´conomique. Fondements anthropologiques, L’Harmattan, Paris. Marysse, S., De Herdt, T. and Ndayambaje, E. (1994), “Rwanda. Appauvrissement et ajustement structurel”, Cahiers Africains, No. 12, L’Harmattan, Paris. Maton, J. (1994), De´veloppement e´conomique et social au Rwanda entre 1880 et 1993. Le dixie`me de´cile face a` l’apocalypse, University of Ghent, Ghent. Moldoveanu, M. and Stevenson, H. (2001), “The self as a problem: the intra-personal coordination of conflicting desires”, Journal of Socio-Economics, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 295-330. Pottier, J. (1993), “Taking stock: food marketing reform in Rwanda 1982-1989”, African Affairs, pp. 240-51. Reyntjens, F. (1996), “Rwanda: genocide and beyond”, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 240-51. Steedman, I. and Krause, U. (1986), “Goethe’s faust, arrow’s impossibility theorem and the individual decision-taker”, in Elster, J. (Ed.), The Multiple Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 197-231. Tardiff-Douglin, D., Ngirumwami, J.L., Shaffer, J., Murekezi, A. and Kampayana, T. (1993), Aperc¸u sur la politique cafeicole au Rwanda, Kigali. Thaler, R.H. and Sefrin, H.M. (1981), “An economic theory of self-control”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 89, pp. 392-406. To¨nnies, F. (1944), Communaute´ et socie´te´, PUF, Paris. Uvin, P. (1998), Aiding Violence: the Development Enterprise in Rwanda, Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT. Verwimp, Ph. (2003), “Development and genocide in Rwanda. A political economy analysis of peasants and power under the Habyarimana regime”, PhD dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven. Willame, J.C. (1995), “Aux sources de l’he´catombe rwandaise”, Cahiers Africains, No. 14, Karthala and CEDAF, Paris and Bruxelles. Williams, B. (1976), “Persons, character and morality”, The Identities of Persons, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Further reading Vidal, Cl. (1991), Sociologie des passions (Coˆte d’Ivoire, Rwanda), Karthala, Paris. Corresponding author Je´roˆme Ballet can be contacted at:
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in preEducation in pre- and post-conflict Education and post-conflict contexts contexts: relating capability and life-skills approaches Jean-Luc Dubois and Mile`ne Trabelsi
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Institute of Research for Development, Centre of Economics and Ethics for Environment and Development, University of Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines, France Abstract Purpose – Conflicts, especially when they turn into civil war or genocide, have irreversible consequences for people. The impact is not only economic as shown by several quantitative studies, but also social and ethical since it deeply affects the mind and behaviour of both current and future generations. The main issue is, therefore, to avoid the eruption of such conflicts, in both pre and post-conflict situations, by implementing preventive approaches. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach – Even if macro-analyses bring up a series of objective causal factors to explain the reasons of uprisings and conflicts, we insist on the importance of people’s micro-attitudes when confronted by such events. The freedom of the agent to react appropriately in order to generate peace, and his responsibility towards the other, become nowadays essential and have to be improved by appropriate innovative education programmes. Findings – Learning to live together and to behave with esteem and confidence, can contribute substantially to the peace-keeping or peace-building processes, especially in pre and post-conflict situations. Such specific capabilities connect to the “life skills” education programme and could bring vital new opportunities. Practical implications – However, the economic or political causes of societal failure may still remain, at the macro-level, and jeopardise these opportunities, with the risk of transforming these positive capabilities into negative behaviour. Therefore, implementing in addition a social precautionary principle and appropriate investigation tools such as observatories and sentinel sites may be required to monitor such risks. Originality/value – The paper offers insights into the following issue: to what extend and under which conditions will micro-level measures effectively contribute to peace-keeping, in the case of pre-conflict situations, and to peace-restoring in the case of post-conflict contexts. Keywords Education policy, Social responsibility, Sustainable development, Conflict management, Peace, Social skills Paper type General review
1. Introduction Notwithstanding a decrease in the numbers recorded of inter-state or intra-state armed conflicts in the last 15 years, they have become devastating in character, with huge irreversible consequences that include both a high toll of deaths, and also mutilations, rapes and various traumas that produce generations of disabled people. Such a situation produces regressive dynamics in the setting up of capabilities. It generates a life where people use their capabilities for destructive objectives, like in the case of child soldiers, and for mafia-like relationships. Such capabilities are based on fear and defiance as resources, favouring regressive attitudes. In such a context, it is difficult to
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 53-65 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723363
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develop the positive capability to live the life that one reasoningly aspires to and people are obliged instead to adjust their own preferences and expectations downwards. The key issue is to avoid such situations and their economic and social consequences, by looking for appropriate preventive mechanisms. The conventional way consists in looking for the factors that cause the conflict to explode and, through appropriate policies, to reduce or suppress these causes at the macro level. This may require the use of traditional military force, despite its increasing inability to successfully bring a conflict to an end and promote a lasting peace. But nowadays, armed conflicts are more often the product of individuals and groups within their own state, rather than inter-state conflicts. Such a context requires us to re-think the issue of security by promoting individual-based action, while keeping at the macro level a strategy framework relating security to development. The focus has to be put on the micro level of the behavioural choices of the people and on their corresponding attitudes. Groups of persons can strongly contribute as social actors and citizens to the making of peace through the use of their own freedom of choice. This could be done through the improvement of personal and group capabilities to make people more able to choose and decide what they want to do and be, with the objective of living better, for themselves and with others, even when the others are quite different. This also refers to the capacity of people to act as social agents and contribute to peace by concrete actions. The capability approach (Sen, 1999) brings an interesting framework for such analysis. Through the development of some specific capabilities, including imagination, emotion and affiliation (Nussbaum, 2000; Hoffmann, 2006), it also provides particular insights for action, in order to live together and enjoy a life with others. UNESCO recommended, through its program on quality education for sustainable development, to implement in the education curriculum the teaching of specific “life skills” namely “learning to be” and “learning to live together” besides the usual training to know and to do, and this can easily be related to the reinforcement of people’s positive capabilities. The issue then becomes: to what extent and under which conditions will such micro-level measures effectively contribute to peace-keeping, in the case of pre-conflict situations, and to peace-restoring in the case of post-conflict contexts? Our paper tries to bring insight into this issue. It consists of three parts. The first part will give an overview of contemporary world conflicts, with reference to characteristics of armed conflicts and main factors contributing to their occurrences. The second part will show how to relate the capability approach and life skills education, as part of sustainable human development. The third part will discuss the weak points in such a view and the risks of failure due to economic and political factors at the macro level. 2. The situation of armed conflict since 1990[1] 2.1 An overview Since, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which brought the end of the cold war, armed conflict has undergone a series of major changes. First, the number of conflicts in the world began to decrease. During the last decade the number of conflicts decreased from 51 in 1991 to 29 in 2003 (UNDP, 2005), among which armed conflicts fell from 31 in 1991 to 19 in 2004 (SIPRI, 2005).
Second, the nature of armed conflict has also changed. There are less international conflicts and more civil wars. In 2004, every one of the 19 major armed conflicts which were active during the year was classified as intra-state. The result is that civilians have become more easily victims of these wars, being targeted during the fights or taken as hostages. Among the four million war deaths which occurred in the 1990s, about 90 per cent were civilians (SIPRI, 2005). Third, the geographical localisation has changed (Durand et al., 2006). Conflicts are now more widely dispersed over the world both at the regional and the international levels. The intra-state conflicts are sometimes interrelated like for Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo or, in West Africa, for Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Coˆte d’Ivoire. The same thing occurs in Europe with the Balkans issues. Fourth, the duration of conflicts is increasing. Long lived and recurring conflicts are becoming dominant on the world scene. SIPRI Research has demonstrated that, while over two thirds of the 51 conflicts listed since 1990 have in principle been solved, 16 out of the 19 remaining conflicts in 2004 were at least ten years old, among which ten were at least 25 years old. Among the 19 active conflicts in 2004, 11 showed an increase in intensity over 2003 (SIPRI, 2005). Africa currently represents about 40 per cent of the world conflicts and several of the bloodiest wars of these last fifteen years. Between 1970 and 2002, 35 conflicts occurred, most of them being civil wars. In 2003, 20 per cent of the African population and 15 countries were involved, generating eight million refugees. The Rwanda genocide in 1994 eliminated an estimated almost one million victims. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo caused the premature death of about 7 per cent of the population, around 3-4 million people. In Sudan, the civil war between northern and southern parts of the country extended over two decades, killing two million people and making six million move away. This harsh conflict once solved, a new crisis sponsored by the state burst out in the western region of Darfur, which has led over two million people to move from their homes, among which are 200,000 who fled to Chad. In the 1990s, other conflicts emerged in Europe, including in Moldavia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, with ethnic cleansing occurring throughout much of the Balkans region. Armed conflicts and especially civil wars jeopardise the development process by generating irreversible direct human costs. The deaths, rapes, wounds and handicaps are immediate corollaries of the conflict. The same applies to all the consequences due to the stress and the various psychological traumas. Other human costs may be less visible and less easy to quantify because they have an indirect impact on the people. This is the case with the collapse of food production and distribution systems, the loss of income, and the dysfunctioning of education and health services. When poor people lose their capacity to ensure health care, to maintain children at school and to make nutritious food, the consequences may quickly lead to a deadly end. Between 1960 and 1995, about 18.5 million people died due to internal conflicts with such consequences, half of them in Africa and 80 per cent in poor countries (Stewart et al., 2001). Once started, a conflict increases the complexity of issues which are already difficult to solve, and accumulates the human costs in an irreversible way. More generally, all the opportunities missed because of the conflict also have an impact on the wellbeing of the next generation by increasing illiteracy, disability, handicap, etc. This weakens the
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sustainability of a country in the long run and pleads in favour of looking for preventive strategies. 2.2 Some of the main causal factors Searching for the main causal factors of conflict occurrences could help in understanding the reasons why they burst out and the means to prevent them and maintain peace. Both econometrics and qualitative analysis can be used to pinpoint the main factors that could play a key role in the surge of a conflict. Among these factors are the level of wealth and poverty, the level of inequality, the importance of natural resources, the economic policy, the number of ethnic groups, and the population size. The combination of these factors increases or decreases the risk of conflict. The smallest probability, i.e. one chance out of one million for the period surveyed (1960-1992), is associated with countries with a high GNP, a good level of natural resources, a great number of ethnic groups, and a small population. On the other hand, a low level of GNP, insufficient resources, two ethnic groups, and large population, together increase the risk to 99 per cent (Collier and Hoeffler, 1998). An unsolved issue is the hierarchical ranking among these factors. Econometrics gives information on the relative weighting of these factors when considering the probability of conflict occurrence. But such probabilities are calculated at a macro and regional level. They may change seriously when local areas are considered with their peculiar socio-economic contexts. Some may think that the richest nations, which spend more on military expenditures and have more wealth to protect, would be more involved in armed conflicts than the poor nations. In fact, econometrics and factorial analysis give another picture. They distinguish rich and peaceful countries from poor countries. In the latter, the war generates a new economic setting that could last by supporting its own range of activities (Humphreys, 2003). The levels of wealth and growth reduce the probability of armed conflict (Collier and Hoeffler, 1998) while economic recession increases it (Blomberg and Hess, 2002). A country with a GNP per capita of $250 had a 15 per cent probability of conflict during the next five years. For a country with a $650 GNP per capita, this probability was reduced by half. It was reduced by half once more for a $1,250 GNP, to 4 per cent. Beyond $5,000, the probability became less than 1 per cent. Since, poverty also increases the duration of conflict (Fearon, 2002), development and poverty reduction efforts should be the first priority for public policies, in terms of conflict prevention. Inequality also plays a role in conflict occurrence, but econometric analyses are not as convincing here as they are with poverty. It seems that inequality between groups has a greater influence than inequality between individuals. However, economic analysis shows that all forms of compromise ensuring the redistribution of goods, assets, information, power, etc. between opposed groups reduce the probability of a conflict occurrence (Azam, 2001). Natural resources also impact on the probability of conflict occurrence. Countries in which wealth depends highly upon the exports of raw materials were more likely to be exposed to internal violence. The maximum risk, i.e. 56 per cent, corresponded to a level of exports situated at 27 per cent of GNP. Without natural resources the risk stabilised at 12 per cent. Minerals and oil resources are more a source of conflict than
are agricultural raw products. However, it seems that it is less the possession of natural resources exports that counts, but the way they are managed, how strong the state is and how uncorrupted the government. Botswana, a producer of diamonds, is one example of good management. Some of the public policies of the early 1990s may have generated various forms of violence, by weakening the state’s functions, by generating inequality through growth and by changing the usual process of (re)distribution through tax release and fiscal measures. However, econometrics analyses are not clear on these links. Others factors, like the size of the population or the number of ethnic groups, also play a role. The risk of conflict decreases when the number of ethnic groups increases, bipolar societies being those with the greater risk. Qualitative studies indicate other important factors, including: the political habits within the country, the regional geopolitics, local culture and tradition, the role of the military, access to weapons, institutional weaknesses, and the perception by people of economic crisis. 3. From capabilities to life skills and peace education Most of the armed conflicts are now civil wars. They involve people who have the double status of soldiers and victims and can, according to circumstances, be either one or the other. In such a context, the issue of security has to be re-thought, by giving a particular focus on the individual’s role, while, in the meantime at the macro level of the state, a strategy framework relating security to development has to be defined. But, focussing on the micro level of the people and their behavioural choices implies to consider them as social actors or citizens who have the capacity to interact with the others who are in the same situation. It is through their attitudes, and the direct use of their freedom of choice, that individuals and groups of persons can contribute to the making or the restoring of peace. The objective is, therefore, to reinforce, through appropriate development strategies, those specific capabilities which contribute to the fact of feeling well and living in harmony with the others. This has to be done at the levels of individuals or groups, especially for those who differ by culture, religion or ethnicity. Therefore, it also concerns people’s capacity to act as social agents to build up peace by concrete actions with others. In that way, the capability approach brings an interesting framework, which can be used for action and evaluation. Sen supposes that individuals, with their personal characteristics and within a set of economic and social opportunities and constraints, will use their resources and endowments (commodities, assets, capital, primary goods, formal rights, etc.) in appropriate functionings to reach their objectives. Their capability set, as a combination of the various attainable functionings vectors, shows the conversion of individual or collective endowments into potential functionings. Therefore, the capability of a person concerns the degree of freedom that this person may enjoy, her power of choice between various options of life; it transforms a formal freedom, given by the law, into a real freedom (Sen, 1999). Nussbaum proceeds in a parallel way by distinguishing, within the generic capability of a person, various vectors of potential functionings. She suggested ten central human capabilities among which the capability of affiliation, which includes “being able to live together with and towards others . . . being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation” (Nussbaum, 2000).
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Reinforcing such capabilities is important in the phases of reconstruction after a conflict. It gives the opportunity to transmit capabilities to future generations in order to move away from the previous situation of dysfunctioning and set new foundations aimed at ensuring a socially sustainable development. This contributes to the general vision of development as recommended by Sen for whom reinforcing the person’s capability and agency will be a source of growth and of sustainability (Anand and Sen, 2000; Sen, 2000). Within this framework, Nussbaum allows us to define more precisely the specific capabilities that are required in a given context, i.e. in particular pre or post-conflict situations. By this route, the “life skills” view can be related to the capabilities approach. The term “life skills” emerged about a decade ago in relation with the need to address what could help learners to cope with risks, decision making, emergency situations and survival strategies. Specific education modules were designed to train them in the ways to react when faced by such situations that they may encounter in their lives. In this context, the “life skills” view also addressed the request to foster the learners’ personal development, to help them unfold their potential and enjoy an accomplished private, professional and social life. Finally, the concept of “life skills” was progressively associated with an education aiming at the acquisition of specific essential behaviours. At the World Conference on Education for All, in Jomtien in 1990, the importance of teaching skills that are particularly relevant to current life was raised. Ten years later, in Dakar, a framework for action was adopted defining the four key pillars that are required to ensure a quality education in the long-term, i.e. learning knowledge, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together. . Learning to know: education will allow students to acquire the basic instruments of knowledge, i.e. the essential learning tools of communication and oral expression, literacy, numeracy and problem-solving. This will help them gain a broad general knowledge, with an in-depth knowledge of a few areas, an understanding of their rights and responsibilities, and, most importantly, to learn how to continue learning. . Learning to do: education will help students to acquire the occupational skills and the social competencies that would enable them to make informed decisions about diverse life situations. This would facilitate functioning in social and work relationships, participating in local and global markets, and using technological tools to meet basic needs and improve their quality of life and the lives of others. . Learning to be: education will contribute to the development of the personality in order to enable people to act with greater autonomy, judgement, critical thinking and personal responsibility. All aspects of the people’s potential are concerned, for instance, memory, reasoning, aesthetic sense, spiritual values, physical capacities and communication skills. This would contribute to a healthy lifestyle, an enjoyment in sports and recreation, the appreciation of one’s own culture, the possession of an ethical and moral code, the ability to speak for and defend oneself, and a resilient attitude. . Learning to live together: education will strengthen the skills and abilities necessary to accept the interdependence with other people, to manage conflict, and to work and plan with others towards common objectives and a common future. This would improve respecting pluralism and diversity (for example, in gender,
ethnicity, religion and culture) and participating actively in the life of the community. The two last dimensions, learning to be and learning to live together, are the so-called “life-skills” since they deal with those important psycho-social capabilities that people need in order to live in harmony with others and to be able to master correctly their own lives. Education should not only provide information but also develop the ability to use this information, including strengthening human agency and attitudes toward sustainable development (UN, 2005). The idea of “quality education for sustainable development” developed for UNESCO, integrates the life skills approach in a wider perspective. It aims at helping people to better understand the world in which they live and therefore to act better when addressing issues such as poverty, consumption and environmental degradation, HIV/AIDS, conflict and violation of human rights, etc. Then the focus on life skills is a focus on specific capabilities, which make it possible to overcome crisis situations, and to contribute to people’s capacity of resilience and of generating a better future. Within this framework, one can consider life skills as particular capabilities that should be reinforced, through the implementation of a suitable education policy, in the context of human development. They can be used to avoid the upsurge of serious conflicts, by improving attention to others and overcoming mental traumas due to social tensions and frustration. Developing these capabilities among children and teenagers during their school curriculum, on an individual as well as a collective basis, would set up the foundations for a development which could become, in the long run, socially sustainable. Becoming adults, these children would transmit by their own behaviour such values to the following generation. Unfortunately, most current education programmes pay too little attention to these dimensions. In rich countries, political ideology and traditions are often combined to defend elitist objectives which far outrank the life-skills orientation. The case of France is typical. If primary education focuses on the four dimensions of learning (to know, to do, to be, to live together), making young people and their parents quite satisfied with the education system, in secondary schools and colleges the focus is only put on two dimensions, learning how to know and to do, leaving aside the key social requirements expressed by the life-skills view. For poor countries, the situation is different because resources allocated to education are scarce: the priority is then naturally oriented towards learning to know and to do, which are seen as the prime necessary conditions to promote human capital and ensure growth. This is at the cost of learning to be and to live together, even though those remain the conditions for sustained social stability and peace and, therefore, also for economic growth. The 2000 World Forum of Dakar on Education for All organised a session on the theme “education in emergency and crisis situations” and invited all countries to “respond to the needs for education systems suffering from the side-effects of wars, natural disasters and political instability”. At the same time, Margaret Sinclair, in her book Planning Education in Emergency and Reconstruction Contexts (2000) explains why:
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. . . special measures of emergency education are required as long as the population continue to “suffer from this side-effect” [. . .]. The initial phase of post-conflict reconstruction requires in fact to implement specific measures to allow the children to return quickly to school, while schooling infrastructures, at the regional and national levels, are nearly completely destroyed in their country (Sinclair, 2000, p. 26).
Education is perceived as an essential need by the majority of people in a country having gone through a war. Therefore, it is necessary to think about the content of education that should be implemented to favour a lasting peace in post-conflict countries: a content which will consider, through appropriate teaching and learning processes, those specific capabilities that are the “life-skills”. The corresponding programmes may not remove the tensions between people, or between groups of people, but they would help to manage them and avoid a new shifting into a war, civil war, or even worse, genocide. However, this will require reviewing the existing education programmes and curricula, designing appropriate teaching modules, and training the teachers and school directors to this new way of thinking and the techniques that go with it. 4. What are the conditions for success? For those reasons, we suggest that the usual education priorities should be strongly reconsidered in the case of pre-conflict and post-conflict situations, by referring to all the four pillars of a quality education for sustainable development. The teaching of the life-skills dimension of education is absolutely required as a priority to avoid the risk of armed conflicts or urban guerrillas. Life-skills should be at least considered as important as the usual dimensions of education based on knowledge and learning to do. 4.1 An ideal pattern In the case of open conflict situations, when wars, social crises, political instability and natural disasters appear, with refugee camps, and precarious installations in ruined villages and destroyed urban districts, countries usually require emergency actions and humanitarian aid as a priority. However, in such situations schooling still remains a stable need, a desire which calls to be satisfied, a requirement that has to be fulfilled. This is why the return of children to school and the continuation of teaching are nowadays regarded as an important component of emergency or immediate post-emergency policy. The situation differs between countries in a pre-conflict context, where the conflict has not yet blown up into military or urban guerrilla action, and countries in a post-conflict context, where military action has stopped and peace is under construction. In the first case, countries need the means to maintain peace, while in the second they have to restore peace in the middle of remaining tensions. Post-conflict situations cover, for instance, the cases of Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and even Mali where the peace process was brought with success through to the end. An interesting pre-conflict situation illustration is the case of the suburbs of French cities in late 2005, where a kind of urban guerrilla campaign was conducted by French young people of foreign origin (Draı¨ and Matte´i, 2006; Via le Monde, 2005). In both pre-conflict and post-conflict situations, there is a need to re-generate the feeling of belonging to the same social body and to find ways of living together. It is necessary to re-create the capacity to live together and imagine a new common future.
Armed conflicts usually destroy physical capital, but one forgets that they also destroy human capital which results from years of education, experiences, and regular health care. The war economy that results produces new forms of inequality and makes people more vulnerable. Moreover, conflicts tear the social bonds and recompose them on new bases by denying basic rights, generating perverse forms of social capital through Mafias and other corrupted social bonds. For instance, armed militia do not respect international conventions; they persecute and kill civilians, recruiting teenagers by force and mutilating children. In this context, the reference to socially sustainable development makes it possible to better understand the impact of wars and look for the means of preventing them. The investment in human capital, through education and health, is a significant way to ensure social durability. For instance, it can be noticed that in several post-conflict countries, where the social fabric was torn by the war, participation initiatives aiming at adult education were a considerable success. People’s consciousness was raised through civic education on their rights and their responsibilities, and this strengthens attitudes which reinforce peace. These post-conflict situations, like any natural disaster, offer a unique opportunity to rebuild: here to rebuild the education system by avoiding the mistakes of the past, to design specific programs and new teaching methods that will disseminate the ideal of peace in a population suffering from various physical and psychic traumas. They make it possible for the teachers to invest more in the creation of school syllabi and the continuous training of the trainers. The reconstruction phase allows reshaping textbooks by cleaning out those parts which led to ethnic and religious divisions, intolerance and hate, and by proposing new models of behaviour which suggest peaceful solutions when facing tensions. But the corresponding policies will have to master the social tensions which were exacerbated, to protect the identities of the various groups of people constituting the society, and to promote social agreement and individual achievement, by avoiding exclusion and social fractures, and generating new networks linked by joint interest. Several countries are now integrating life skills in their national curricula because the benefits of life skills education in terms of outcomes are increasingly acknowledged. India’s National Curriculum Framework for School Education of 2001 includes life skills in areas linked to health, consumer rights and legal literacy. School-based programmes in Zambia reflect an even wider application of life skills, grouping these under three headings: skills of making effective decisions, skills of knowing and living with oneself, skills of knowing and living with others. Some countries have infused life skills throughout the curriculum, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mali and Jordan. Others have included them into a specific topic of the curriculum such as health in the Nepal national life skills education programme. Other countries, like Afghanistan, Lesotho and Sri Lanka, have opted for a specific curriculum on life skills (Hoffmann, 2006). 4.2 Some risks of failure Even if this “ideal peace-keeping pattern” seems plausible, there are still strong risks of collapse when the micro-attitudes of the people, acting to generate a long lasting peace, find themselves in opposition with economic and political trends at the macro level. In other words, if improving people’s capabilities to be and to live together is necessary in
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pre- and post-conflict context it may be not sufficient. If the causes of armed conflicts at the macro level still remain active, education will not have all its power as a tool to promote peace. This implies that specific conditions at the economic and political level are also required to ensure social sustainability. Four sets of conditions can be envisaged when looking at the feasibility of a sustainable peace. The first set is based on the economic rationality of conflict as seen through cost-benefit analysis. Some groups benefit in monetary terms from the conflict, while others do not. Moreover, the conflict may last, if dominant groups benefit from it. A specific pattern of incomes results from the new order of social interactions generated by the conflict. In that case, the economic condition for restoring peace will be to change the benefit balance of the conflict among the various partners, which requires introducing incentives, threats and sanctions. The reference to Sen and Nussbaum helps us to go beyond this classical utilitarian cost-benefit analysis by considering ethical concerns and focussing on people’s capabilities of choice and agency. In this framework, a second set of conditions would be, following Perroux (1965), to share a common vision for the future and to generate a collective consensus on a vision that may attract a majority of people: “conflicts can only be reduced within the framework of a collective project such as the collective benefits of a new nation, a regional union being constructed, etc.”. The third set of conditions is related to the factors that contributed, at the macro level, to the bursting out of the conflict. Econometric analysis and qualitative studies pointed out such factors, including the level of poverty and inequality, natural resources, public policies, the quality of institutions, the trust in the government, etc. Appropriate action would then be to reduce the impact of those causes of the conflict wherever it looks feasible, i.e. to reduce poverty, master inequality, improve the State capability, reform public policies, etc. Such action would have to be tailored according to the socio-economic context by ranking these factors and considering the local constraints for feasibility. For instance, public policies will have to avoid jeopardising people’s existing social rights or traditional sharing habits. This requires setting up limits, in terms of social precautionary principles, in order to avoid triggering irreversible consequences. Such principles express, in innovative terms, the concern for justice and sharing, with the purpose of avoiding the frustration which may lead to social explosion. In that way, current policies focus on poverty reduction but forget to consider at the same time the issues of vulnerability, social exclusion and inequality. The inequality of capability, for instance, is extremely sensitive and can be a major cause of sustainability collapse, as shown in the case of French suburban youth (Ballet et al., 2005; Dubois, 2005). Once the macro-level factors are stabilised, the teaching of life skills, i.e. learning to live together and learning to be, can become the priority. The issue is that the poorest countries which are those most affected by conflicts have the weakest education systems, the capacity of which is often eroded by budgetary constraints. In pre or post-conflict situations, military expenditures often take priority over social investment. For instance, since 1990, the ratio of education expenditures for low income countries represents 4.2 per cent of the GDP for the peaceful ones and 3.4 per cent for those in conflict situations, i.e. a difference of about a fifth. For those countries having too scarce resources for education, restoring and maintaining peace should be supported with the help of the international community, by considering that peace is a global public good
that deserves to be financed through external assistance. This provides the fourth set of conditions for sustainability. These sets of conditions for sustainability are defined in order to ensure the feasibility of education for peace and to make it more efficient. However, even with the setting up of limits, it may be difficult to oppose those political leaders who are ready to set societies on fire by manipulating their people for their own benefit, as was done in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Coˆte d’Ivoire. In that case as General Cot, former Commander in Chief of UN troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina, said at a university meeting in 1991 on the conditions for peace: “if we had arrested at the beginning the four first political leaders that began to proclaim hate against the other communities, we would have avoided the war” (Dubois, 2001). Even a specific training on responsibility for these leaders may not be sufficient to maintain peace, when compared to the benefits in terms of power, honours and assets that they are expecting from a conflict situation. 5. Conclusion The search for a lasting peace is not new. Many philosophers and thinkers of ancient times devoted their lives to that objective. Some examined the desire for peace compared to war (Aristotle), the bond between domestic peace and social peace (St Augustine), the possibilities of safety brought by peace (Hobbes) and the realisation of oneself during peace (Spinoza). Others attempted to seek the conditions for a permanent or “perpetual” peace, because it is during periods of peace that human rights are guaranteed and respected (Grotius, Rousseau, Castel de Saint Pierre, Kant). For them, the conditions of a sustainable peace come either from specific agreements between states, or from alliances between peoples confirmed by unions and federations. The capability approach allows us to go further by considering that a lasting peace is the result of the decisions and choices of the persons themselves. They can use their own capability set, individually or in relation with others, to maintain or restore peace. This view fits much better to guide action in a world where civil wars become predominant. The recommendation of UNESCO to develop the teaching of life skills in national curricula goes in the same direction and contributes to education for peace. In face of an uncertain future with multiple challenges, appropriate education may bring a new opportunity to countries which just came out of harsh conflicts and must live with irreversible consequences that are not easy to compensate for. It gives an opportunity for progress by emphasising prevention and, through freedom and social justice, a balanced management of tensions, avoiding the slide into a civil war. All fit in the global objective of human development by reinforcing people’s capabilities in order to enable them to better function and find a flourishing path in life. In this context, it is the responsibility of the international community to finance supplementary educational programs in the poorest countries by considering that peace is a global public good. This can be done in accordance with policy measures aiming at reducing poverty, developing individual capabilities and improving governance. It requires that macro economic or political causes which generate the conflict, at the national level, be suppressed or at least held under control. There is a risk that the expected positive role of education at the micro level, through the teaching of life skills, be weakened or shifted away from a positive end, if the key conditions of sustainability at the macro level are not fully respected. In that latter case, instead
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of reinforcing social cohesion, education can exacerbate frustrations, with the risk of transforming the positive capabilities into negative behaviour that will pursue or restore the conflict. The education process contains ambivalent potentials that need to be regulated if one wants to avoid such negative shifting. For this reason, we require a social precautionary principle based on determined limits for the key conditions of sustainability, as previously defined. The regular monitoring of these conditions could be done through appropriate investigation tools such as observatories, watch systems or sentinel sites. For instance, a peace observatory, by gathering specific analysis and collecting appropriate indicators, could look at the respect given to the key sustainability conditions and evaluate the impact of the life-skills education programmes. Through regular reports it would give a picture of the current situation and help to prevent the upsurge of armed conflicts. Note 1. To describe the current situation of armed conflict in the world we refer to data and analyses from research teams such as the research programme on economics of conflicts in the World Bank, the world and national Human Development Reports of UNDP, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the Centre for Peace and Human Security (CPHS) in Paris, and the International Peace Research Association (IPRA). References Anand, S. and Sen, A. (2000), “Human development and economic sustainability”, World Development, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 2029-49. Azam, J-P. (2001), “The redistributive state and conflicts in Africa”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 429-44. Ballet, J., Dubois, J-L. and Mahieu, F-R. (2005), L’Autre De´veloppement, le de´veloppement socialement soutenable, L’Harmattan, Paris. Blomberg, S.G. and Hess, G.D. (2002), “The temporal links between conflicts and economic activity”, Wellesley College Working Paper 2000-11, World Bank WPS, Washington, DC. Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. (1998), “On economic causes of civil wars”, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 50, World Bank WPS, Washington DC, pp. 563-73. Draı¨, R. and Matte´i, J-F. (2006), La Re´publique bruˆle-t-elle ? Essai sur les violences urbaines franc¸aises, Editions Michalon, Paris. Dubois, J-L. (2001), “Les recherches des e´conomistes sur la paix”, Culture de la paix: cle´s du 21e`me sie`cle, UVSQ, IDRP, Les actes du Colloque 28 avril, pp. 36-40. Dubois, J-L. (2005), “Searching for a socially sustainable development: conceptual and methodological issues”, paper presented at International Conference on Ethics, Economics and Law: Against Injustice, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, 28-30 October. Durand, M-F., Martin, B., Placidi, D. and To¨rnquist-Chesnier, M. (2006), Atlas de la mondialisation: comprendre l’espace mondial contemporain, Presses de sciences Po, Paris. Fearon, J. (2002), “Why do some civil wars last so much longer than others”, Stanford University working paper, World Bank WPS, Washington, DC. Hoffmann, A-M. (2006), “The capability approach and educational policies and strategies: effective life skills education for sustainable development”, in Reboud, V. (Ed.), Sen: un e´conomiste du de´veloppement, AFD, Paris.
Humphreys, M. (2003), “Aspects e´conomiques des guerres civiles”, Revue Tiers Monde 174, PUF, Paris, pp. 269-95. Nussbaum, M. (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Perroux, F. (1965), L’e´conomie des jeunes nations, PUF, Paris. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sen, A. (2000), “The ends and means of sustainability”, Keynote address at the International Conference on Transition to Sustainability, Tokyo, 15 May. Sinclair, M. (2003), Planifier l’e´ducation en situation d’urgence et de reconstruction, UNESCO, IIPE, Paris. SIPRI (2005), Statistical Yearbook, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Stockholm. Stewart, F. and FitzGerald, V. et al. (2001), War and Underdevelopment, Vol.1: The Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford. UN (2005), UNECE Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development, United Nations, New York, NY, CEP/AS. 13/2005/2/Rev.1. UNDP (2005), The Human Development Report 1990-2004: 15 Years of Publication, Statistical Data Base, United Nations Development Program, New York, NY. Via le Monde (2005), La crise des banlieues, Dossiers documentaires, Bobigny. Further reading Kant, E. (1795), Projet de paix perpe´tuelle, Vrin, Paris, translation 1999. About the authors Jean-Luc Dubois is a Research Director at the Centre of Economics and Ethics for Environment and Development (C3ED), Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and University of Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ). Jean-Luc Dubois is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
[email protected] Mile`ne Trabelsi is a PhD student at the Centre of Economics and Ethics for Environment and Development (C3ED), Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and University of Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ). E-mail:
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A deliberative ethic for development A Nepalese journey from Bourdieu through Kant to Dewey and Habermas John Cameron and Hemant Ojha School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of a procedural deliberative alternative to an atomistic conception of individuals and an economic logic of markets or a priori universal lists, as ethical foundation for evaluating socio-economic change. Design/methodology/approach – To develop this argument, the paper combines a modified Kantian categorical imperative with deliberative ethics drawing on the writings of Habermas and Dewey. The journey through the European Enlightenment thought of Kant to the contemporary thought of Habermas and Bourdieu aims at mapping continuity and change in key themes in development ethics. These ideas are then given practical application in a case-study of the people-forestry interface in Nepal. Findings – The paper shows how Kantian non-deception links to Habermas’ notion of communicative action and Dewey’s notion of cooperative inquiry, and how Kantian non-coercion links to the inclusion of subaltern voices. While the paper proposes that more open deliberative processes can potentially produce ethical gains, it also identifies an idealistic risk in this position. Bourdieu’s thinking is utilised to reveal limitations on improving deliberative processes where there are powerful mechanisms reproducing inequalities. Practical implications – The paper makes the case for greater attention being given to exploring deliberative processes as a prerequisite for ethical developmental actions. Originality/value – The paper brings together authors who rarely feature in the development studies discourse and applies their ideas to a practical case study. Keywords Ethics, Sustainable development, Forestry, Nepal Paper type Research paper
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 66-87 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723372
Introduction This paper explores the possibility of centre-staging deliberative processes in development ethics. We seek to show how this approach can throw light on the challenges in both improving the lives of vulnerable people in the world and conserving the natural environment. We offer a framework for a procedural ethics which is culturally “thin” enough for all to own it and which excludes no position where good reason is sustained in open deliberation. On this basis, we offer an assessment of deliberative processes (which qualitatively differ from, and go beyond, participatory processes) in a case study of the people/forestry interface in Nepal. The paper combines our ongoing empirical research on forest/people interactions in Nepal (Ojha and Timsina, 2006; Ojha et al., 2006; Ojha, 2006b), with ideas of Habermas (on deliberation and communicative action), Dewey (on cooperative inquiry) and Bourdieu (on doxa and habitus) and our previous work on Kantian ethics (Cameron, 1999). Figure 1 outlines how we draw on and link the theoretical sources. The paper
Substantive Ethics with Idealistic Agency Kant : Categorical Imperative – Non-deception Non-Coercion
M-Kantian modification of Kant pointing to greater deliberation
Procedural Ethics with Deliberation as Intersubjective Process Dewey: transactional/ /communicative ontology of being human
Substantive Ethics in the Face of Constrained and Structured Agency Bourdieu : Doxa, differentiated deliberative competence, symbolic violence
Habermas : unconstrained discourse as the foundation of ethical decisions and norms
then moves from the theoretical through to a case study of people/nature interactions in Nepal. Current ethical and political practice after the collapse of the USSR is largely within a neoliberal order, but the global order has found no ideological consensus, and there are numerous claimants to truth about improving the human condition. While many practical challenges are being organised against the neo-liberal ordering of the world (as reflected in street rallies concurrent with major policy events of the globalisation giants such as World Trade Organisation (WTO)), there is a general problem of conceptualising ends and means for improving human quality of life. Responses to the challenge of thinking through improvement in the human condition have recently drifted into a culturally rich, ethically ambiguous relativism, though that is not without its critics (Bauhn, 1998; Bauman, 1998). Post-modernist relativists in the North are jostling for recognition with more absolutist claimants from various parts of the South, including from Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and various branches of Christianity. Our argument is organised as follows. In the next section, we introduce the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) to analyse a structural model that delimits the potential for fully open deliberative ethics. The main input from Bourdieu is that deliberation is itself a process of enacting more entrenched forms of violence which he calls symbolic violence, enacted through the very process of language and communication, and that genuine deliberation is possible when crisis arises in the symbolic structure of society, forcing the habituated actions of people to be brought under discursive deliberation. From this relatively pessimistic position we move to Kant’s categorical imperative, as a universalist, substantive ethical position, and then modify this Kantian position to take account of a number of factors, notably an unequal distribution of power (Cameron, 1999). We use these ideas to move towards a design for a procedural ethics that applies conscious human agency to development practice. We particularly draw on John Dewey’s notions of transactional inquiry and democracy as a learning process, and Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics and deliberative basis for arriving at moral restraints for collective life. Dewey (1859-1952) provides a strong ontological basis for understanding communicative human co-existence. This is expanded by Habermas (1929-), searching for grounds for the democratic legitimacy of social norms or
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Figure 1. A conceptual map linking substantive and deliberative ethical ideas
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governance by recourse to both private and public autonomy as co-original, rather than mutually exclusive. Figure 1 shows how we locate Dewey and Habermas between the rationalist position of Kant and the structuralist approach of Bourdieu. Our case study is based on Nepal’s community forestry (CF) policy and practice, which we see as a complex interaction among diverse groups of social agents, mainly local people, techno-bureaucrats, and development agencies. Throughout the modern history of Nepal, forests have been a highly contested space – both materially and symbolically – for a broad range of actors. Whereas forest was traditionally a resource for subsistence livelihoods, subsequent intervention by state functionaries, business groups and Western conservationists and developmentalists have made the forest a very complex ground of conflict and deliberation. As forest was the hub of conservation and local livelihoods in a highly fragile Himalayan environment where some of the world’s poorest groups (at least in material wealth) live, rapid ethical shifts in development thinking have been found in the policy and practice of forest governance. In Nepal’s field of forest/people interface, one can find the world’s most progressive legislation recognising local people’s rights over forest, and at the same time, a highly stratified society in which certain groups of elites control the resources without facing much resistance and deliberative challenge from the ordinary people. Using Bourdieu’s concepts as a foundation for a realistic procedural ethics Bourdieu’s ideas are introduced here to meet a concern that deliberation needs to be purged of the utopian idealism of appealing solely to free moral agency supposedly persuadable by well intentioned texts claiming to be universally rational. The case of Nepal CF practice suggests that despite intensive developmental efforts in institutionalising participatory processes, supported by very progressive legislation, non-deliberative decision processes continue both at local community level and national policy levels. There is a recurrent problem of control of decision spheres by people who enjoy greater symbolic privileges in the deliberative setting, often drawing on specific social locations in terms of caste, class, formal political positions and gender (Malla, 2001; Ojha et al., 2006). The presupposition of completely free and equal moral agency prior to deliberation is unrealistic. Bourdieu warns us that deliberation as an ethical practice should be seen in the context of these imperfections. The reality of ethical conservatism in contexts of reproduced grave inequalities and socio-ecological non-sustainability can be conceptualised using Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. We use Bourdieu’s idea of social fields as relatively independent arenas of social practice and negotiation. Human agents, according to Bourdieu, seek legitimacy through accumulation of symbolic capitals. Study of how symbolic power is gained and exercised can provide important insights into how certain ethical patterns reproduce, within restricted spaces for deliberation, and provide opportunities for deception and violence, thus reproducing chronic social inequality (Hallett, 2003; Swartz, 2003). The symbolic basis of domination provides important guidelines to understand the dynamics of deliberative deficits and social inequality. Bourdieu’s chief concern is that neither “forced choice” nor “consent” can fully explain deliberative deficits. Bourdieu (2001, p. 37) argues: The effect of symbolic domination (whether ethnic, gender, cultural, or linguistic) is exerted . . . through the schemes of perception, appreciation and action that are constitutive of habitus, . . . below the level of the decisions of consciousness and the controls of the will.
Therefore, habitus is patterned behaviour that delimits free choice – including ethical choices. A pattern in which deliberative practices are frustrated or dominated does not mean that people have chosen this situation willingly. The dominated contribute, often unwittingly, sometimes resignedly, to their own domination by non-deliberative decision-making. This acceptance can take form as emotions: . . . shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, guilt – or passions and sentiments – love, admiration, respect. . . . The passions of dominated habitus . . . are not of the kind that can be suspended by a simple effort of will, founded on a liberatory awakening of consciousness (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 39)
This is because “they are deeply embedded in the form of dispositions” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 39). The distribution of symbolic capital is crucial to understanding the acceptance of unequal access to decision-making (Crossley, 2004). The other related challenge concerns the possibility for human agents with diversity of capitals to engage in open deliberation. If human agents are situated according to the structural logic of a social field, actualised by the relations between habitus and field, then how can agents in different social locations engage in deliberation? The way one speaks and behaves varies systematically from one social location to another, and people with different ethical beliefs do not normally meet in the social exchange processes, and therefore are less likely to engage in deliberation. This threatens the normative ideal of deliberation that says state officials, politicians and the marginalised citizens should engage together in political decisions (Hayward, 2004). Aware of such challenges, deliberative theories are pushing out their conceptual boundaries to include deliberative activism (Young, 2003; Fung, 2005). Bourdieu notes two types of constraint on high quality deliberation. First, the practice of deliberation itself is impregnated with a strategic orientation, as seemingly disinterested actions are in fact interested ones (centred on the protection and accumulation of economic, cultural, symbolic and political capitals in their various forms). Second, even the calculated interests of social agents are inscribed within certain sets of deeply held assumptions and values, which he calls doxa, deposited historically in a pattern of habituses, working in particular fields of day to day practices (Swartz, 1997; Crossley, 2004)). The concept of doxa is used to capture the worldview of ideas and rules that people bring to any field of action. In our usage the concept of habitus includes the part of doxa that constitute ethical rules, but also includes socially acceptable deviance from those ideal doxic rules. Engagement with Bourdieu thus helps us to connect deeply held beliefs (doxa) and observable practices (habitus) in particular social fields – in which some people are more advantaged than others in terms of symbolic and cultural capitals as well as of deliberative dispositions. As a result of differences in these internal and external competencies, some are systematically advantaged over others in the processes of deliberation and cooperative inquiry. Bourdieu (1991, pp. 127-8) proposes substantive social conditions for the emergence of deliberation. As the social order draws its permanence from the tacit acceptance of the agents: . . . politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes
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cognitive subversion . . . But heretical break with the established order . . . presupposes a conjuncture of critical discourse and an objective crisis, capable of disrupting the close correspondence between the incorporated structures and the objective structures which produce them, and of instituting a practical epoche, [in other words] a suspension of the initial adherence to the established order.
Bourdieu himself sees some possibilities of opening up deliberation in circumstances that might be broadly characterised as crises. The concept of crisis is vital to introducing active human agency to the more passive structures in Bourdieu and can potentially throw light on the dynamics and changes in deliberative processes. Crisis can originate, for example, when experiences of nature fail to match expectations of stability in natural processes over a significant period of time. Such experiences can include both unforeseen volatility and perverse trends – that is issues of both uncertainty and non-sustainability. Crises shift decision-making from structural habit to conscious agency. The existing predominant form of symbolic power may become unstable due to dissonance between the regularities of the field and on the other hand the schemes of perceptions and thought of the habitus groups. This may lead to an awareness of symbolic violence, on the part of both dominated and dominant, and the former may start undergoing an active process of reflection, faster than the latter. The process of recognition once triggered may move at accelerated pace, as an uncovering of an element of doxa that has hitherto legitimated symbolic violence may lead to further and faster uncovering of the deeper level doxa. Critical self reflexivity then becomes a source of transformation which Bourdieu recognises (Wacquant, 2004). Thus, transformation can involve shifts in both procedural and substantive ethical stances. In another paper, we have explored the field of people/forest interactions in Nepal to give insights into continuity and change in deliberative processes (Ojha et al., 2006). That research explored the case of forestry development in Nepal in which habitus and doxa of international actors, forest bureaucrats, local elites and members of poor and marginalised groups interface in the nation’s widely acclaimed CF programme. The deficits in deliberative processes that we identify are explained by the interplay of bureaucratic, elitist and marginalised worldviews (doxa), and the corresponding inequality in the distribution of cultural, symbolic and economic resources essential to exercise communicative agency in processes of more open deliberation. We examine how this interplay is unlikely to produce substantive or procedural ethical gains in terms of diminished coercion and deception or higher quality deliberative processes because of the absence of crisis. We conceptualise an ensemble of political and cultural practices within the discursive territory of “sustainable forestry” as a Bourdieuian social field, in which a complex pattern of human agencies and subcultures operate to generate observable practices (Ojha, 2006b). An ethical assessment of deliberative processes in the field suggests that participatory processes in practice have ended up with conservative outcomes – in terms of further embedding of violence, corruption and deception in increasingly less visible ways – such as professionalisation, extension of expert authority, and the proclamation of egalitarian legal-ethical imperatives for all members of a community without addressing the extremely hierarchical relations between and within agencies in Nepalese society. To conclude this section, we suggest three levels of decision-making practices derived from Bourdieu, each involving doxa-habitus-deliberation tensions:
(1) Practices that proceed largely within existing doxic rules and relations of power, which are largely mis-recognised. Deliberative processes here are confined to attempts to sort out minor operational cases by using widely accepted rules, e.g. fines for collecting grazing materials out of season. (2) Practices that move from doxic rules to habitus pragmatics and bring power relations under rational critiques. Here intermediate deliberative processes attempt to sort out tensions between habitus positions by using practically oriented ethics, e.g. penalties for not providing household labour for forest maintenance by richer households. (3) Practices brought fully into the discursive domain, with fundamental relations of power brought under critique. A major rift or dissonance between practices and field takes us beyond manageability through habitus pragmatics and challenges the language and symbolic boundaries/structures of deliberation, e.g. when evidence emerges of bribes being paid to forest department officials by commercial loggers. All three levels interact, with accumulations of tensions at one level overflowing into the next, higher level, but in the absence of a generalised crisis the deficits in deliberative processes will be reproduced – albeit possibly involving increased use of physical violence. Kantian categorical imperative as a thin substantive foundation for development ethics Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) lived through the heart of the European Enlightenment and in globally tumultuous times. He proposed a universalist ethic: a categorical imperative for all people, independent of their cultural orientation. From an instrumentalist position, he can be seen as arguing that, if people wish to constitute an indefinitely sustainable society, then they rationally must accept a categorical ethical imperative to create a social order in which nobody is coerced or deceived. This categorical imperative of non-coercion and non-deception applies even to a society of devils, as no social order can survive the precariousness and uncertainties of living where killing and lying are a continuing threat to life and contract (Cameron, 1999). At a time when development debates are becoming increasingly concerned with violence and corruption as key elements in damaging human well-being, the claim that non-coercion and non-deception are foundational principles of rights and obligations for all human beings in all societies provides a promising philosophical focus in the search for principles for normative development theory. In an earlier paper, Cameron applied a modified view of Kant’s ethical imperative to suggest two mappings – one from the non-fulfillment of the principle of non-deception through to the social experience of corruption, and the other from non-fulfillment of the principle of non-coercion through to the social experience of violence (Cameron, 1999). The modified Kantianism (m-Kantianism) proposed by Cameron (1999) argues that the Kantian ethical categorical imperative to non-deception and non-coercion can play a role as a universalistic foundation for development evaluation, provided it is adjusted to meet the following major interconnected challenges: . Moving to cover not only individual but also group interactions. . Linking rights to obligations.
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Dealing with action at a distance through institutions. Taking account of unequal economic, cultural and political resources/wealth. Recognising variations between societies and groups in thick values. Including time as an explicit factor, taking account of duration, non-reversibility, uncertainty, and sustainability.
These challenges make enactment of the Kantian ethical imperative in human social practice extremely complex and require exploration of the procedural and practical dimensions in different social contexts. In rural Nepal, where people earn a living partly from the forests, we can see violence and corruption enacted by individuals working on behalf of the state (techno-bureaucrats) or those who draw on traditionally legitimate forms of power (such as local elites). The thick social institutions which help in the coordination and collective action around forest governance are themselves sites of domination and violence. Allocation of forest and land resources to local feudal lords, and then coopting peasants in order to extract rents, has been a common phenomenon in Nepal’s modern history (Regmi, 1977), and this system of relations of production still dominates the current pattern of institutions and social relations. Also, cultural differentiation in terms of caste, gender and ethnicity further complicates the possibility of non-deceptive practices. At least what is now clear by 2006 is that a neo-liberal marketisation of forest governance is not a feasible alternative to these collective institutions of coordination and control. But the problem of domination remains. The problem becomes further entrenched when we move from small communities to larger geographic scales – and it is increasingly appreciated that we need an ethic of environmental governance at even global scale – as we have to deal with diverse social values with regard to environment. While Kantian ethics help us to see the problem of ethical practice in terms of a categorical imperative, it falls short of showing how non-deception and non-coercion can actually be enacted in the complex reality. The categorical imperative is intended to be universal and apply to all human beings at all points in time. The modified version here lacks Kant’s original optimism in that it admits issues of unequal power. Patterns of inequality in power will vary between societies and thus ethical behaviour will be sensitive to context. A society with a highly unequal distribution of power and a related capacity to use coercion and deception to reproduce that inequality will have a different ethic of resistance compared to a more equal society, in which coercion and deception can be more readily reduced through improved deliberative processes. The challenge is that even the processes of ethical improvement in governance practices – such as CF in Nepal – are often driven by Western assumptions, and tend to limit their practices of governance to establishment of groups and institutional structures, which in reality stand on the basis of existing structures of inequality which sustain deception and coercion. Given current awareness in development studies for the physical environment, a complete ethical position must include a position on “nature.” Here, too Kant provides insights. His approach to the people/nature relationship is summarised in The Critique of Judgement, where he discusses nature in terms of its power over people:
. . . threatening rock, thunderclouds piled up [to] the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. . . . [They] raise the forces of the soul above the height of the vulgar commonplace and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature (Kant, 1989, pp. 10-1).
Kant envisages insecure contexts in which fearful people are rendered passive by dread and compares them with securer contexts in which such natural forces are experienced as sublime. In securer contexts, people can appreciate their capacity for reason as a distinct capability that exists in contrast to the emotional sensation of the sublime. Reason becomes more valued because of the natural. People can then turn reason back towards nature and attempt to reduce it to scientific laws. But the raw emotional essence of the natural does not disappear in this process. Kant’s ethical categorical imperative is based on reason, but nature is crucial to the valuation of that reason and hence a lively natural world with its moments of the sublime is vital to Kantian ethics. A person who is unaware of the eye of the tiger will not value calm reflection and deliberation as much as a person who has experienced the insecurity of that moment. If nature is totally tamed then human ethical consciousness becomes less not more. In the same way, consciousness for Hegel’s bondsman, who knows fear of loss of life and associated interdependence, is likely to be more developed than for the master. Even for the austere Kant, nature has significance for his ethics in inducing a humility that makes ethical behaviour more likely and deliberative closure more difficult. In terms of both people/people and people/nature relationships, m-Kantian thinking pushes the discourse on development ethics towards non-closure and procedural rather than substantive ethical conclusions. Our position seeks to move from a thin substantive starting point, through the implied procedural ethical concerns, towards procedural arrangements to improve deliberation in the direction of less deception and coercion in specific social contexts. Neo-liberals and m-Kantians can share doubts about the nature of the State, bureaucratic allocation of resources and bureaucratic accountability. The neo-liberal structural adjustment approach seeks to marketise away these problems of bureaucratic economics and politics, while the m-Kantian seeks to deliberate them away. Which is the better approach to critical questions on conservation of a habitable physical environment, widespread addictive narcotic production and use, and inadequate personal and public safety has become a crucial issue. The neo-liberal approach to development which marginalises and individualises such issues is already on the defensive and is likely to remain so. To face such issues, the m-Kantian position demands that the concepts of democracy, participation, access and accountability be problematised and theorised as developmental keywords and rescued from formalistic use in multi-party electoral and bureaucratic paradigms. The Kantian categorical imperative to non-deception is crucial to understanding deliberative deficits. The sense of having been deceived can be aroused by many experiences. The simplest situation involves direct misrepresentation of a piece of information by one agent to another agent. More complex are situations in which one agent has reason to expect one form of behaviour but receives another.
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Effective agency is undermined by both experiences and, when such experiences are common in a society, the viability and sustainability of the social order can be chronically, if not mortally, undermined. Undermining of agency may involve a combination of deception and violence. German society between 1925 and 1945 provides a telling case-study suggesting such an interaction. Owings (1993) uses ethnographic methodology, including recall from as long as 60 years previously, to attempt to understand the range of women’s responses in the Germany of that time. These women were not directly threatened by Nazi deceptions regarding superiority and inferiority among social groups. Owings suggests that women took a wide range of positions with respect to the rise of Nazism. The range included: willingness to accept authority (legitimated by emphasis on nationalism and motherhood, and enforced by self-and family-preservation); perceived powerlessness to oppose Nazism socially (despite examples of individual courage in assisting other individuals and following Communist Party or other discipline); and crises of explicit moral choice when the price of following one option was probable death, so that women instead lived with guilt in a context of uncertainty over “reality.” This uncertainty over the violent reality relied upon removal by the Nazis at an early stage of agencies concerned with transparency and accountability, thus increasing the potential for deception. The extension of violence was more gradual and secretive right up to the final solution from 1942. Women from a variety of positions who were asked about violence in Germany during 1933-1939 might well have argued it had decreased, at a time when potential for carrying through unprecedented violence was being developed. Some would even have claimed the level of economic deception had decreased with the repression of “Jewish” businesses (Owings, 1993). Societies possess multiple ethical codes for limiting coercive and deceptive behaviour in political, civil society, and market relationships. But such codes not only involve ethical rules (analogous to Bourdieu’s doxa), they also include reasons/ justifications for apparent breaches of each code (as one part of what Bourdieu calls habitus). Multiple codes of behaviour in a society with differing degrees of formality generate multiple potential forms of coercion and deception and protestations that coercion and deception were not present. For instance, a common form of deception is to claim to be acting within one code when de facto operating with reference to another. Also each of the codes may have its own dynamics leading to redefinitions of acceptable behaviour within each code and modifying the interaction between codes. Thus, mapping from the Kantian categorical imperative of non-coercion and non-deception to actual required behaviour is a complex process. Nevertheless, in m-Kantian terms, this preliminary overview suggests there may be ways to assess whether a society is moving towards less or more coercion and deception, utilising Bourdieu’s concepts. The existence of corruption and violence at their present levels has implications for any intellectual project that is concerned with the possibilities of progress in the quality of human life. The m-Kantian position attempts to give that project conceptual depth. It aspires towards a universal, global ethics, but leaves much room for sensitive analysis of local variations in the meanings and patterns of coercion and deception. The m-Kantian methodology is inevitably discursive, inclusive and critically aware of power relations, unequal power structures, and the power poverty of some people. Corruption and violence, both at the individual and, particularly, at the mass levels, are
outcomes of unequal or uncertain power relationships. Varying mixtures of inequality and uncertainty in a power relationship can induce different forms of violence and different potentials for corruption. To bring corruption and physical violence to the centre of development studies, as major causes of low quality of human life, requires explicit attention to the specific nature of deception and coercion at a societal level and the decision-making space for limiting them. Policies to place people as ends and agents, rather than as means and victims/clients/customers/human capital, require concern with the means and processes of policy formulation and implementation and explicit evaluation of interactions and relationships. With m-Kantian development objectives, the policy process from identification to evaluation should over time become more transparent, less opaque. Rights to information and public inquiry procedures become a development issue, not an optional extra or a transaction cost to be minimised. Many of the people in grass-roots organisations concerned with development will suspect this m-Kantian approach of being politically utopian as much as economically unrealistic. They would argue that day-to-day exercise of power is based on structures where power is centralised and multi-form and any proposal to more equally distribute power will meet uncompromising resistance in depth across the whole range of economic, cultural and political experience. If this analysis is accepted, which concludes that the agency of large groups of people is structurally hindered and their claims undermined and repressed, then the m-Kantian approach becomes a variant on a Hegel-Marx approach (Hegel, 1966) to society and consciousness. The process of asserting claims to agency by those to whom it is denied is developmentally progressive and justifiable. m-Kantians must argue though that such a political revolution should be carried out using means that respect the categorical imperatives of non-coercion and non-deception. There is much work to be done in developing means of communication and indicators that allow patterns of whole lives, including coercion and deception, to be understood sensitively at all levels of aggregation and to omit no sub-group of people. Networks with the ability to communicate patterns of others’ lives to people remote from that experience are needed. Universal literacy in, and access to, the written and electronic media is an important objective. Facilitating unstructured, non-commercial, mutually reflective, cultural contact has a vital role to play. Numerous practical experiments on local scales in self-defence, democracy, participation, access and accountability and environmental conservation need to be more widely communicated, and their impacts on corruption and violence, deception and coercion, and environmental degradation can be evaluated. We can then also move beyond the defensive language of rights to be not deceived and coerced, into the language of obligations to positively advance less deception and coercion. Improved deliberation as an ethical process: Habermas and Dewey The work of Onora O’Neill (1941-) helps us to bridge from Kant to Habermas. Her interpretation of Kant’s thinking emphasises both interdependence and communication as key human characteristics (O’Neill, 1986, 1990, 1996). Habermas’s “discourse ethics” requires that all those affected by ethical norms to coordinate and guide collective action of social agents must deliberate together without coercion and deception over the possibility and the content of the norms. As he argues “Only those
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norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas, 1990). Since, for him, private and public autonomy are co-original (Habermas, 1996, p. 129), one leading to the other, social agents in an ethical community “have to” engage in communicative interactions to arrive at understanding so that both the individual and collective gains are maximised (Haller, 1994, p. 111). This suggests that resolving the practical problems of poor and marginalised people in a degrading natural environment involves creating conditions through which they can engage in discursive deliberation free from coercion and deception. The optimistic belief is that high quality deliberation will address structural constraints on deprived people’s participation. Two dimensions need to be identified – one of ensuring free and non-coerced communication of emotions, feelings and information; and secondly, recognition of uncertainty and complexity, and of the need for experiential learning over time, testing and exploring ideas in the real world setting. Seen from this ethical perspective, even the well-recognised participatory process of Nepal CF suffers from major deliberative deficits. Let us take an example: In a CFUG [Community Forest User Group] with a pole stage Sal forest, foresters advised the group to undertake thinning so that the Sal trees[1] grow faster. The group is close to Kathmandu valley, and because of easy road access, many of the smallholder farmers in the area have started to cultivate vegetables as cash crops, such as beans, cucumber and others, which need small supporting sticks. Before a CFUG was organised, the forest was de facto open access and the farmers could collect sticks without any restrictions. But after the establishment of [a] CFUG in mid-1990, technical forestry staff developed a forest management plan which prescribed clearing of all bushes/inferior species in the Sal forest. When the bushes were cleared, the forest became clean monoculture of Sal trees as per the wishes of the forest officials. But [the] majority of the land-poor farmers who were trying to earn a living through the production of cash crops had no supply of small sticks from the forest. On an average, each household needs about 1,000 sticks per year. This means that the forest could have better remained as bushy and shrubby for them but they could not argue against official forestry knowledge during planning and decision-making. This illustrates how government forestry knowledge is being imposed, without any deliberative interaction with local citizens (Ojha, 2006b).
The case illustrates that deliberative ethics is distorted by unequal power between technical experts and ordinary people. Still the concept of deliberation points to directions of more ethical practice – if farmers were allowed to participate in the process of identifying and designing the strategies of forest management, the outcomes could have been more ethical. Here, the Kantian notion of non-coercion and deception needs to be enlarged, to recognise a Habermasian domain of communicative action. Deliberative governance is inspired by Habermas’s notion of seeking communicative rationality in power relationships. This is a form of rationality, beyond a scientific or technical conception of reason employed by humans to understand the physical world (Habermas, 1971, 1987). When free and equal subjects deliberate, they transform each other and a new form of rationality emerges in the communicative interaction (Dryzek, 2000). Habermas’s main thesis is that only those norms are valid that meet with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse. This rationality redefines democratic legitimacy, ethics, and decision-making processes. From the perspective of communicative rationality, political agency (or citizenship) is an intersubjective enterprise, as people
are connected to diverse networks of communication in society. In that sense, they are not autonomous rational beings in themselves, as the ways through which they understand, interpret and channel resources are mediated by intersubjective processes. This reasoning questions aggregative models of liberal governance, which merely add up individual preferences without regard to deliberative principles and collective ethics (Chambers, 1996; Dryzek, 2000). Deliberation is a conscious exercise of communicative competence by social beings to understand, negotiate and transform human relations and ethical norms. It is a “social process” involving communication of reasons, arguments, rhetoric, humour, emotion, testimony, story-telling, and gossip (Dryzek, 2000, p. 1). Such communicative practices do not just make governance possible but changes in them can be constitutive of improved governance. Both Habermas and Dewey claim that most problems of governance are associated with distortions in communication among the social agents engaged in ethical discourse (Bohman, 1999; Bohman, 2002). Difficulties exist in dependability of communication and mutual intelligibility (Dewey and Bentley, 1949, p. v), and there is always a possibility of communication getting distorted, especially when humans have to engage in situations of differences and conflicts. In Bourdieu’s terms, deliberation has doxic procedural ethical rules, differentiable from the substantive rules of habitus in a particular field. These procedural ethical rules admit uncertainty, risk, and existence of power (otherwise there would be no need for deliberation). As such they must have elements of being open-ended in outcomes, discursive in style, evidence-based in legitimacy, and also providing room for emotions to flow. While the Habermasian view is too exclusively preoccupied with normative framing of deliberation, ideas of Dewey highlight the ontological value of deliberation. Dewey’s ontological stance, on a communicative basis for understanding being human, emphasises that human relationships are in a continuous process of creation (Dewey, 1966, p. 3). Dewey distinguishes between “transactional” and “interactional” processes. Whereas the interactional processes assume that individuals have an autonomous existence before interaction, transactional processes envisage the creation of both individuals and groups in society through the processes of transmission (Dewey and Bentley, 1949). Dewey’s conclusion is that “when communicative processes are involved, we find in them something very different from physiological process; the transactional inspection must be made to display what takes place, and neither the particles of physics nor those of physiology will serve” (Dewey and Bentley, 1949, p. 134). From Dewey, we argue that an atomistic conception of purely autonomous individuals is not adequate to understand ethical actions. An alternative is to start analysis from the complex social interactions surrounding practical problem situations of ethics. Another aspect in which Dewey complements Habermas is the dynamic notion of learning through experience, rather than transcendental deliberation. Dewey considers social practices as central to collective learning, experimentation and democracy. Every social practice is based on a practical rational ethics that can give rise to individual variations. This resonates with the Habermasian idea of deliberation as a process of transforming preferences through interaction, and Bourdieu’s fuzzy practical logic in social action (the knowledge of a coach is never applied exactly into practice by a player, who has his or her own technique of playing). But nevertheless, in
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everyday language and means of communication, we can observe the primacy of the collective in shaping the private. One of the crucial questions which treatises on ethics should address is how power can be an ethical action, as human collectivities are always coordinated through some relations of power. The history of human society shows that there has been a recurring question as to how individuals and groups can constitute ethical relations of power. The question of legitimacy becomes even more critical when there is general recognition of a crisis and a need to transform existing relations of power from one form to another (such as from a feudal society to a democratic society). Whereas Dewey argued for democracy as cooperative inquiry by concerned citizens, his ideas are sometimes criticised for being too instrumental (Festenstein, 1997). Habermas’s discursive conception of “radical democracy” does not designate a specific institutional form but a social and epistemological ideal of a “self-controlled learning process,” with freely participating subjects (Festenstein, 1997). Both Habermas and Dewey thus provide a normative basis of organising power but both depend heavily on confidence in universal, open communicative processes, without reference to contextual, complex patterns of inequality. To qualify that over-confidence we suggest utilising Bourdieu’s more structuralist ideas as a counterweight to Habermas’s and Dewey’s optimism. Reflections on forestry policies and practices of Nepal from the 1970s to today As introduced in previous sections of this paper, Nepal’s CF does not consist of harmonious village communities managing forest areas in isolation from the entire society. The forestry practice of local communities is a result of a complex web of relations within themselves, and between them and a range of non-local social agents, who take various positions in the field of CF and thus affect, and are affected by, the practices of forest management and decision-making. Although it started as a donor-supported program by government in the late 1980s, CF has emerged as a distinct social field with numerous actors engaged in the reciprocal relations of exchanging various forms of economic, cultural and symbolic resources, and at the same time having differentiated social positions, enduring dispositions, cognitive frames, and diverse motivations. Over the past 25 years, the range of actors engaged within the field of CF has consistently increased, especially after the enactment of a multi-party political system in 1990 and a devolutionary forest law in 1995. Actors engage in different ways – producing policy ideas, disseminating technical ideas and information, mediating conflicts and the like. They together constitute a topography of social space. During the early 1980s, Nepal’s mountains were perceived widely as a site of environmental and livelihoods crisis – deforestation and soil erosion were seen as affecting water flows and the livelihood resources base locally and beyond (Eckholm, 1976). Around the same time, a global environmental movement was gathering momentum, using the language of crisis to emphasise the environmental costs of continuity and the need for change. The Nepal Himalaya then became a matter of concern internationally. Technical environmental experts emphasised a technical scientific rationality, highlighting the rates, nature and dynamics of environmental degradation in “ultra-conservationist” fashion (Blaikie and Muldavin, 2004).
The discourse on Nepal’s forests thus went beyond the political boundary of Nepal, and international agencies started to deliberate over how the field could be addressed. Expatriate “experts” came to Nepal and the number of environmental scientists working in Nepal increased following the 1980s Stockholm conference on Environment and Development. Richer countries now had a new mandate to intervene in the physical environments of poorer countries, to replace their powers in the colonial period. Initially, both Nepalese foresters and foreign technical experts emphasised government controlled plantation/afforestation as the solution. These experts could not understand local people’s negative responses to their recommendations as they were working from a technocratic rationality. Local citizens were allowed very little deliberative space to define problems and propose solutions. This is why many of the plantations undertaken as a quick-fix technical solution were not successful – they intruded into the pre-existing systems of resource use decided in local deliberative processes, leading to strong local resistance (such as defying fences, continued grazing, and even uprooting of seedlings). But this local resistance forced experts and bureaucrats to reflect (Table I). The experts then began to relocate priorities from technical to socio-political dimensions, including to issues of local deliberative processes (Gilmour and Fisher, 1991). After a series of deliberative interactions, new rules were created to authorise local communities to take control over forests. But in the 1980s a political regime with very constrained deliberative processes was in place: the partyless panchayat[2] system with limited civic participation in political decision-making. The process of decentralisation of forest control was confined to local Panchayats, the local bodies of the Panchayat political system that was directly controlled and dictated by the King. This allowed local elites to capture control over the forests (Panchayat forests), working closely with local bureaucrats and largely acting on their technical advice, though lubricated by regular corruption and occasional violence (for forceful exclusion of the forest-dependent poor). This, in modified Kantian terms, can be seen as a deceptive move by the Royalist government to coopt local elites around Panchayati politics, and thus to dissipate their possible resentment against community resource management. A more genuinely decentralised form of governance emerged following a popular struggle for multi-party democracy in 1990. Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) were recognised as independent local groups to manage designated forest areas. In 2005, there were about 15,000 CFUGs nationally, with more independence over resource control. But there remain persistent questions of equity and democratic practice, mainly because of a thin notion of democratic accountability and a consequent deliberative gap in the relations between people and political leaders. Under this liberal governance framework, forest bureaucrats have exercised tremendous symbolic power not only as scientists but also as haakim or patrons (Ojha, 2006a). Malla (2001) reports a compelling case of the persistence of “patron-client” relations between the forest bureaucrats and local elites, and the peasant forest users, despite the change in forest policies. Just providing greater independence to local groups proved ineffective as there seems to be a lack of concurrent discursive politics to tackle issues of exclusion and inequality. The political field and the field of CF are not linked adequately, and the latter has again been subjected to technocratic dispositions emphasising the formation of CFUGs and quantitative assessment of resource stocks, at the cost of deliberative
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Table I. Overview of Nepal forestry case seen from different ethical perspectives
Nepal case
Corruption, violence, need for deliberation, inequality Reveals how practices of forest Demonstrates a more governance are marked by the pronounced critique of unethical ubiquity of unethical practices in practice and points to the need terms of both non-coercion and for deliberation. Fails to deception. But this position gives demonstrate a procedural little insight into how they can be strategy of ethical practice reformulated
m-Kantian
Provides a more visible direction for ethical improvement in terms of countering deliberative deficit. Offers some evidence of causal relations between deliberation and justice outcomes – such as from policies to support community based management and civil society institutions to safeguard civic rights and challenge technocratic doxa, but there remains a huge deficit on deliberation. Challenges to this deliberative ethical strategy include: the idea seems too idealistic and constrained by unequal deliberative competence of the social agents involved
Communication, deliberation
Habermas/Dewey
The idealism of deliberation is purged to provide deeper analytical insights into when/how deliberation can lead to reproduction or transformation. Currently, deliberation in forest governance is structured around the languages of techno-bureaucrats and the participatory/ deliberative gains are not free from symbolic violence
Doxa, differentiated deliberative competence, symbolic violence
Bourdieu
80
Concepts and Non-deception, non-coercion themes
Kant
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transformation of doxa. But there are better practical instances at local level that show that when political forums are widened within and around CFUGs, the scope for deliberative transformation of inequitable practices and rules is expanded (Timsina et al., 2004; Banjade and Ojha, 2005). Local Nepalese societies have dense networks of institutions and associated symbolic ethical doxa and patterns of habitus which provide challenges and opportunities for deliberation. Institutions of caste and gender are particularly challenging for deliberative improvement as they differentiate citizens into structurally very unequal groupings. Ethnic diversity can add to cultural richness and social learning (Young, 1997) but when it crosscuts with inequality, the deliberative challenge is suppressed. More open deliberative practices within local societies as well as between those societies and the wider world could produce both procedural and substantive ethical gains. But CF still tends to be viewed in isolation from civil society socio-cultural systems, and their ethical doxa is instead guided by a thin logic of modernist scientism and its claims to ethical neutrality (Scott, 1998; Nightingale, 2005). In addition to the discourse on community management, the neo-liberal doxa emphasising the desirability (in terms of both efficiency and ethics) of moving control of forests towards “autonomous individuals” and market forces (in a neo-liberal sense) is still present in Nepal (Shrestha, 1999). Politicians and technocrats tend to ally in favour of privatisation of commercial forest resources. Civil society has time and again vehemently questioned the application of such ideology in governing Nepal’s forests (Shrestha, 1999). Deliberation over the use of forest resources is thus ethically threatening for elite interests. This is consistent with a retreat from the language of ecological crisis. Forestry at local level is related to non-local and global processes through the exchange of economic and symbolic capitals. WTO policies on trade affect the market prices and markets for medicinal plants and other forest products which local CFUGs produce (US $26 million was earned in 1995 from the trade in non-timber forest resources). This means CFUGs not only acquire resources to become local autonomous practitioners, but also become participants in the global discourse on global trading rules. Emergence of a nation-wide federation of CFUGs in the mid-1990s is an indication of the ability of Nepalese people to build institutions to play this role. The Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal (FECOFUN) has actively promoted local agendas of users at national and international levels. Although CFUGs were declared independent entities in the Forest Act of 1993, several subsequent actions of government tended to undermine the power of CFUGs (Britt, 2001). FECOFUN sought to safeguard their rights by participating in the national debate. Deliberative gains were still being challenged by doxa sceptical of deliberative rationality and its associated ethical challenges (Ojha and Timsina, 2006). For instance, more aggressive emphasis on conservation in the 1990s tended to emphasise a need for coercion to protect those resources. FECOFUN’s contribution in the national debate was crucial in bringing the views of local forest users into national and international policy discourse. There will be continuing instances in which the debate over control of forests is threatened with capture by bureaucrats and technical experts using deception and coercion, and marginalisation of deliberative processes. In one instance, for example, a FECOFUN activist was offered a grant by a bilateral
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forestry project if he would stop publicly criticising the project approach (personal communication with national FECOFUN activist). A law or rule is often not implementable in practice, as practices are not determined by formal rules if these compete with powerful dispositions of habituses in the field. The Forest Act 1993 recognised the rights and authorities of CFUGs, but the behaviour of state forest officials has distorted the law markedly in practice (Dhital et al., 2002; Lachapelle et al., 2004; Timsina et al., 2004). FECOFUN’s public criticisms of the technocratic dispositions of foresters and its work to politicise forest governance issues have provided much evidence of these distortions. Such experiments in changing deliberative governance seek to engage a wide range of people with diverse interests, capacities and positions, communicating in the field of forestry practices, critiquing each other, challenging each others’ doxa, exchanging different forms of capitals, formulating and refining their habitus patterning (Table II). Procedural ethical gains can be made from the resulting significant, mutually reinforcing, challenges to deceptive practices including: . Increased sensitivity to corruption; Maoist threat to bribery (Seddon and Hussain, 2002). . Growing value of more scientific cultural capital (which gives scope for becoming independent consultants rather than traditional bureaucrats).
Civil society institutions seeking Foundational doxa being greater access to communicative challenged and ethical deliberation on forest resources implications National Forestry Organisation
Community Forestry User Groups
Local more excluded people
Table II. Civil society challenges for more deliberative processes over forestry in Nepal
Professional NGOs
Neo-liberal marketisation. Technocratic closure in terms of universal scientific knowledge Regulatory authoritarianism Questioning of ethical doxa that tolerate state corruption and violence Technocratic closure in terms of local environmental knowledge Corruption Questioning of ethical doxa of scientific ethical neutrality/ superiority Cultural closure and claimed right to exploit resources Questioning of ethical doxa of Hindu caste superiority legitimating deception and coercion Liberal-constitutionalist and technocratic state Questioning of ethical doxa of individual liberty
Symbolic capital aspects of habitus being questioned Autonomous individualism “Expert” judgements Bureaucratic authority
“Expert” judgements Contempt for the “peasantry”
Caste and gender legitimacy
“Hakim” culture of bureaucrats and respect of political agency of citizens
.
.
.
. .
.
.
Mass media and local revelations of limits of “expert” technical knowledge and competence. Social and political science oriented research into use of techno-bureaucratic power in relation to forests (of which this paper is part). Local people challenging the haakim – such as by not using the formal greeting Namaste. Ordinary citizens learning the language of the foresters in order to subvert it. Radical challenge to development failures of the past four decades (including the Maoist threat). Emergence of more politically engaged civil society both in forestry and the national political field. Political limits of national developmentalist doxa being revealed by radical NGOs (Ojha, 2006a).
In the conclusion section, we will reflect on the potential for continuing change. But overall, the history of recent forestry activities in Nepal reveals a continuing ethical deficit in both substantive and procedural terms. Deception and coercion have continued despite claims of increased popular participation. Attempts to improve deliberative processes have had limited local and national impact, less than the effects of the Maoist rising with its own doxa and habitus practices and associated ethics on who can deliberate. The degree of success of Nepal CF in reversing Himalayan environmental degradation must be weighed against deliberative failures resulting from the imposition of a doxa with its own ethical dimension legitimating a technocratic, conservationist habitus. This demands reframing of public debate both in procedural and substantive terms – procedurally to enhance the agency of the poor and marginalised groups to effectively participate, and substantively to expose deceptive elements in the claims to ethical authority on the part of the dominant technocratic habitus, and the associated element of deception utilised to reproduce social inequality. Conclusion The pessimistic tone of our conclusions to the case study raises the question of whether the framework we are offering here is doomed to find acute structural deliberative deficits in any field where patterns of mutually reinforcing inequalities persist over time. But we do see opportunities for conscious agency improving deliberative processes and associated procedural ethics. Our framework allows both for continuing (and even deepening) deficits and for improvement. Elements of Kantian deception can be found in any dominant doxa wherever gross inequalities are rationalised as being natural and inevitable. These deceptions seek to close deliberation on the reasons for inequalities. Where this closure is challenged, deceptions are exposed and demands for more open deliberation cannot be suppressed by symbolic violence alone. Then more open deliberation or increasing physical coercion may result. The key to shifting from symbolic to physical violence or more open deliberation lies in the concept of crisis. Crisis can originate when nature dramatically challenges a psycho-social reality, when experiences fail to match doxic expectations of stability in natural processes. The Kantian contemplation of the sublime in nature is relevant here in terms of the capacity
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of nature to shock the rational into deeper reflection. In less elevated terms, the natural environment still has the capacity for surprise and for forcing a fundamental review of what it means to be human. Despite all the external proclamations of crisis in the Himalayan/Gangetic Plain eco-system this has not been the experiential reality of the mass of households with average sized landholdings in Nepal (Blaikie et al., 2002). Crisis can also emerge from exposure by intellectuals and activists of systematic hypocrisy, between avowed doxic ethical rules and actual performance in a field, that cannot be accepted as mere variations within habitus practices. The intellectual leadership of the Maoist rising can be seen as having revealed an unacceptable degree of deception by the nationally powerful elite, deception in which external donors have been complicit. Seen through the lens offered in this paper, there is a potential for a more deliberatively open, and hence more procedurally ethical, direction of change in Nepal. But the challenge to the patterns of doxa and habitus that have reproduced deliberative deficits is not being driven by a common cause in conserving a vulnerable environment; rather by the Maoist movement’s exposure of the dominant national doxa, and of the elite’s claims to be developmental in the interest of the mass of the Nepalese people, as essentially deceptive in modified Kantian terms. We see this as a complex crisis with a strong ethical aspect, in which more open local deliberation would be a rational response, rather than a class war seeking to exclude those complicit in previous exclusions as the Maoists claim. The situation in Nepal in 2006 is confused, and vulnerable at national and local levels to moves towards increasing physical coercion rather than to reducing deception. The modified Kantian categorical imperative then predicts a vicious rather than virtuous spiral and the situation may move beyond both Bourdieu’s reproductive structures and Dewey and Habermas’ free will, into bloody chaos. There is a window of opportunity for human agency acting to reduce deliberative deficits at local level but it may be rapidly bricked up if those seeking office at the national level attempt to close down local deliberative processes through electoral or dictatorial means. The most likely outcome then would be that the technocratic doxa, possibly in military uniform, will eventually reassert itself and an opportunity for procedural ethical gain will be lost. Notes 1. Sal is a high value timber species found in South Asia. Much of the Colonial Indian silviculture was focused on Sal forest management, developing models of management that maximized timber. 2. The panchayat system was headed directly by the king. It had three tiers of elected body of panchayat politicians – village panchayat, district panchayat and national panchayat. Despite elections, the real power was derived from the monarchy. References Banjade, M. and Ojha, H. (2005), “Facilitating deliberative governance: innovations from Nepal’s community forestry – a case of Karmapunaya”, The Forestry Chronicle, Vol. 81 No. 3, pp. 403-8. Bauhn, P. (1998), “Universal rights and the historical context”, European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 19-32.
Bauman, Z. (1998), “On universal morality and the morality of universalism”, European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 7-18. Blaikie, P. and Muldavin, J. (2004), “The politics of environmental policy with a Himalayan example”, Asia Pacific Issues, East-West Center, Hawaii. Blaikie, P., Cameron, J. and Seddon, D. (2002), “Understanding 20 years of change in west-central Nepal: continuity and change in lives and ideas”, World Development, Vol. 30 No. 7, pp. 1255-70. Bohman, J. (1999), “Democracy as inquiry, inquiry as democratic: pragmatism, social science, and the cognitive division of labor”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 590-607. Bohman, J. (2002), “How to make a social science practical: pragmatism, critical social science and multiperspectival theory”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 499-524. Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, Polity, Cambridge, MA. Bourdieu, P. (2001), Masculine Domination, Polity, Cambridge, MA. Britt, C. (2001), “Mixed signals and government orders: the problem of on-again off-again community forestry policy”, Forests, Trees and People Newsletter, No. 45, pp. 29-33. Cameron, J. (1999), “Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a Foundation for Development Studies and Action”, European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 23-43. Chambers, S. (1996), Reasonable Democracy: Jurgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London. Crossley, N. (2004), “On systematically distorted communication: Bourdieu and the socio-analysis of publics”, The Sociological Review, Vol. 52, pp. 88-112. Dewey, J. (1916/1966), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, The Free Press, New York, NY. Dewey, J. and Bentley, A.F. (1949), Knowing and the Known, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Dhital, N., Paudel, K.P. and Ojha, H. (2002), Inventory of Community Forests in Nepal: Problems and Opportunities, ForestAction and Livelihoods and Forestry Programme, Kathmandu. Dryzek, J.S. (2000), Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Eckholm, E.P. (1976), Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects, W W Norton, New York, NY. Festenstein, M. (1997), Pragmatism and Political Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Fung, A. (2005), “Deliberation before revolution: toward an ethics of deliberative democracy in an unjust world”, Political Theory, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 397-419. Gilmour, D.A. and Fisher, R.J. (1991), Villagers, Forests and Foresters: The Philosophy Process and Practice of Community Forestry in Nepal, Sahayogi Press, Kathmandu. Habermas, J. (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Habermas, J. (1987), The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System – A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Habermas, J. (1990), “Discourse ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification”, in Benhabib, S. and Dallmayr, F. (Eds), The Communicative Ethics Controversy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Habermas, J. (1996), Between Facts and Norms – Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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Haller, M. (1994), The Past as Future – Jurgen Habermas Interviewed, Polity, Cambridge, MA, (Translated and edited by Max Pensky). Hallett, T. (2003), “Symbolic power and organizational culture”, Sociological Theory, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 128-49. Hayward, C.R. (2004), “Doxa and deliberation”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 1-24. Hegel, G. (1966), The Phenomenology of Mind, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London. Kant, I. (1989), The Critique of Judgement, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Lachapelle, P.R., Smith, P.D. and McCool, S.F. (2004), “Access to power or genuine empowerment? An analysis of three community forest groups in Nepal”, Human Ecology, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 1-12. Malla, Y.B. (2001), “Changing policies and the persistence of patron-client relations in Nepal: stakeholders’ responses to changes in forest policies”, Environmental History, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 287-307. Nightingale, A. (2005), “The experts taught us all we know: professionalization and knowledge in Nepalese community forestry”, Antipode, Vol. 37, pp. 581-604. O’Neill, O. (1986), Faces of Hunger, George Allen and Unwin, London. O’Neill, O. (1990), “Justice, gender and international boundaries”, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 20, pp. 439-59. O’Neill, O. (1996), Towards Justice and Virtue, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Ojha, H. (2006a), “Techno-bureaucratic doxa and challenges for deliberative governance: the case of community forestry policy and practice in Nepal”, manuscript. Ojha, H. (2006b), “Development as symbolic violence? The case of community forestry in Nepal”, manuscript. Ojha, H. and Timsina, N. (2006), From Grassroots to Policy Deliberation – The Case of Federation of Forest User Groups in Nepal, Forest Action, Kathmandu. Ojha, H., Timsina, N., Khanal, D. and Cameron, J. (2006), “Deliberation in environmental governance – the case of forest policy making in Nepal”, manuscript. Owings, A. (1993), Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, Penguin, London. Regmi, M.C. (1977), Land Ownership in Nepal, Adroit, Delhi. Scott, J. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Seddon, D. and Hussain, K. (2002), “The consequences of conflict: livelihoods and development in Nepal”, Working Paper 185, Overseas Development Group, Norwich. Shrestha, K. (1999), “Community forestry in danger”, Forests, Trees and People Newsletter, Vol. 38, pp. 33-4. Swartz, D.L. (1997), Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Swartz, D.L. (2003), “Drawing inspiration from Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic Power”, Theory and Society, Vol. 32 Nos 5-6, pp. 519-28. Timsina, N., Luintel, H., Bhandari, K. and Thapaliya, A. (2004), “Action and learning: an approach for facilitating change in knowledge-power relationship in community forestry”, Journal of Forest and Livelihood, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 5-12. Wacquant, L. (2004), “Critical thought as solvent of doxa”, Constellations, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 97-101.
Young, I.M. (1997), “Difference as a resource for democratic communication”, in Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (Eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 383-406. Young, I.M. (2003), “Activist challenges to deliberative democracy”, in Fishkin, J.S. and Lasslett, P. (Eds), Debating Deliberative Democracy, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 102-20.
A deliberative ethic for development
Further reading Bourdieu, P. (1998), Practical Reason: On The theory of Action, Polity, Cambridge, MA. Habermas, J. (1990b), “Discourse ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification”, in Habermas, J. (Ed.), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhardt, C., Nicholsen, S.W, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 43-115. Timsina, N., Ojha, H. and Paudel, K.P. (2004), “Deliberative governance and public sphere: a reflection on Nepal’s community forestry 1997-2004”, paper presented at Fourth National Workshop on Community Forestry, Department of Forestry, Kathmandu, Nepal.
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Corresponding author John Cameron can be contacted at:
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Sustainable livelihood approaches and soil erosion risks Who is to judge?
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Tim Forsyth London School of Economics and Political Science, Development Studies Institute, London, UK Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to debates about environmental policy in developing countries by examining how far sustainable livelihoods approaches (SLAs) to development may allow an alternative and less universalistic approach to environmental changes such as soil erosion. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an overview of debates about environmental narratives and SLAs. There are tensions in both debates, about how far local institutions represent adaptations to predefined environmental risks, or instead enable a redefinition of risks according to the experience of poor people. In addition, there is a tension in how far SLAs should be seen as a fixed institutional design, or as a framework for organizing ideas and concerns about development. The paper presents research on soil erosion in Thailand as a case study of how SLAs can redefine risks from erosion for poor people. Findings – SLAs provide a more contextual analysis of how environmental changes such as soil erosion represent risk to different land users, and hence SLAs can make environmental interventions more relevant for reducing vulnerability. But this approach can only succeed if intervener agencies are willing to consider challenging pre-existing environmental narratives in order to empower local livelihoods. Originality/value – The paper adds to existing research on SLAs by exploring the implications of SLAs for redefining environmental assumptions. The paper forms part of work aiming to make debates about the politics of environmental knowledge and science more practically relevant within development policy. Keywords Environmental management, Soil erosion, Sustainable development, Developing countries, Thailand Paper type Research paper
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 88-102 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723381
Introduction In many upland areas of developing countries today, environmental policies are based on universal assumptions about the nature and causes of environmental risk (Kasperson and Kasperson, 2001). For example, in the mountains of northern Thailand, environmental risk is defined in terms of soil erosion and its potential impact on watershed properties. As a result, government policies seek to control erosion by restricting upland agriculture, relocating villages from the uplands, or covering large areas of land with teak and pine plantations. This approach to environmental risk, however, is now increasingly challenged (Lash et al., 1996; Wisner et al., 2004). A growing number of researchers are instead urging that environmental risk should be seen more contextually, and less on the basis of universal assumptions about biophysical causes of risk. Yet, despite much discussion about the need for alternative approaches, researchers are still uncertain
about how to implement policies that do not adopt universal approaches to environmental risk. This paper considers the ways in which sustainable livelihoods approaches (SLAs) to development may be used for this purpose. SLAs have been adopted by development agencies since the 1990s as a way to reduce vulnerability and poverty through means such as income diversification and agricultural intensification (Scoones, 1998; Carney, 2003). Influenced by scholars such as Robert Chambers and Amartya Sen, SLAs aim to strengthen local resilience by enhancing institutions governing access to livelihoods and resources. Some analysts have claimed SLAs may allow poor people to adapt to, or reduce, environmental degradation by aligning environmental policy more with local environmental perceptions and vulnerability. But, some critics claim more work is required to make SLAs effective for governance (Arce, 2003), and their implications for governing environmental risks can be developed further. The paper explores the potential use of SLAs in less universalistic environmental policy by considering soil erosion in the uplands of northern Thailand. Northern Thailand and approaches to soil erosion The highlands of northern Thailand[1] commonly inspire images of teak forests, Buddhist temples, lush green rice fields and remote hillside villages inhabited by colorful “hill tribes.” Although the region is by no means as high as the snow-capped Himalayan ranges further west (northern Thailand’s highest peak, Doi Inthanon, is just 2,565 m above sea level), the region is the most consistently mountainous region of Thailand. It is also the most remote region, with many valleys and hillsides unconnected to transport routes, and was only politically integrated into the rest of Thailand in the twentieth century. Classically, northern Thailand has contained two main ethnic groups: the lowland Thai (khonmuang), who traditionally inhabited irrigated intermontane basins; and upland minorities (so-called “hill tribes” or chao khao), who historically practiced forms of shifting cultivation in the uplands. Upland minorities have also been divided into ethnic groups who have either lived in Thailand for as long as the lowland Thai (such as the Karen), and those who have migrated to Thailand from neighboring Burma, Laos and China during the twentieth century, and who typically cultivated opium. Some early studies of shifting cultivation in the region classified these groups into those using so-called “pioneer” forms of shifting cultivation, such as the Hmong, Mien and Akha (who relocated villages every 10-20 years in search of more land); and “rotational” cultivators, such as the Karen (who rotated agricultural plots around semi-permanent settlements) (Grandstaff, 1980). In recent decades, however, these distinctions have become blurred as both Thai and minorities inhabit the uplands, and forms of shifting cultivation have been replaced by more permanent and commercialized agriculture. Both historic and current forms of upland cultivation have been blamed for causing environmental degradation, and particularly erosion. These views have long pedigrees. The British colonial scientist Spate (1945), writing about comparable areas in Burma, commented: “naturally, these practices are attended with serious deforestation and soil erosion.” More recently, permanent agriculture has also been blamed for erosion as it reduces fallow periods and increases the intensity of land use. Some observers also fear that historically “pioneer” shifting cultivators may not understand the potential
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long-term impacts of permanent agriculture. In 1987, the Bangkok think-tank, Thailand Development Research Institute (1987, p. 296) wrote: Whereas slash and burn agriculture was once more closely attuned with the ecosystems exploited, it now causes untold ecological damages . . . In the process, major watersheds are being denuded, with increasing silt loads washed down into the nation’s rivers [and] silting up dams.
Deforestation is blamed for erosion for it reduces the canopy cover of soil, and frequently removes trees from the ground and disturbs soil. Cultivation also takes place on steep slopes, which encourages erosion. Sediment from the hills is blamed for silting up lowland dams and rivers. Erosion of soil is also considered to reduce its water-holding properties, which is seen to exacerbate lowland water shortages. Critics have, in addition, claimed that opium-substitution policies cause environmental degradation. During the 1980s, various development agencies sought to replace opium cultivation with alternative, cash-based export crops such as cabbages, soya beans and strawberries. These crops have been criticized for either exposing too much upland land to rainfall and for providing too little binding of upland soils. Moreover, some NGO workers have also considered that attempts to integrate upland minorities within wider commercial networks may destabilize historic balances between farmers and the fragile upland environment. One upland-NGO worker wrote: Traditionally, the hill tribes used slash and burn tactics in a limited way – just to produce food for their families. But in trying to produce cash crops and satisfy the demands of the market, the tribes surpassed the natural capacities of the land, degraded by deforestation and erosion (Tuenjai Deetes, 2000, p. 1).
And some environmental NGOs have been even more explicit about the threat of erosion that may result from upland agriculture: Heavy rains wash away the soil, which quickly silts up dams, reservoirs and rivers . . . Every rainy season now, lowland paddies are buried under 2-3 m of sand . . . The evergreen headwater forest should be areas of strict conservation as their removal brings about environmental disaster (Svasti, 1998).
Consequently, various government and NGO initiatives have sought to enforce environmental policies that reduce agricultural pressure on upland soils. Policies include relocating villages from locations considered especially fragile for soil erosion; placing restrictions on cultivation on steep slopes; and reforesting large areas of land with teak and pine plantations. Plantations are claimed to help reduce erosion by protecting soil surfaces, and by reducing the need for upland agriculture by offering livelihoods in maintaining plantations instead. Grass strips on steep slopes have also been used, which aim to prevent erosion by reducing the length of the slope and hence the ability for water on slopes to gather speed. Most significantly, large areas of northern Thailand are now placed in various categories of protected land such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, which restrict agriculture. Currently, about 50 percent of the total northern region is classified as conservation forest. In some highly forested provinces such as Nan, conservation forest covers 80 percent of the provincial area (Ewers, 2003).
Questioning these concerns Yet, these worries about soil erosion in northern Thailand may also be criticized for various reasons. First, much research has questioned the assumptions made about causes and effects of erosion in Thailand. For example, research in the similar topography of the Middle Hills of Nepal has indicated that popular debates overlook the immense variation in environmental processes across time and space, and the role of non-anthropogenic causes of erosion such as monsoon rainfall and tectonic uplift (Ives and Messerli, 1989; Ives, 2004). In particular, many deep gullies that dissect upland areas may be naturally occurring (Smadja, 1992, p. 7). Other hydrological research elsewhere has questioned how far land-cover changes such as deforestation are necessarily linked to water shortages. Indeed, planting large-scale tree plantations may even decrease lowland supplies of water (Calder, 1999; Bruijnzeel, 2004). A related finding is that estimates of soil erosion coming from the universal soil loss equation (USLE) (adopted as a guide in the USA after the so-called “Dust Bowl” crisis of the 1930s) may be overstatements in tropical regions (Hallsworth, 1987). Research has suggested that the USLE may simplify factors such as rainfall intensity (particularly the influence of storms) or the length of slopes, where farming practices provide breaks in slopes. Moreover, the USLE may focus too exclusively on erosion rather than on declining soil fertility caused by exhaustion of nutrients. In northern Thailand, slopes are frequently divided into complex household plots, and rainfall falls mainly between June and October, often in storms. In one study, Thitirojanawat and Chareonsuk (2000) found that the USLE predicted rates of soil loss in Nan province 104 times greater than those actually observed in run-off plots! Second, research has also suggested that many farmers may mitigate environmental change by careful practices of adaptation. For example, classic research on shifting cultivation has argued that farmers are more skilled in managing species diversity and soil fertility than commonly thought (Conklin, 1954). Research has also questioned the relationship of upland cultivation and erosion. In Nepal’s Middle Hills, anthropologists found that some hill farmers actually use landslides opportunistically to assist in the creation of terraced land, and that landslides may renew soil fertility by turning over soil (Kienholz et al., 1984; Ives and Messerli, 1989, p. 90). Perhaps, most famously, Tiffen et al.’s (1994) study in Machakos, Kenya, demonstrated that “more people” could mean “less erosion” if farmers were able to build terraces, instigate soil conservation, and identify opportunities for trade and income diversification. And thirdly, some analysts have argued controversially that fixed visions of environmental risk, such as those concerning soil erosion in northern Thailand, should be understood politically as attempts to legitimize state interventions and systems of control (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). Sociologists of scientific knowledge have given the name “environmental narratives” to some fixed notions concerning environmental risks, to indicate how very simple cause-and-effect stories have become accepted as incontestable, when in fact they are less certain than assumed. “Crisis narratives,” Roe (1995, p. 1066) argued, “are the primary means whereby development experts and the institutions for which they work claim rights to stewardship over land and resources they do not own.” And Hajer (1995, pp. 64-5) wrote: “Storylines [or narratives] are
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devices through which actors are positioned, and through which specific ideas of ‘blame’ and ‘responsibility’ and ‘urgency’ and ‘responsible behaviour’ are attributed.” Consequently, analysts have argued that many fixed beliefs about the cause and effect of environmental problems serve political purposes in enforcing notions of social order or political authority that may not be as easy to achieve without these visions of risk. How do these fixed visions of risk, or environmental narratives, occur? Scholars have argued that narratives “stabilize” conceptions of complex and uncertain biophysical events or change processes, in order to offer a managerially convenient summary of cause and effect. For example, in Guinea in West Africa, Fairhead and Leach (1996) argued that the state has blamed smallholder agriculturalists for deforestation because it believes population growth and inappropriate agriculture have contributed to the decline in forest areas. However, research that Fairhead and Leach summarize has shown that villagers have actually contributed to the conservation of forest areas, and that divisions between closed and savanna forest are complex and variable. Yet, as a result of the narrative, the government of Guinea has been able to defend a centralized approach to environmental policymaking, and instigate various restrictions on agriculture in rural areas. One important concept in creating environmental narratives is “problem closure,” which is when one specific definition of a problem is used to frame subsequent generation of knowledge about environmental causes and effects (Hajer, 1995, p. 22). Problem closure also reflects dominant patterns in society and politics, as well as the definition of technical expertise and who is allowed to participate in scientific discussion. Listening to alternative social needs, or diversifying the definition of expertise might therefore produce alternative forms of knowledge. In northern Thailand, the historic divisions between “uplanders” and “lowlanders,” or ethnic minorities and Thais, as well as the desire of the state to bring this region under greater political control, seem prime ground for environmental narratives to emerge. These various concerns have led analysts to argue that approaches to environmental risk should not be based on universal and predefined notions of cause and effect, but instead should be defined more flexibly, case by case. It is important to ask how far environmental changes present problems for different people; how far people are able to adapt to changes; and how far the definition of risk itself may affect their own political and socio-economic status. But at the same time, there is still uncertainty about how to integrate these concerns into an alternative form of environmental policy that can avoid the problems of oversimple standardized narratives. In particular, it is not clear if more flexible approaches to environmental risk imply the need for greater adaptations to known risks, or the need to redefine the nature of risk in a more fundamental way. For example, Tiffen and Mortimore’s work assumes that erosion is still a problem, even if people can adapt to, or avoid, it. In contrast, research in the Himalayas has suggested that erosion is not necessarily the chief cause of degradation, and that declining soil fertility, or overall lack of productive land, is a more accurate indication of what restricts livelihoods (Ives, 2004). Consequently, should alternative approaches to environmental policy still mean building institutions against predefined risks, or instead allow local people to reformulate the perception of risks? One possible route for more flexible approaches to environmental risk lies through SLAs.
Sustainable livelihoods and environmental risk SLAs within development studies are generally traced to the work of Chambers and Conway (1992), who argued that one can reduce poverty and vulnerability by increasing livelihood options, especially during times of economic or environmental stress. They wrote:
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[. . . a sustainable livelihood] can cope with and recover from stress and shocks, maintain and enhance its capabilities and assets and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities for the next generation; [it] contributes net benefits to other livelihoods at the local and global level and in the short and long term (Chambers and Conway, 1992, p. 1).
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This and later discussions of SLAs have also been influenced by Amartya Sen’s concepts of endowments, entitlements and capabilities, which discuss how poor people can access resources and livelihood options (Scoones, 1998; Carney, 2003). Endowments (and the related term of assets) cover a variety of types of resources (tangible and intangible, notably including institutional arrangements) that may allow individuals to achieve livelihoods and their chosen potential. Capabilities are the range of valued life-options (including life-paths over time) that people can attain (Alkire, 2002). SLAs seek to make institutional arrangements that guarantee a range of livelihood options, which can reduce the vulnerability and poverty of individuals. The term “sustainable” refers to different aspects of longevity: economic, institutional, social and environmental (Carney, 2003, p. 27). SLAs may be described in various forms, but some authors have argued that the essence of SLAs should be to be flexible, and avoid having specific institutional designs that may restrict local determination of assets and capabilities (Ellis, 2000; Hinshelwood, 2003). Figure 1 shows one diagrammatic representation of SLA, which avoids having predefined lines of activity between local development problems (the vulnerability context), state-based policy contexts, and the middle-level development interventions that affect assets, activities and outcomes. Self-determination of livelihoods and risks is a further key feature of SLA. Proponents hold that: Poor people themselves must be key actors in identifying and addressing livelihood priorities. Outsiders need processes that enable them to listen and respond to the poor (Ashley and Carney, 1999, p. 7).
VULNERABILITY CONTEXT shocks seasonality trends
ASSETS
ACTIVITIES
OUTCOMES
POLICY AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT government laws & rights democracy
Source: Adapted from Scoones (1998) and Ellis (2000)
Figure 1. The basic sustainable livelihoods framework
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Sustainable livelihood approaches call for constant questioning of common assumptions and repeated reference to the effects of policy and actions on the livelihoods of the poor (Carney, 2003, p. 32).
Consequently, SLAs may be compatible with non-universal notions of environmental risk because they allow poor people to define risks as they perceive them. In effect, this means the problem closure of environmental interventions is derived from the perceptions of local vulnerability by poor people, rather than on the basis of externally predefined narratives about cause and effect. This specific use of SLAs for local determination of risks has not always been made explicit in adaptations of SLAs by development agencies and research institutes since the late 1990s (such as, for example the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)). These uses of SLAs have instead developed three themes that may assist in social and economic access to livelihoods. SLAs have now generally focused upon furnishing different types of “capital” as resources for livelihoods. Usually five types of capital are identified: natural (natural resources), physical (infrastructure, technology); financial (including loans); human (personnel and training); and social (social cohesiveness). Second, livelihood strategies have been defined as agricultural intensification or extensification, livelihood diversification, and limited forms of migration. And thirdly, the ability to achieve or access these livelihoods have been seen as determined by a range of formal and informal organizational and institutional factors that influence sustainable livelihood outcomes (Scoones, 1998; Bebbington, 1999). Indeed, these three themes have been used as part of a tentative institutional design of the SLA that is transferable between contexts. Despite these advances, some critics have argued that SLAs are insufficiently developed in political terms, or as tools of local governance. Some have suggested that SLAs should be reformulated as rights-based approaches in development, where participation is defined as the right to assert needs, rather than a “sham participation” in policymaking by poor people (Baumann, 2000, p. 34; Carney, 2003). At another level, others have claimed that an emphasis on institutional design and diverse “capitals” (such as natural, social, etc.) has made SLA “merely a confused diagram and a wordy manual” and that we should instead realize “community work is not easily captured in a diagram” (Hinshelwood, 2003, pp. 254, 243). This kind of argument underlies the desire to have flexibility in how SLAs are designed and described (Figure 1). Moreover, Arce (2003, p. 204) has argued that using words such as “capitals” in uncritical, easily transferred, ways may reduce the ability for local people to assert their own values in framing development policy. In environmental terms too, there are questions about how SLA is applied. On one hand, some analysts have agreed that SLA implies a more livelihoods-focused approach for defining risk and resources. According to Scoones (1998, pp. 6-7): Natural resource base sustainability refers to the ability of a system to maintain productivity when subject to disturbing forces . . . This implies avoiding depleting stocks of natural resources to a level which results in an effectively permanent decline in the rate at which the natural resource base yields useful products or services for livelihoods.
In addition, DFID (2002) has argued that SLA can challenge some key environmental narratives that poor people cause or cannot adapt to environmental degradation. This approach fully adopts the new problem closure offered under SLAs because it allows
poor people to define both environmental problems and sustainable development because they are linked to activities that may reduce their vulnerability and secure sustainable livelihoods. This approach therefore gives precedence to poor people’s definitions and uses of natural resources as a way to reduce vulnerability, rather than necessarily allow resources or environmental problems to be defined by other means. In contrast, some environmental applications of SLAs have still adopted predefined definitions of risk, and have seen SLAs as ways to encourage local institutional adaptations to these risks. For example, writing about SLA and environmental science, Ashby (2003, p. 2) commented: “A reversal of environmental degradation requires new livelihood options that change people’s incentives, in particular, the benefits and costs of resource use.” This approach suggests that livelihood activities should be seen as operating in response to known risks and known potential damage to resources, rather than as redefining these risks or valuations of resources from the perspective of reducing local poverty and vulnerability. Similarly, a report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has discussed SLA as a form of local institution that exists alongside methods of environmental protection, rather than as also a form of environmental protection itself. The report wrote: An environmentally protected area, such as a park or game reserve, represents a particular type of local institution that could link with the livelihoods of people living in the area in several ways . . . Successful conservation of wild animals within the area might increase the vulnerability of people living outside by having their crops destroyed or their lives threatened. On the other hand, in the longer term it may reduce people’s vulnerability to natural disasters like drought or flooding by protecting watersheds, wetlands and local microclimates . . . (Messer and Townsley, 2003, pp. 16-7).
Such statements overlook the epistemological potential of SLAs by defining both the risks and the institutions in terms from outsiders, rather than acknowledging how the definition of livelihood strategies and risks are linked by poor people. Moreover, this statement adopts cause and effect statements about watershed and climate protection that may reflect simplistic environmental narratives. In this case, it seems that discussion of SLAs has been added on top of pre-existing notions of environmental risk, rather than being a way to specify this risk using the perspectives of vulnerable people. SLAs therefore have been proposed as ways to build institutions around poor people’s perceptions of resources and vulnerability, but critics have suggested that SLAs may still be dominated by outsiders’ priorities for policy. Moreover, the link with environmental risks may still be developed further. The following example from Thailand tries to indicate how far SLAs can enable a more locally determined approach to defining environmental risk. Example: soil erosion and livelihoods in northern Thailand The topic of sustainable livelihoods has been researched to a limited extent in Thailand (Parnwell, 2005), but these studies have not focused on SLAs’ role in environmental analysis. Various other development interventions have adopted insights from SLAs, even if they have not formally claimed this. The following examples of research on erosion and livelihoods indicate possibilities for integrating SLAs with non-universalistic approaches to environmental risk.
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The first study is based on research by the author (Forsyth, 1996, updated by fieldwork, 2004-2005) on land cultivated by the Mien ethnic group[2]. The Mien were traditional “pioneer” shifting cultivators, who have learned to adopt permanent and commercialized agriculture since their arrival at this site in 1947. The population has grown from 110 in 1947 to about 1,200 in 2005. Historically, the staple crops of the Mien were rice, maize and opium. Since, the 1980s, opium cultivation has been abandoned, and farmers have also cultivated soybeans, ginger and peanuts, with limited amounts of coffee, oranges and lychee. This study asked how farmers responded to soil degradation, including its impact on livelihoods. Historic aerial photographs, land surveys and a Geographical Information System (GIS) were used to identify how far land use had been concentrated on steep slopes[3]. These categories were then physically measured for erosion in order to to indicate the range of historic soil erosion that had occurred in this region[4]. Farmers were then interviewed about their perceptions of soil degradation and its impacts on decisions about livelihoods. The study yielded various findings. First, the GIS map and interviews with villagers indicated that farmers were aware that steeper slopes generated more erosion, and that this was considered responsible for declining soil fertility in these regions. Yet, consequently, farmers had used less steep land more frequently, which generated less erosion, but which was more likely to experience exhaustion of soil nutrients. Consequently, erosion was indeed considered a risk, but farmers tried to avoid it, and this was shown by the “most eroded” category of land being just 5 percent of the total study area. The physical measurements of erosion indicated rates of 24 and 64 tons per hectare per year 1963-1991 for the “least” and “most” eroded categories of land, respectively. The higher of these rates is indeed considered high in Thailand and elsewhere (Nipon, 1991), but the role of agriculture in generating these levels may be relatively low because farmers avoid these slopes. Second, gullies in this area of Thailand may result from naturally occurring weathering of granite, rather than from agricultural practices. The GIS data indicated a marked absence of relatively gentle slopes of between 10 and 20 percent, which was apparent in the landscape which consisted of hummocky, rounded land and gullies of some 1-2 m depth in-between. This has been described as an “all-slopes-topography,” which is found on granite land in other locations (such as Brazil; Twidale, 1982, p. 177). Furthermore, villagers explained that these gullies existed before the establishment of the village; that they occurred on both forested and agricultural land; and that villagers preferred to keep them vegetated in order to harvest plants. These gullies may therefore be non-agricultural contributors to upland erosion and lowland sedimentation. And thirdly, farmers explained that – despite their attempts to avoid erosion – soil fertility was declining, and that inorganic fertilizer was now considered necessary. Indeed, surveys indicate that fertilizer use has growth from just 5 percent of households to 100 percent between 1991 and 2005. Detailed discussions also revealed that farmers had adopted a new system of local land tenure during the early 1970s (after some 25 years of settlement), which allocated land to specific households and families (earlier there had been an open-access system). This new system of land tenure encouraged farmers to cultivate land continuously in order to demonstrate that they intended to keep the land, an innovation that they hoped would enhance their formal
tenure security. Moreover, the proportion of household members working in cities, or engaging in circular migration to earn remittances was increasing. The second study was conducted by Turkelboom (1999) among the Akha people, some 15 km from the Mien site, at Pakha in Chiang Rai province[5]. The Akha are also historically “pioneer” cultivators, although this village was established in 1976. Farmers cultivate irrigated and rain-fed rice, as well as cabbage, beans and tree crops. The study used a combination of experimental plots, erosion surveys and participatory discussions with farmers. It asked how farmers were responding to erosion and land shortage, and how these impacted on livelihoods. First, the study found that agriculture was indeed increasing erosion. Tillage erosion was apparent because farmers experienced declining soil fertility at the top of steep slopes, in locations where water erosion was less likely to occur because of the comparative lack of slope length. Gully erosion was also evident. This village also had deep, naturally occurring gullies between convex slopes. But there were also smaller gullies on agricultural land that did not occur under forest cover, of some 10-15 cm in depth. These gullies apparently resulted from overland flow generated during rainfall on steep slopes, or when water ran onto slopes from other sources, such as from roads. Sometimes landslips occurred when streams or paths undercut slopes. The erosion on slopes, however, was also found to increase soil fertility when soil was deposited on lower slopes, around lines of crops, or on leveled land. Yet, despite this erosion, it seemed clear that erosion on slopes did not lead to lowland sedimentation because only a third of agricultural slopes fed stream networks and thus deposited soil would remain in place. Moreover, soil was deposited on slopes as steep as 60 percent, and hence steep slopes need not always generate net outflows of sediment. Second, however, farmers were aware of these problems and adopted various methods of soil conservation. Mulching reduced the impacts of erosion during the early weeks of cultivation of some crops such as ginger. Diversion channels – or small trenches 10-20 cm deep – were drawn across fields to reduce water flow, and to demarcate field ownership. Tree crops on slopes were also increasing, partly because some farmers saw them as a more reliable source of income. Yet, farmers agreed soil fertility was declining. Some elders liked to tell the mythological story of a giant, underground snake or pig-like monster (“pjengcha”) that caused landslips and political havoc every 13 years. Others reported “you can see the bones through the soil now” or that “the land is becoming like old people – they are not strong enough to hold anything anymore” (Turkelboom, 1999, pp. 172, 190). Thirdly, erosion arising from new commercial crops was not as bad as suggested. Rain-fed rice (the most “traditional” Akha crop) had the highest rates of erosion: 60 tons per hectare per crop cycle. Maize and beans were least erosive with median soil losses of, respectively, 19 and 10 tons per hectare per crop cycle. Erosion in cabbage fields lay in between these two extremes. Importantly, this study measured erosion under cropping systems (with reference to the timing and manner of cultivation) rather than according to crops or slopes alone. Consequently, the months when cabbage had only a small surface area were generally during the dry season, when rainfall erosion was least. Moreover, if the price of cabbage fell, farmers would abandon fields, allowing them to be invaded by grass and hence be further protected against erosion. Yet, perhaps most importantly, this study also showed it is important not to generalize about farmers. Turkelboom (1999, pp. 208-11) identified five levels of
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entrepreneurialism or concern for soil conservation: secure investors (who owned paddy fields and fruit plantations); profit maximizers (adopting high-risk crops such as cabbage); diversifiers (farmers who mix rice cultivation with limited cash crops); survivors (those who cultivated only rice on a short-term basis); and dropouts (who relied solely on wage labour and petty business). The survivors accounted for some 30 percent of the village. The point of this classification is to acknowledge soil and crop management does not take place uniformly across single ethnic groups, but that there is great diversity between and within households. Implications for sustainable livelihood approaches These two studies are relevant to SLAs because they concern the nature and response to environmental risks by poor people. They add to the debate about SLAs because they do not just demonstrate how villagers are adopting strategies such as agricultural intensification, economic diversification and limited migration. Instead, they also show that the very definition of SLAs, as responses to periods of environmental or economic stress, cannot be separated from the definitions of those risks. Three factors appear significant. First, despite the common beliefs that upland agriculture is a cause of erosion, and that environmental policies should control erosion directly, the studies demonstrate clearly that the assumptions about erosion are simplistic. Erosion and sedimentation are not only caused by agricultural practices, but also by various non-anthropogenic causes such as gullies; the topography of stream networks is important; and other factors such as the location and influence of roads on water and soil flows have to be acknowledged. Crop cycles, or the timing and management of different crops may also mitigate their impacts on erosion. Moreover, erosion need not represent the most important cause of soil degradation for upland farmers themselves, as declining soil fertility through repeated cultivation may be more significant. Indeed, local perceptions and responses to soil problems partly ensure that erosion is not as damaging as it might be. Consequently, the organizing vision for SLAs – or underlying problem closure – should clearly not be the belief that upland agriculture is causing erosion, and that stopping this erosion will prevent lowland sedimentation or upland declining soil fertility. Second, soil erosion is clearly only part of the causes of risks to individual households. Households have different vulnerabilities, according to access to land, availability of labor to diversify into different economic activities, and in levels of entrepreneurialism. Erosion, or soil degradation in general, clearly affects most farmers in both studies, but the impact on overall household vulnerability is highly variable. Consequently, we should perhaps not ask whether “erosion” is the appropriately predefined risk, but the extent to which erosion is potentially a risk because of the overall exposure of people to erosion. If the contribution of upland agriculture to erosion is not as high as thought, then perhaps it may be acceptable for farmers to achieve livelihoods through repeated cultivation if this is also conducted with the use of fertilizers and with achieving income through supplementary sources[6]. In this sense, therefore, we should not ask whether erosion is a predefined risk, but we should consider how far it might be a risk if resources of adaptation are not available. However, we can conclude that land shortage and declining agricultural
productivity (if it occurs) are more certain risks for upland farmers, to which erosion may or may not contribute. And thirdly, it is clear that some of the interventions proposed by environmental policies may actually significantly work against SLAs. Most directly, this may be caused by the removal of agricultural land through tree plantations. These studies therefore indicate that SLAs need to have local fora in which these dominant definitions of risk (or problem closures) can be challenged. To date, most discussions of SLAs have not really defined the settings in which livelihoods and environmental problems are defined, and some discussions of SLAs (such as those undertaken by Ashley and Messer and Townsley above) aim to place livelihood strategies within predefined environmental objectives. If SLAs are to emphasize the needs and perceptions of vulnerable poor people, then there needs to be more attention to who defines environmental risks and how. In effect, this means ensuring that the assets and capabilities implied in a Sen-ian SLA also imply rights over defining the objectives of sustainable livelihoods, and not allowing others to define these to the detriment of local people’s livelihood opportunities. Conclusion: deepening the impacts of sustainable livelihoods approaches This paper has summarized debates about SLAs as a potential way to avoid fixed and universalistic attitudes to environmental risk. It illustrated this challenge with examples of research in the uplands of northern Thailand, and the disputed belief that environmental policy should focus on mitigating soil erosion. The paper showed two studies that demonstrated various perceptions of and adaptations to erosion by upland farmers, which challenged government assumptions and policies addressing upland degradation. In conclusion, I have argued that SLAs may allow environmental policy to avoid universalistic assumptions by organizing environmental interventions around more meaningful, locally governed notions of risk. This point needs to be given more attention within debates about SLAs because definitions of risk are fundamental to organizing interventions. Yet, many assumptions (or “narratives”) of risk are not necessarily appropriate, nor defined by the people targeted by SLAs. Some critics have voiced these views already. According to Arce (2003, p. 200), “neither community development nor sustainable livelihood approaches are consistent idioms with a clear set of interrelated propositions”. Consequently, Arce agrees that “the starting point of a SLA should be the actors’ reality” (p. 204). But is this happening? This paper argues that the means to achieve such local sensitivity is to move away from universalistic approaches to environmental risks, and instead acknowledge the local contexts in which risks exist, and how far adaptive capacity can make some environmental changes alone (such as erosion) less important indicators of risk. Accordingly, SLAs should be seen in terms of a combination of local institutional design, plus a wider, less structured, basis for ideas (Hinshelwood, 2003). For SLAs to be effective, they must critique the organizing visions and discourses that define environmental risks in ways that exclude local consultation. This, of course, is a more complex and controversial undertaking, as it may challenge political objectives of government agencies, or social visions of how certain regions or peoples should be managed. Working locally within vulnerable people to define risks, and working
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elsewhere to challenge assumptions about risks, may both build sustainable livelihoods, as well as implement a less universalistic approach to environmental policy. Notes 1. Usually the term, northern Thailand refers to the the upland areas in the provinces of Chiang Rai, Phayao, Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Mae Hong Son, Lampang, Nan, Phrae and Uttaradit, although administratively, the region also includes provinces further south. 2. On underlying granite with sandy-clay soils at an average altitude of about 700 m. 3. The photographs and land survey allowed maps of dry-season land use to be made for the years, 1954, 1969, 1977, 1983 and 1991. The GIS then calculated susceptibility to erosion using the simple indicator of slop steepness. Each map was divided into categories to indicate “most” and “least” used or steep. The final map of predicted erosion was achieved by multiplying the two indices of slope steepness and historic land use together, and dividing this index into four quartiles, of which the highest and lowest quartiles indicated “most” and “least” eroded land. 4. The study used the Cesium-137 method to measure soil erosion, which is based on the assumption that Cesium-137 isotopes were deposited evenly on soil after thermonuclear bomb tests of the 1950-1960s. Soil erosion or sedimentation since this era can be measured by comparing isotopes between eroded and uneroded sites. Conventionally, this approach provides estimates of annual erosion since 1963 (the peak of isotope deposition), and soil measured to a depth of 25 cm (Ritchie and McHenry, 1990). 5. Underlain by granite, phyllite and shale, with sandy-clay soils, at an altitude of 7-900 m. 6. This point leaves undiscussed the question of the impact of fertilizers on soil and water quality, which this paper cannot do for reasons of space. References Alkire, S. (2002), Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Arce, A. (2003), “Value contestations in development interventions: community development and sustainable livelihoods approaches”, Community Development Journal, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 199-212. Ashby, J. (2003), “Introduction: uniting science and participation in the process of innovation research for development”, in Pound, B., Snapp, S., McDougall, C. and Braun, A. (Eds), Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods: Uniting Science and Participation, Earthscan, London, pp. 1-9. Ashley, C. and Carney, D. (1999), Sustainable Livelihoods: Lessons from Early Experience, DFID, London. Baumann, P. (2000), “Sustainable livelihoods and political capital: arguments and evidence from decentralization and natural resource management in India”, Working Paper 136, Overseas Development Institute, London. Bebbington, A. (1999), “Capitals and capabilities: a framework for analyzing peasant viability, rural livelihoods and poverty”, World Development, Vol. 27 No. 12, pp. 2021-44. Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. (1987), Land Degradation and Society, Methuen, London. Bruijnzeel, S. (2004), “Hydrological functions of tropical forests: not seeing the soil for the trees?”, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, Vol. 104 No. 1, pp. 185-228.
Calder, I. (1999), The Blue Revolution: Land Use and Integrated Resource Management, Earthscan, London. Carney, D. (2003), Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches: Progress and Possibilities for Change, DFID, London. Chambers, R. and Conway, G. (1992), Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, IDS Discussion Paper 296, Institute for Development Studies, Brighton. Conklin, H. (1954), “An ethnoecological approach to shifting agriculture”, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 77, pp. 133-42. DFID (2002), Poverty and Environment, information booklet, Department for International Development, London. Ellis, F. (2000), Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ewers, K. (2003), “Governance framework for local land use strategies”, paper presented at Meeting on Local Land Use Strategies in a Globalizing World: Shaping Sustainable Social and Natural Environments, Institute of Geography, Geocenter, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, August 21-23. Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1996), Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Forsyth, T. (1996), “Science, myth and knowledge: testing Himalayan environmental degradation in northern Thailand”, Geoforum, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 375-92. Grandstaff, T.B. (1980), “Shifting cultivation in northern Thailand: possibilities for development”, UNU Resource Systems Theory and Methodology Series No.3, United Nations University, Tokyo. Hajer, M. (1995), The Politics of Environmental Discourse, Clarendon, Oxford. Hallsworth, E. (1987), Anatomy, Physiology and Psychology of Erosion, Wiley, Chichester. Hinshelwood, E. (2003), “Making friends with the sustainable livelihoods framework”, Community Development Journal, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 243-54. Ives, J. (2004), Himalayan Perceptions: Environmental Change and the Well-Being of Mountain Peoples, Routledge, London. Ives, J.D. and Messerli, B. (1989), The Himalayan Dilemma. Reconciling Development and Conservation, Routledge, London. Kasperson, J. and Kasperson, R. (2001), Global Environmental Risk, Earthscan, London. Kienholz, H., Schneider, G., Bichsel, M., Grunder, M. and Mool, P. (1984), “Mapping of mountain hazards and slope stability”, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 247-66. Lash, S., Szerszynski, B. and Wynne, B. (Eds) (1996), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, Sage, London. Messer, N. and Townsley, P. (2003), Local Institutions and Livelihoods: Guidelines for Analysis, FAO, Rome. Nipon, T. (1991), “Erosion study and control in Thailand”, Proceedings of Workshop on Soil Erosion and Debris Flow Control Organised by the Indonesian Institute of Science under UNEP-UNESCO-IRTICES-LIPI Regional Training Programme on Erosion, Jakarta, October. Parnwell, M. (2005), “Crowding out and clawing back: local institution and sustainable livelihoods in north-east Thailand”, International Development Planning Review, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 143-68.
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Ritchie, J. and McHenry, J. (1990), “Application of radioactive 137Cs for measuring soil erosion and sediment accumulation rates and patterns: a review”, Journal of Environmental Quality, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 215-33. Roe, E. (1995), “Except Africa: postscript to a special section on development narratives”, World Development, Vol. 23 No. 6, pp. 1065-9. Scoones, I. (1998), “Sustainable rural livelihoods: a framework for analysis”, IDS Working Paper 72, IDS, Brighton. Smadja, J. (1992), “Studies of climatic and human impacts and their relationship on a mountain slope above Salme in the Himalayan Middle Mountains, Nepal”, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 1-28. Spate, O. (1945), “The Burmese village”, Geographical Review, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 523-43. Svasti, M.R.S. (1998), “A response from Thailand to the world rainforest movement article: ‘Thailand: the struggle of forest people to remain in the forest’”, World Rainforest Movement Special Bulletin, available at: www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/Special.html (accessed April 12, 2005). Thailand Development Research Institute (1987), Thailand Natural Resource Profile, TDRI, Bangkok. Thitirojanawat, P. and Chareonsuk, S. (2000), “Verification of the universal soil loss equation application (USLE) on forest area”, Royal Forest Department, Bangkok, available at: www. forest.go.th/Research/English/abstracts_water/wse64.html (accessed June 12, 2004). Tiffen, M., Mortimore, M. and Gichuki, F. (1994), More People, Less Erosion? Environmental Recovery in Kenya, Wiley, Chichester. Tuenjai Deetes (2000), “A bridge to the hill tribes”, UNESCO Courier, available at: www.unesco. org/courier/2000_10/uk/dires.htm (accessed March 23, 2005). Turkelboom, F. (1999), “On-farm diagnosis of steepland erosion in northern Thailand: integrating spatial scales with household strategies”, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Twidale, C. (1982), Granite Landforms, Elsevier, Amsterdam. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T. and Davis, I. (2004), At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed., Routledge, London. Further reading Jones, S. and Carswell, G. (Eds) (2004), The Earthscan Reader in Environment, Development and Rural Livelihoods, Earthscan, London. About the author Tim Forsyth is a senior Lecturer in environment and development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has conducted research on environmental institutions and governance in Southeast Asia, and has written on the politics of environmental science and knowledge. Tim Forsyth can be contacted at:
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Allocating responsibilities in multi-level governance for sustainable development Sylvia I. Karlsson
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Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, Tampere, Finland Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare three different principles – the culpability, capacity and concern principles – for allocating responsibility for governance in a multi-level context of addressing sustainable development. Design/methodology/approach – The principles are first analysed from a theoretical and normative standpoint, linking to earlier literature on for example, the contribution principle, subsidiarity and global citizenship. Then the three principles are analysed in an empirical setting. The selected case is the issue complex around the health and environmental concerns from pesticide use in developing countries. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews were carried out with relevant stakeholders from local, national and global governance levels on themes which enabled analysis of the workability and justness of the principles and whether they were already applied to some degree. Findings – Analysis of the case shows the mutual complementarity of the three principles for allocating responsibility for governance, especially when culpability and capacity are dispersed across different agents and levels. However, the concern and capacity principles emerged as more important and promising. The results indicated the need for moving the value basis of agents towards more selfless global concern in order to create an effective multi-level governance system. Practical implications – The results may help policymakers at different levels to analyse more systematically who should assume responsibility for sustainable development governance and why. Originality/value – Extends the analysis of principles for allocating responsibility for global issues. Keywords Governance, Social responsibility, Sustainable development, Pesticides Paper type Research paper
A multi-level and multi-layered context for allocating responsibility Complexity is a key issue that the world must deal with in its responses to environmental degradation, unsustainable development paths and resulting human insecurity. Complexity in this sense emerges as a result both of identified and as yet undiscovered interdependencies among various elements of the Earth system, of which humanity is an integral part and indeed has become the dominant force. In governance this complexity has a horizontal component, across sectors and different groups of stakeholders, and a vertical component across multiple governance levels – local, national, regional and global. The empirical work underlying this paper was carried out through support from a grant by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), which is gratefully acknowledged. Most of the theoretical work was undertaken within the framework of projects nr 107310 and 118473 of the Academy of Finland. The author is indebted to Des Gasper and P.B. Anand for valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper.
International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 103-126 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 DOI 10.1108/03068290710723390
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A challenge both for moral analysis and governance is to find the most appropriate principles for allocating governance responsibilities to specific levels, and to specific agents at each level, in such a multi-level reality. Governance is in this context the “sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs” (Commission on Global Governance, 1995, p. 2). The challenge is particularly relevant for discussions on the role of international organizations and institutions in providing Global Public Goods (GPGs). The protection of the global commons such as the climate system or marine areas from degeneration, or more widely protecting the ability of the Earth System to provide the ecosystem services which humanity depends on, fall within the domain of GPGs and related issues. Yet in a world of sovereign states the allocation of responsibilities to the global level requires extraordinary political will and effort on the part of many countries and is seldom the first choice, rather a last resort. The designation of an issue as global or as a GPG is in large part a normative and political exercise, not a matter purely of semantics. In many arguments it follows by implication that a global issue has to be addressed through some form of global governance, although not necessarily through hard law such as a multilateral environmental agreement (MEA). This is perhaps more explicitly so for environmental issues where the physical span of the issue is often used as a functional argument for at what level governance is needed;, e.g. in the literature advocating the concept of ecosystem “fit” (Folke et al., 1998; Young, 2002), or the literature on environmental federalism (Esty, 1999) and subsidiarity (Jordan, 2000). It is a common argument that if a resource or system is physically global, then global governance is needed. The physical character of the issue could be considered as one principle of allocating responsibility to a certain level of governance. I will not examine this as a separate criterion as I find it is too narrow to be used as a general principle across issue areas. Instead I integrate relevant aspects of this to the other allocative principles that I will discuss. A second challenge for moral analysis and governance is closely related to the first one. It concerns how to allocate responsibilities for governance simultaneously to several levels of governance. For most issues no one level is sufficient for governance. The global level cannot provide any goods or protection without engagement of sub-global governance levels (Princen, 1998). For global commons, Feeny et al. (1990, p. 14) claim that “[t]he solution of such problems will necessarily involve co-management on a large-scale”. McGinnis and Ostrom (1996, p. 476) stress that sustainable global regimes “must make sense at all levels of aggregation: local, regional, national, transnational and global” and Princen et al. (1994, p. 221) argue that “degradative forces occur at all levels and thus must be addressed simultaneously.” The need to address the collective action problem at multiple levels makes governance a complex multi-level and cross-level issue. “Multi-level governance” is a concept that has been extensively used in, for example, analysis of the European Union governance system and discussion of how it should change (Scharpf, 2001; Hooghe and Marks, 2003). In recent years the concept and framework of multi-level governance is also slowly being applied in some global contexts (Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Bache and Flinders, 2005). The rationale for this is often taken as a recognition of the implications of processes currently in progress,
whether they are called globalisation (Held et al., 1999), distanciation (Giddens, 1990) or fragmegration (Rosenau, 2000)[1]. The allocation of responsibility to actors at the global level is thus insufficient for many of today’s sustainable development challenges. Agents with responsibility to act have to be identified across governance levels:
Responsibilities in multi-level governance
The distancing of the site of degradation from its original cause confuses the allocation of responsibility. In the post-Rio context, this poses enormous public policy problems regarding the level of legislation – local, national, international or transnational (Saurin, 1994, p. 46).
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Allocation of responsibility also needs to go beyond governmental agents and include multiple stakeholder groups especially when the degradation is caused by mundane individual and collective everyday activities linked to livelihood and/or lifestyles. Effective governance needs to take the shape of a multilayered system composed of co-ordinated and mutually supportive governance across levels, sectors and agents (Karlsson, 2000). This paper seeks to compare three principles for the allocation of responsibility in a multi-level governance context: culpability, capacity and concern. Each of these has been suggested in the literature, albeit sometimes referred to by different terms. These three are selected because together they cover much of the argumentation that has been made in relation to global justice and sustainability. Perhaps, the only additional principles to consider are linked to the functional argument about “fit” as discussed above and associated arguments focused strongly on efficiency rather than effectiveness. The paper first explores earlier use of the three principles in the literature and compares them in a theoretical setting. Secondly, it compares them in an empirical setting through the analysis of one issue complex, the governance response to local and global health and environmental problems arising from the use of agricultural pesticides in developing countries. The paper briefly describes the background of the pesticide case and the case study methodology. It then applies and tests the alternative principles for allocating responsibility to address the problem through various forms of directed actions, using the broad criteria of how workable and just the principles are to implement. The final section summarizes the analysis and explores some possible conclusions and policy implications. The culpability principle Allocating responsibility for governance based on the principle of culpability means that agents who contribute to the problem in question, agents who are to some degree “culpable” in a causal and moral sense, should take responsibility for the effects of their action on others and seek to rectify the situation. In the literature a variation of this has been referred to as the contribution principle, formulated by Brian Barry (2005) for the problem of abject world poverty. It declares that “agents are responsible for addressing acute deprivations when they have contributed, or are contributing, to bringing them about” (Barry, 2005, p. 103). From a moral perspective, it seems an intuitively sound principle that those who are culpable for a problem explicitly assume a large share of responsibility to address it. In global justice theory, there is an argument that it is wrong to argue for responsibility based on benevolence or moral duty, as this blinds us from realizing our culpability (Forst, 2005). This argument implies that culpability for, e.g. abject poverty in the world is shared by a multitude of agents and structures and
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thus for many agents there would be reason to take responsibility for reducing poverty because they are part of causing the situation. However, while Barry in his definition of the contribution principle limits it to consideration of what I will for simplicity call “physical” causation or culpability, I add also the criterion of “moral” culpability. Agents who are physically culpable, having acted in a way that had negative impacts, might perhaps be considered not morally culpable if they either were not aware of the consequences of their actions (and they could not reasonably have been aware) or lacked the capacity to act differently without very high costs to themselves or others. (Pogge’s approach as outlined in Follesdal and Pogge, 2005). This formulation of the culpability principle relies on the ability to: . identify the causal links for a problem along the chain of causality including both agents and institutions (rules, social practices, etc.); and . identify which agents can be also considered morally culpable in view of their own (reasonably required) awareness of their contributing role and their capacity to act differently. Neither of these components is a straightforward objective exercise and they are also closely interrelated. Who or what is seen as culpable depends on who is making the judgement and on what criteria they use. The ability of an “outside” analyst to identify culpable agents may not be very relevant unless there are reasonable opportunities for the agents themselves to become aware of the impacts of their actions. For example, there are “sharp disagreements” about which agents are responsible for the abject deprivation in the world (Barry, 2005, p. 105) and a similar statement can be made for many social, economic and environmental issues. The identification of causal links can be difficult enough in a “simple” localised problem in a more or less closed system with few external influences. In a context of globalisation with its increasing stretching, or distanciation, between decision and impact, action and consequences, it means that we face severe obstacles in overseeing, as well as in controlling, the consequences of our decisions and actions. Environmental problems illustrate this better than most: The effect of time-space distanciation is to render opaque – through the mediation of action – the relationship between intention, action and outcome, thereby confusing our comprehension of causality (Saurin, 1994, p. 48).
It has been argued that in such “complex social contexts” the culpability principle would put an unreasonably high demand on information (Barry, 2005, p. 112). One way to address this concern is by looking at the three types of contribution-based reason for assigning responsibility: interactional, organizational and institutional (Barry, 2005, p. 120). Interactional analysis focuses on the culpability of individuals as agents and the objection of impracticability is often then raised, for it is difficult for individuals to know the impact of their actions. While this may often be the case, Barry argues that it should be much easier for them to recognise the impact of the patterns of their behaviour, i.e. their practices. Analysing the culpability of organizations has other challenges. It is often easier to trace the impact of the actions of organizations compared to individuals, but on the other hand “participation in organizations can erode the sense of connection that individuals feel with the effects of their actions” (Barry, 2005, p. 120). This latter challenge is further exacerbated when analysing the
culpability of institutions. Here, there are large risks that individuals do not recognize the impact of shared rules (Barry, 2005). A question that runs through the consideration of culpability is how much effort one can reasonably expect from agents to identify the impacts of their action on others. In some cases, for some agents, such information is readily at hand if sought after (such as health impacts of secondary smoking or pesticide intoxications); in other cases or for other agents reliable information is hard to come by (such as the impact of our consumer choices on global poverty). We see the limitation of the culpability principle even if we only look at the difficulties for agents to recognize their own “physical” culpability. Turning to the second component of the analysis, the assigning of moral culpability, there are even more challenging aspects to consider. How do we make judgements of whether particular agents had the options and capacity to take other courses of action than those which are considered to contribute to the problem? This also relates to how we assign culpability between individuals, collective agents like governments, or the institutions and structures which influence their behaviour. How constrained are individuals and organizations by the structures in which they are embedded and the various institutions which prescribe directions and provide incentives for their behaviour? The driving forces for a problem are often found in long chains of interlinked direct and indirect driving forces occurring at different governance levels[2]. The global institutional order is causally linked to “morally significant harms” through its rules that affect people directly or indirectly (Follesdal and Pogge, 2005, p. 7). If responsibility is only assigned to those who are contributing to the problem in the last step in the chain, then the focus is likely to be on individual responsibility, for example, of those who drive cars and thus contribute to climate change, rather than on the collective agents like the planners of road and public transportation networks. This excludes the contributing role of the institutions and structures that create the situations where individual agents have little chance or incentive to act other than in ways that contribute to the problem. Furthermore, institutions (as rules) and structures are not agents who can be held morally accountable and one then has to go one step further and look at the agents who created them or who could change them. Barry (2005) argues that adhering to the culpability principle would require agents to both rectify those harms that the institutional order creates as well as contribute to designing a more just order and then adhere to the institutions in such an order, but this raises another level of questions on how much capacity agents – individuals and organizations – have to change the institutions that constrain their behaviour in a direction which contributes to the problem. There are certainly cases where individual and collective agents are completely devoid of options to act differently, due to being institutionally “locked in” or to lack of, for example, scientific, technical and financial capacity. However, in many situations it is likely to be a much more open question, where there is some awareness of culpability, and there is some capacity to behave differently but it is uncertain how much. There is also a question of the cost of that alternative course of action. How much sacrifice can be morally expected? This raises many questions for the application of the culpability principle, questions which lead us on to the capacity principle.
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The capacity principle Allocating responsibility in governance based on the capacity principle means that agents who have the capacity to address a problem more effectively or efficiently should assume the responsibility to do so even if they are not culpable for the problem (Barry, 2005). In my consideration of this principle I focus primarily on the effectiveness (rather than efficiency) of agents, reflecting the priority to achieve substantial changes in desired sustainability directions even if it will be costly. In contrast to the culpability principle it is thus insensitive to the past and only focuses on what is the most effective course of action in the current situation. The application of the capacity principle would imply that it is possible to determine what measures are needed to address the problem and which agents possess the necessary resources to carry these out. Such judgements, on for example the relative capacity of agents or on which institutional arrangements would be required, are often surrounded by considerable disagreement (Barry, 2005). The capacity principle has close affinity with the subsidiarity principle which has been institutionalised in the EU as a guide for allocating responsibility between governance levels, incorporated in four places in the Treaty of the Union adopted at Maastricht in 1992 (Schilling, 1995). Subsidiarity is based on the assumption that “no single level of organization is appropriate for all social functions” (Trachtman, 1992, p. 468) and implies that “many policy responsibilities are shared between different tiers of government and that each tier is responsible for those functions which it is best able to discharge” (Scott et al., 1994, p. 64). It thus relates to comparative efficiency which means, for example, that action should be taken at the level where it is most effective, the effectiveness condition, and that action at higher levels should be taken when lower levels cannot achieve the set goals in isolation, the necessity condition (Føllesdal, 1998). These two conditions can, of course, conflict; for example, lower levels may be potentially the most effective yet lack the capacity or be unwilling to take action because of different priorities. Such functional arguments for allocating responsibility in governance based on the capacity principle face severe constraints at the global level from the reluctance on the part of countries to give up part of national sovereignty to global bodies. Nevertheless, some argue this is precisely what is required for the redistributive arrangements needed to address global injustice (Mertens, 2005). The concern principle As mentioned above, various authors (such as Forst, 2005) would like to see agents recognizing their culpability for the deprivation in the world and basing their action on this rather than some general feeling of “benevolence”. The concern principle starts from the other end. Allocating responsibility in governance based on the concern principle means that the primary motivation for action is concern for those who suffer the impacts of, for example, poverty or environmental degradation[3]. This concern can either focus on the individual agent him/herself and his/her family, being thus primarily based on self-interest, or the concern can focus on others who suffer, however far away they live, being thus based more on altruism[4]. In both cases this presumes that the agent is aware of the causal links and has some capacity to do something. In the first case agents would need to realize that their actions (or lack of actions) affect their own well-being and it has been argued that this is typically a necessary
condition for agents to address, for example, environmental problems: “For many people, the limits of environmental degradation are reached only when they themselves experience environmental harm” (Wapner, 1997, p. 217). However, with many globalised issues, the causal links between their own action and their own suffering – assuming they exist – may be too weak and invisible for agents to be aware of them, or to be able to become aware of them without undue effort, and act on them. Thus, relying on this part of the concern principle would require some form of enlightened self-interest. The argument to protect the environment for people’s or states’ own interest is a commonplace one: “... our ecological interdependence establishes a prudential basis for our obligation to help ourselves by helping them” (Shrader-Frechette, 1991, p. 164); and Brown Weiss (1992, p. 14) asserts that the traditional view that one nation’s interest is always in conflict with other nations’ is losing relevance and that “environmental protection is not a zero-sum game”. This is the foundation for the realisation that co-operation pays off in relation to resources held as commons: . . .individuals, private organizations and individual nation-state governments find themselves increasingly in the position where the actions from which they themselves benefit are also those which serve the greater global good (Brenton, 1994, p. 269).
In a situation where self-interest is a predominant factor guiding people’s sense of responsibility to act, creating an effective governance system would necessitate making each person (and organization) at every level whose action relates to the issue see it as in his/her/its interest to be involved in action. If concern for one’s own interest is not sufficient to motivate action, relying on more self-less concern as a motivation for assuming responsibility requires that stakeholders expand their community of concern to encompass larger spheres of people, and ultimately humanity at large. A major step in such expansion of the community of concern is to extend it to citizens of other countries (it can also include non-humans and the planet itself). Although many consider this an immense leap, others take it as the natural starting point, arguing that “[t]o assume that the construction of our moral world has suddenly to cease at our national borders seems arbitrary at best” (Tan, 2005, p. 58). At the collective level this would imply that states have the same concern for the plight of other states as they have for their own citizens, something that Keohane argues would facilitate governance: “if governments’ definitions of self interest incorporate empathy, they will be more able than otherwise to construct international regimes, since shared interests will be greater” (Keohane, 1990, p. 236). Those based in the tradition of “realism” where the principle of national sovereignty is still seen as the foundation for the interaction among states, will discard this principle as utopian. Nevertheless, there are many developments in normative theory and practice which indicate that this is a desirable and even possible path. One promising direction is the development of the concept of global or world citizenship. Falk (2002, p. 27) describes the spirit of a global citizen as one which is “committed to transformation that is spiritual as well as material, that is premised on the wholeness and equality of the human family”. Dower and Williams (2002, p. xxiii) describe the concept as involving an “attitude of loyalty towards the world as a whole or towards all of humanity”. Adopting the concept involves an acceptance that what happens to human beings anywhere in the world does matter (Dower, 2002b). In other words:
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. . . it is difficult for anyone who says he is a world citizen not to accept at least that certain things matter in other parts of the world, and in mattering matter to him, and that this is the basis for being committed to action for the sake of what matters (Dower, 2002b, p. 152).
The question is then how much they matter. On the one hand, it has been argued that the kind of moral universalism that underlies global citizenship “does not deny that people care more about their relatives and less about foreigners” (Mertens, 2005, p. 100). Rather it emphasises that local preference should take place within a just global framework. On the other hand the underlying moral, or even spiritual, principle is one of the inherent equality of all human beings. If these foundations were increasingly adopted by agents, if agents expanded their spheres of concern, out of enlightened self-interest or alternatively because they expand their concern to encompass larger groups, then it would make the concern principle more relevant. The concept of global citizenship also has institutional implications in that it implies that we have global moral obligations which cannot be met without the development of appropriate institutions (Dower, 2002a). The case study: pesticide use in developing countries After having explored these three possible principles for allocating responsibility for governance to specific levels and agents/stakeholders, it is time to test them on a real case where we can see more concretely how workable and just the different principles may be and if in fact they are already applied. Pesticide use in developing countries and its associated problems may not be as obvious a choice as poverty, biodiversity loss or climate change. However, it is another appropriate choice both because of its gravity in terms of human suffering and environmental consequences and because of the local-global linkages and complexity it manifests in similar manner to many other globalised sustainable development issues. Pesticides – background and impacts A pesticide is defined as a chemical substance that kills pests. Pests can be any organisms that are considered harmful to agricultural crops, like insects, fungi, or plants. During the second half of the twentieth century pesticides have been seen as the solution to the problem of harvest loss due to pests. Half of the global agrochemical market goes to five major crops: cereals, maize, rice, soybeans, and cotton (Anonymous, 1999). It is often claimed that pest problems are more severe in tropical climates than in temperate climates. The figures for crop loss attributed to pests in the (sub)-tropics are still very uncertain – they vary up to 75 percent (WHO, 1990) – but in all cases high. Pesticides were a vital part of the Green Revolution, since the new higher-yielding varieties were more sensitive to pests and required the use of both pesticides and fertilisers. Developing countries comprise about 32 percent of the world pesticide market and this proportion of the market has expanded over the years (Anonymous, 1999). Agriculture in developing countries can generally be divided into three categories: export crop plantations, export crop farms, and subsistence farms. The level of pesticide use is usually highest in the first category and lowest in the last, and the export agricultural sector consumes most pesticides in developing countries (Dinham, 1993). Pesticides can, after their intentional release on farmland, be transported in various environmental media, such as soil, rivers, ground water, air and oceans. Humans can
be exposed to pesticides during direct handling of the substances in production, transportation and application as well as (at lower intensities) through residues in food products, drinking water, air, etc. There is very poor data on the number of acute poisonings from pesticides globally. The most widely circulated numbers give an estimation of annually 1 million unintentional (mainly occupational) and 2 million intentional (suicide attempts) intoxications, with 220,000 deaths, and most of these would be in developing countries (WHO, 1990, p. 85). However, the data that these estimations are based on is old, sparse and contested. The data concerning possible long-term health effects is even more sparse and lack of data precludes any estimation of numbers (WHO, 1990, p. 87). The few studies on chronic effects from pesticides in developing countries demonstrate neurotoxic, reproductive, and dermatological effects (Wesseling et al., 1997). Data on the exposure of domestic consumers in developing countries is also very sparse. Owing to lack of research the impact of pesticides on the environment in the developing countries is largely unknown. There are references to a wide range of environmental effects on water, soil, non-target organisms and ecosystems, primarily based on the experiences in the North and assuming that similar patterns of effects will emerge in the South with increasing pesticide use[5]. The use of one particular type of pesticides in developing countries, the type belonging to the group Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), has increasingly been seen as a global problem since a proportion of the persistent pesticides is believed to be transported in the atmosphere and in the oceans to the northern- and southern-most latitudes where they accumulate in the biota (Loganathan and Kannan, 1994; Wania and Mackay, 1993). Many of the persistent pesticides have now been banned in developing countries – a few are still produced but most of the remaining problem is in the stockpiles of unused products (IFCS, 1996) – and have been replaced with other compounds such as organophosphates, carbamates, and pyrethroids and many others, but many of these replacements have turned out to be much more toxic for the people who apply them. Pesticide complexities Pesticide use is characterised by a high degree of complexity in drivers, effects, and responses in governance, each of which stretches over the South and the North in both the geographic and socio-economic sense of the words. It is a good example of a human activity which has multiple linkages between different spatial (and temporal) scales and governance levels. It affects society and the environment on different scales: from the individual human health effects for an agricultural worker in the banana plantation in Costa Rica, to the biota in the lakes of Canada and Northern Europe. The societal driving forces encouraging the use of pesticides are embedded in the global economic and trade system. For example, multinational corporations (MNCs) market pesticides, and importing countries’ consumers and retailers desire a certain quality of agricultural products. Responses from individuals and organizations aimed at reducing the negative effects, or reducing the risk for such effects, include policies of MNCs who promote the safe use of pesticides, of governments who engage in negotiation of a global convention to phase out certain persistent pesticides and who attempt to gain control of which pesticides are used in their countries, and of farmers who switch to alternative pest management methods to avoid damage to their crops from pesticides.
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Methodology My case study was conducted through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders – governmental authorities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), pesticide companies, farmers and agricultural workers – firstly at national level in two countries, Kenya and Costa Rica, secondly at local level in one coffee growing district – Meru and Naranjo, respectively, – in each of these countries, and thirdly at the global level in key United Nation agencies in Rome and Geneva, during the years 1997-1999[6]. The selection of interviewees was made by purposive rather than random sampling. Themes for the interviews included if and how pesticides were understood as problems, perceptions of the drivers for the problems, available risk reduction strategies, and aspects influencing decision-making and action, including particularly the role of knowledge, values and institutions. Together, this enabled an analysis of the different allocation principles. Relevant documents were collected and analysed primarily from global and national levels – such as pesticide legislation and regulation, MEAs, codes of conduct, project descriptions, promotional material – together with participant observation in some national and international workshops addressing pesticides. Details on the methodology and empirical data can be found in Karlsson (2000). What is the pesticide problem? Among the stakeholders included in the study there are at least five dimensions, or categories, of how pesticide use is structured as a “problem”: economic access, production, human health, environment, and trade. Some of these are exclusive to stakeholders at one level only, others are in common at several levels. The problem categories can be divided into two major groups. The first consists of economic access and production problems that relate to the intended purpose of pesticides, to control pests in agricultural crops. The second group consists of those three problem categories that concern non-intended side-effects of pesticide applications. These problem categories are closely linked. The environment serves as a medium for transport of pesticides and their metabolites, which may expose humans to these substances via air, water, etc. and potentially affect human health. Pesticides, as a trade issue, emerge in the regulations established to address the concern of long-term low level exposure to pesticide residues in food. Pesticides exerting effects on other than the target organisms – organisms on the farm and surrounding environment – can cause disruption in the population of natural enemies of the original pest leading to increased and different pest attacks and thus production problems. Although the only problem explicitly put in economic terms is that of farmers’ inability to purchase pesticides, all the other problems could have economic implications. Health problems from pesticide spraying can lead to reduced income for families, reduced soil fertility can reduce future harvests, and trade problems put millions of dollars of exported products at risk. The type and magnitude of the perceived environmental and health effects of pesticide use varied significantly among stakeholders within and between levels. At the local level, government extension staff saw pests as a significant production problem and promoted pesticides to address this. This was the case among the respondents in Meru (Kenya) as well as in Naranjo (Costa Rica) except that in the latter case there was also an awareness of negative production effects from some types of
pesticides. Farmers struggled to afford to buy pesticides in Meru, while in Naranjo they could afford them. Economic access and production problems were of the highest priority for farmers, but were not mentioned to any significant degree at the higher levels of governance. The issue of residues as a problem for trade was high on the agenda at the national and global levels in governments and IGOs (inter-governmental organisations), but it was largely referred to as a problem of the past, before preventive measures had been taken. That there were negative health and environmental effects from the use of pesticides in the South in general, and in the two countries in question, was raised in most stakeholder groups, although never unanimously. The exception was for environmental effects, which went completely without mention at the local level in Meru. Across all levels, the perceived or expressed pesticide-environment connection was weak. It was the health related problems that dominated the problem structuring at national and global levels. This variation in problem structuring means that various stakeholder groups at different levels are likely to reach very different conclusions on whether the benefits of pesticide use outweigh the negative impacts on human health and on the health of the environment. The different conclusions are based on different values and interests, on different access to information on the costs and benefits, and on different institutional settings. Who takes responsibility and why? There were many stakeholders in my study, particularly at global and national levels, who had to some degree taken responsibility and engaged in efforts to reduce the problems with pesticide use in developing countries, but the type of problem they addressed, and their primary motivation, varied. “Northern” environment and health concerns dominated as motivation for global action in the form of “hard law” measures such as standards for trade and international legislation. Producer health in developing countries and industrialized country trade requirements were primary criteria for many of the globally initiated aid activities such as capacity building, while Southern trade interests were neglected. Neither did developing country consumers get much attention in the development of standards and monitoring activities. The international trade regime allows food importing countries to consider the health of only their own in-habitants; they are not permitted to differentiate between products based on how they are produced[7]. Rarely was the issue of the environment in the South – of soil, of water, and of ecosystems – explicitly mentioned on the agenda of IGOs or as a rationale for their actions. This means that global responsibility in governance was expressed through different types of global action for North- and South-related issues and the latter issues were often not addressed at all. The motivation for taking responsibility at the national level was reflected in, for example, the criteria for allowing and banning pesticides in Kenya and Costa Rica, which all included concern for health and environment within the country. These criteria were set out in law and the officials working in registration of approved pesticides also referred to them. While the empirical material in this study cannot demonstrate fully what considerations actually did influence the decisions to ban some substances and permit others, it seems that the overriding priority was to secure the position in international trade of agricultural products, plus farmers’ need of effective
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pest control products. Concern for worker and farmer health, however, emerged in the attention from government and industry to safe use training. Among the people who favoured other risk reduction approaches, such as integrated pest management (IPM) or organic farming, the economy and health of the farmers were the primary motives. Consideration for the local environment was also mentioned, especially in Costa Rica. At the local level some farmers in Kenya felt uncomfortable or sick from pesticides and therefore hired workers to spray the coffee trees. They did not concern themselves with the health of those workers by providing protective clothes and training for them. These farmers did not include employees’ health as part of their concern and responsibility; neither did some individual and plantation farmers in Costa Rica. Culpability – blaming farmers or multinationals? Who or what is seen as culpable for the problems associated with pesticide use is subject to varying opinions not only concerning objective cause-effect links, but also regarding who is morally culpable. When asking stakeholders about their views on the why questions – why are there problems with pesticide use – I often did not receive a response. Moreover, when a respondent did not refer to the existence of a problem, such as health or environmental effects, the why questions were not relevant. Officials from government agencies and pesticide companies at local and national levels in both Costa Rica and Kenya made claims about whether knowledge about how to use the products properly was or was not available for farmers and workers: The problem is not to produce them, the problem is not to use them, the problem is using them in the wrong way due to ignorance (Ministry of Agriculture official, Costa Rica)[8]. Our people are not very prepared to handle these chemicals, as a result there is poisoning, etc. They are not aware of the composition of the chemicals nor the dangers they pose. . . (Rhoˆne-Poulenc Kenya official).
These respondents argued that if there is information, if there is knowledge, if there is awareness, then there should be no problem, but those Kenyan farmers who knew about the risks said they had no resources to obtain the protective clothes that were recommended for the application of pesticides. This would thus be a legitimate reason to exonerate them from moral, if not “physical” culpability. The Costa Rican farmers and agronomists in the study always blamed intoxication on carelessness. They believed that the afflicted person handling the pesticides on the farm, the person who suffered intoxication, had not followed the safety procedures. At the global level, IGOs considered the absence of information on pesticide characteristics among national decision makers in developing countries as obstructing proper decision-making on banning undesired pesticides. Stakeholders’ views on what factors contributed to the problem and who were culpable can be interpreted as being based on either of two opposing assumptions: (1) all pesticides pose a risk, versus; and (2) all pesticides are safe, if used as prescribed. The first assumption makes any pesticide use contribute significantly to risk. The second assumption attributes risks primarily to how pesticides are used. If the second assumption is adhered to, that all pesticides are safe if used as prescribed, then pesticide
technology is constructed as posing no threat in itself. It is only the circumstances that create the risks: users of the technology may fail to use the pesticides properly. “Safe” in this case could refer to both health and environmental risks, but the concept “safe use” mostly stressed the health risks[9]. At one end, national governments, adhering to the pesticide industry viewpoint and supporting modern pest technology, affirmed that use per se was no risk, as long as the mode of use was appropriate: All pesticides registered are safe, it is only to follow the application instructions. We find some misuse (Ministry of Agriculture official, Kenya).
At the other end, the organic movement and others stressed that all pesticides per definition constitute harm and they will all eventually end up in the environment: For us all pesticides are toxic. There can be no safe use of pesticides. Even if they are used with [the prescribed] measures, then there is disposal and environmental pollution is the result (Environmental NGO official, Kenya).
Assumption (1) implicitly assigns culpability to the industry that is developing pesticides and governments that allow their use. NGOs considered the MNCs, governments, and aid agencies to be responsible for encouraging the use of pesticides and they pushed them to adhere to the FAO Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides (FAO, 2003) and to switch to IPM which involves a reduction in pesticide use. Assumption (2) instead assigns blame to the ultimate users themselves, the farmers and workers who apply the pesticides: The person that is going to apply it does not like to use coats, gloves, masks although we know that a large percentage of the farms have these for them to use. But there are a lot of people that do not like it and who prefer to apply them in the open air. This is the irresponsibility of every person and not of the employers (Coffee cooperative official, Costa Rica).
Allocating responsibility for governance of pesticide risks according to the culpability principle illustrates some of the challenges of the principle. Assigning culpability to MNCs is for many people logical because it is MNCs who develop, manufacture and/or promote the substances and make profits from them. Not only are they culpable, but they also have the resources (capacity) to act. However, if pesticides are viewed as essential components of the efforts to increase food production in the world, the companies provide a priority good and so where should the liability then lie? Assigning culpability to individual pesticide users is complex as the “degree” of physical culpability differs significantly depending on lifestyles and behaviour. Pesticide application patterns vary enormously between different categories of farmers within countries as well as between countries and continents. In order for an agent to be considered morally culpable the first requirement, in the eyes of some analysts, is that agents are (or should have been) aware of the impacts of their actions. In this case the requirement will put high and probably unrealistic requirements on available information. It is difficult for a farmer in the rural South to get access to the information that his/her application of pesticides may have effects on his/her own health after many years or even decades. He may not feel any immediate health symptoms either. It is even more difficult for him to become aware that residues of the pesticides in the crops could add to the general exposure of toxins to consumers in Europe or North America or that some of the substances he has used can be transported by the atmosphere to polar areas. Nonetheless, even if the local
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stakeholders were exonerated from moral culpability, any governance measures that are put in place at higher levels that do not influence farmers’ and workers’ behaviour and options for risk reduction, will not have an influence on either the health of farmers, workers, and consumers of sprayed products in national and international markets, or the local and global environment.
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Capacity to know and do If there is no capacity to act at the local or other levels where culpability originates, then there is not much that can be done in governance. Princenties responsibility, in this sense, to capacity: “Socially, one cannot be responsible for something if one cannot respond to the relevant problems” (Princen, 1998, p. 401). The capacity of agents to assume responsibility for governance and take action for risks with pesticide use in developing countries depends on which types of risk reduction strategies are adopted. These strategies can be divided into three clusters: focusing on reducing the use volume per se, reducing the use of the most toxic pesticides, and reducing exposure through improved mode of use[10]. Each of these strategies are associated with one underlying question in decision-making: whether pesticides should be used or not; which pesticides should be used; and how should they be used. Based on the case study, it is possible to schematically illustrate (Figure 1) how far stakeholders at different levels are occupied with these three questions and how that affects their actions. The amount of decision-making on each of the questions at each level is closely linked to stakeholders’ capacity to assume responsibility and act. Starting with the if/whether question, much debate on the costs and benefits of pesticide use in developing countries has engaged stakeholders at the global level. The pressure from public opinion and NGOs contributed to the switch in IGO (inter-governmental organisation) policies from direct support of pesticide use to a focus on IPM and thus on use reduction. It is also from cumulative consumer decisions IF?
WHICH?
HOW?
GLOBAL NATIONAL LOCAL
Figure 1. Decisions made on pesticides at different governance levels
Notes: The widths of the columns schematically depict a judgement made on the relative amount of attention given to each question in decision-making at each level and the influence that such decision-making has on action. The grey shading highlights which levels predominate in which decisions. Market structures and institutions at the global level collectively create the incentives for or against farmers’ use of pesticides; national agencies have the ultimate authority to determine which pesticide should be available for use in the country; while farmers in the end maintain their power to decide how the pesticides are used Source: Karlsson (2000)
that demands for organic products are created in a range of importing countries, opening the opportunity for farmers to cultivate without pesticides if the institutions for certification, marketing, and export are in place. At the same time it is the MNCs in Europe, the USA, and Japan which develop pesticide products and market them world-wide. Somewhere between the companies, the agronomists and the governments at the national level, norms have been created and reproduced that make firm the belief that pesticides are essential to the modernisation of agriculture and higher production levels. Those setting the standards for pest management at country level largely take the central role of pesticides for granted and do not devote much attention to the whether question. In Meru and Naranjo, the coffee farmers at the local level all wanted to use pesticides. Co-operative institutions and the local culture pressured them to use pesticides, and they knew of no alternatives. In Costa Rica a few coffee farmers had contemplated switching to organic farming, because they had heard of this alternative farming system. However, few on farms in conventional production saw organic farming as a viable alternative. Farmers at the local level had overall little leeway in deciding for or against using pesticides on their coffee trees. National governments have no power to decide on which products agrochemical companies choose to submit for registration in their country, at the national level, as in Kenya and Costa Rica’s government agencies for the registration of pesticides, decisions are made on which pesticides are allowed and which are banned[10]. At the local level, the agronomists of the co-operatives and the extension officers recommended to farmers which products they should use, but the recommendations they gave came from national research institutes. Farmers generally followed these recommendations and thus there was not much local decision-making on which pesticides to use[11]. The information on toxic and ecotoxic risks collected and disseminated from the IGOs could be used by national governments, together with the data submitted by industry, in their decisions on which safety precautions should accompany the pesticides on their labels, that is how they should be used. The WHO hazard classification of pesticides, for example, determines the colour coding and safety measures on the labels of the products in Costa Rica. In Kenya and Costa Rica, the pesticide laws emphasised that every pesticide product should have a label with information including instructions for how the pesticides should be used by those who apply them. These instructions were then included in the safe use training among farmers. The ultimate decisions, however, on how the pesticides were handled and used in the field were made by the farmers and workers themselves. They decided where the pesticides were stored, the timing and dose of application, what clothes to wear during application, etc.[12]. My study along with others indicates that the adoption rate of safe use messages was low. In a number of cases responsibility was assumed and action taken at levels that had a special capacity, and was thus implicitly based on the capacity principle. IGOs considered it beyond the capacity of developing countries to collect all the information and make risk assessments on pesticides. Therefore, they assisted them in that respect by collecting and disseminating to them information on the toxicity of substances and by establishing global “soft institutions” such as maximum residue limits (MRLs) and acceptable daily intake levels (ADIs), for use at the national level. As it was considered to be beyond the capacity of farmers to have the knowledge to evaluate the toxicity of pesticides, agencies were established at the national level to make those decisions. At the national level, where the formal institutions were established to decide which pesticides to allow,
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decision-makers relied heavily on the regulatory actions made in other countries, how IGOs have evaluated them, etc. This reflects their acknowledgement of the limited capacity of their countries and the better capacity of IGOs and the countries in the North to make such decisions. The Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade further illustrates this (www.pic.int). The benefit was for developing countries to be aware of the regulative actions of other countries with a better capacity in this field. Another example of this is the negotiations towards the Basel Convention, which relate to trade in hazardous waste, which can include obsolete pesticides. The Basel Convention was probably the first major international environmental negotiation where developing countries demanded tougher text than did developed countries (Brenton, 1994). In this case, developing countries explicitly wanted a formal multilateral agreement to make up for their lack of capacity to establish and implement institutions at national level. This is unusual because deciding on the level of acceptable risk is usually considered to be the prerogative of national governments. The analysis illustrates some of the implications of the principle of capacity for the allocation of responsibility for governance. Firstly, identifying who has capacity to handle a problem depends on views on the relative effectiveness of different strategies and actions. This in turn depends on judgements of what levels of risks are acceptable, and of who and what – such as individual agents or institutions and structures – are the key elements that can be influenced in the system of linked direct and indirect driving forces ranging from the global economic and trade system to individual farmers’ pesticide handling practices. This assigning of culpability for pesticide risks varied widely among stakeholders, as described above, and was influenced by diverging views on, e.g. the inherent nature of pesticides and the possibility that pesticides could be used safely by farmers and workers in developing countries. Secondly, a multi-level governance context constrains the capacity of agents and makes them dependent on supportive governance across levels. On the one hand, there are constraints inherent in the structure of the international system, where the nation-state has been and is the primary legislative power. The global level can only legislate for those countries that choose to enter a specific institutional arrangement. On the other hand, there are constraints for the institutions closer to the specific problem. In the pesticide case, the capacity to form codes of acceptable conduct of farm owners towards their casual workers, concerning what they should do to protect their health, is rooted in socio-cultural institutions formed at the local level. Capacity to change these local institutions would have to be built up at this level. It is essential in multi-level governance that responsibility is taken at those levels where the major decisions are made that influence key driving forces and where stakeholders have the capacity to establish and enforce institutions whose operation could reduce the problem. This capacity may stem from institutional legitimacy. National governments have the legislative power. They may, however, not be able to incorporate the global context in their institutional design. On the other hand in many cases, but certainly not always, agents at local level have better capacity to design institutions for the local context. Thirdly, stakeholders who have the capacity to act may not have contributed to the problems, and thus need some other motivation for taking responsibility for governance than liability based on culpability. Such motivation could be based on either a sense of self-interest or – to be discussed in the next section – moral obligation.
Concern for yourself and sometimes others Relying on concern for individual well-being is difficult in the pesticide case because, as in most environmental problems and particularly those with a global dimension: “The social and spatial distribution of benefits differs considerably from the social and spatial distribution of costs” (Saurin, 1996, p. 92). The harms produced are often not borne by the people who cause them. Even if it could be said for global environmental issues that “all people and all states are polluters and victims simultaneously” (Iwama, 1992, p. 111), the effects are not evenly distributed. However, separation of benefits and costs is not invariably the case. If the focus is on the health effects, then local stakeholders in some cases, such as farmers who spray their own fields, receive both the benefits and costs. The problem is that they are typically not sufficiently aware of the effect their own actions have on their own health. Motivated by enlightened self-interest Basing the allocation of responsibility for pesticide risks on enlightened self-interest in this type of situation has to build on a deeper understanding of the underlying driving forces behind the risk with pesticides and of who are exposed to the risk. It has to build on knowledge of the complexities around the negative effects of pesticide use and unveil possible interdependencies and feedbacks within both the natural and social systems. It needs to include the understanding that the person who handles the pesticides – or others close around, whom the person cares about: family members or neighbours – can suffer effects over the short or long-term. Awareness of the linkages between the use of pesticides and negative effects suffered is essential for any stakeholder if he/she is to be able to consider any aspects of self-interest and express responsibility through action. Enlightened self-interest encompasses the concern for long-term health effects. Comments by a Costa Rican and Kenyan government official, respectively, illustrate how such self-interest can change the policy of local agents: Why do you think that the organic [coffee] producer in our countries responded so readily to this market? Because it offers better price, because it offers priorities in the process, because all that they produce is bought and the farmer is sought out where he is. . . But it is a common interest. There is an interest from the European that he wishes to eat a berry which is tasty but that does not kill him (Ministry of Agriculture official, Costa Rica). Many have two farms, one for their own food and one for the market. They used to use very dangerous chemicals on the market crops but we got them to stop that by explaining that it will be consumed by your son or daughter in town some day. When we showed how they get affected they started using the right chemicals. Some chemicals in coffee are not suitable for vegetables (Meru government official).
This illustrates how the self-interest of a farmer and his family simultaneously can be part of a common interest for stakeholders far away and can motivate taking responsibility. In the North, the increasing number of consumers who wish to purchase organically grown products may be based on self-interest, to avoid their own exposure to pesticide residues. However, this may have the indirect result that the farmers in the South receive incentives to reduce their own exposure to pesticides. Even the concern for the pesticides being released into the environment can be related to pure self-interest, because water can act as a medium that results in human exposure. Governance based on enlightened self-interest can make people include even a global perspective in their
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actions: “The world is only one. If someone does something somewhere it will affect you” (Kenya government official). Concern for the environment on such grounds requires the awareness that such linkages between the environment and human health are possible and probable. The response to such awareness depends on the level of risk that stakeholders are willing to accept. The need for more data and knowledge on the effects, not only in governments but also among all stakeholders, would be substantial, but ultimately, the linkages may consist of subtle interdependencies that are difficult to prove conclusively. Therefore, to rely on the concern principle for allocation of responsibility requires that decision makers apply the precautionary principle to some degree and accept that there may be effects from pesticide use on their own close environment and the health of their families and themselves. To motivate the allocation of responsibility in governance solely in terms of enlightened self-interest is not easy to achieve for the issue of pesticide use in developing countries and its negative side-effects. Not every stakeholder has as much self-interest to gain from taking responsibility and action to reduce the risks. Even if the consequences of POPs pesticides have been called global due to their transportation across the oceans and atmosphere, this does not make every farmer, consumer, or citizen in every country suffer the negative effects to the same degree. Furthermore, in many cases, mere awareness of a risk is not enough to act: “There is no guarantee that people who have a good understanding of their system of interest within the context of a larger whole will act on that understanding, or if they do, how they will act” (Blackmore and Smyth, 2002, p. 204). Informing farmers of the toxicity of pesticides often does not make them change old habits of how they are handled. There are other competing values for farmers: the use of pesticides is part of a farmer’s normal daily bread-winning activity which aims to increase the security of the family income. Motivated by altruism The concern principle for allocating responsibility for governance can also be based on altruism, on concern that is expanded beyond both narrow and enlightened self-interest. This refers to those cases where stakeholders internalise an interest in both the health of the environment and of people in other countries who are afflicted with the effects of pesticide use. It means that they internalise the consideration for the plight of others, whether they are workers and consumers in their own community or people who live in distant places. An example of broader values than just the interest of the family as the basis for taking action comes from those farmers in Costa Rica who have switched to organic farming: There are really not many incentives. The incentives are more internal, that people feel good with what they are doing (Costa Rican cooperative official).
Similar broader values also apply to those European and American consumers who have expanded their concern to encompass the health of those farmers, and their workers and families, who produce the food products that they buy. Likewise, the governments of the North expanded their concern beyond only their own farmlands, farmers and consumers to include those of the South, by taking part in the Rotterdam Convention’s prior informed consent procedure for export of those pesticides that are known to produce severe effects under the conditions of use in developing countries.
There are significant differences in the interests surrounding pesticide use in the South: the farmers’ interests in a maximum harvest, pesticide companies’ interest in maximum profit, NGOs’ interest in health and environment, etc. It is hard to imagine how these differences could be reconciled based on self-interest only, irrespective of how enlightened such an interest is. An expanded community of concern including the whole of humanity is the only way that stakeholders in one part of the world would be inclined to consider, and take the responsibility for, the acute health effects of pesticides on people in another part of the world. It is the only way that governance measures could be established that influence significant commercial interests that stand to lose from the governance of pesticide risks. However, the case study showed many examples where the concerns and priorities of stakeholders at one level were not considered at other levels. The values that underpinned decision-making were often limited to stakeholders’ personal interest, to short time spans, and/or limited geographical scope. At the global level, the MNCs had their economic interests and multilateral negotiations had an agenda dominated by transborder pollution. Long-term health effects for the rural population and consumers in developing countries did not appear as a strong concern at any of the decision-making levels. The environment in developing countries was largely absent as an object of concern in risk reduction policy except on the agendas of a few international and national NGOs, and a limited number of farmers in Costa Rica. In summary, the concern principle has until now been a weak motivation for assuming responsibility in the pesticide case. Policy implications – concern and capacity before culpability? What lessons can be drawn from the pesticide case, on how workable and just are the different principles for allocating responsibility to different levels and stakeholders? Allocating responsibility to specific agents at specific governance levels according to their culpability for the problem requires an analysis of who (individual and collective agents) and what (structures and institutions) are the direct and indirect drivers of the problems and, linked to this, which agents are “physically” and morally culpable. This principle is naturally morally appealing from the perspective of justice but emerges as both extremely challenging and facing numerous normative choices if applied on such a globalised issue-complex as the pesticide case. The veil of ignorance between actors and their impacts can be very thick; they are largely not aware of the negative consequences of their actions. Awareness of the consequences is also not enough to assign responsibility based on culpability if actors have no options and no capacity to act differently. This is particularly challenging when the “negative” action in question is deeply rooted in a wider socio-technical regime – like modern food production – and viewed by most stakeholders as a “positive” and necessary action. Allocating responsibility based on agents’ capacity may seem more straightforward both to analyse and apply. However, it is still closely connected to judgements of what are the drivers for the problems and the most effective risk reduction strategies, for example, whether institutions, technology and/or individual behaviour need to change. Agents must have the appropriate capacity – such as the power, resources and knowledge – to address the problems effectively whether they are culpable or not. Many agents at one level lack one or more of these elements, when power, resources and knowledge are concentrated with agents at other governance levels. In addition, agents need to have a motivation to act – such as out of guilt for having contributed to
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the problem or out of concern for oneself or others – unless one envisions a very top-down type of governance with strong enforcement mechanisms where effectiveness can be the guiding principle. Allocating responsibility based on concern for those suffering from the problems can be approached through two pathways. It can either be based on increased knowledge of the impact of one’s own actions on personal and family health – thus some form of enlightened self-interest – or it can be based on “expanded value spheres” with concern for the welfare of people and ecosystems far away, in effect adherence to some notion of global solidarity and accepting the implications of the concept of global citizenship. The pesticide case illustrates the limitations of enlightened self-interest, due partly to the complexity of cause-effect linkages and its significant information requirements – unless there is a pervasive application of the precautionary principle together with expectation of strong negative effects as a rule rather than exception. It suggests also, however, the promise of the global solidarity route if linked to a systems perspective of the global commons. This positive appraisal of the concern principle, however, needs to build on the assumption that motivation based on self-less concern is either already widespread or that it can be actively nurtured through, for example, education (Dubois and Trabelsi, 2007), processes of cooperative interaction (Tasioulas, 2005) or the design of institutions which strengthen cosmopolitan aspirations and commitments (Tan, 2005). Taken together, the three principles are more complementary than mutually exclusive, particularly when culpability and capacity are dispersed across agents and governance levels. However, the principle of allocating responsibility based on self-less concern seems to be particularly important, although concern alone is not enough to affect change. Allocating responsibility for governance of a particular societal concern to agents who may be culpable (in a physical sense) but without capacity to act (and thus not fully morally culpable) and getting agents with capacity (and who may or may not also be culpable) but who have no motivation to act from concern for the victims are both bound to fail, particularly in multi-level governance contexts where the global level only has at its disposal primarily soft institutions and certainly no mechanisms to assign and enforce liability. Even if only one principle were selected, we can see the rationale of allocating responsibility for governance through creating effective institutions at all governance levels that take a multi-level integrated perspective. When there are local driving forces for global problems, global governance must reach down to influence the local actions. The national and global institutions have little effect in reducing risks if they do not influence the choices and actions of local stakeholders. For issues with local-global linkages in both their effects and driving forces, the conclusion is that institutions and governance at the local and global level need to be mutually supportive. The challenge in achieving this should not be underestimated. Even the case discussed in this paper – which by many would be considered as dealing with an issue on the lower end of global priorities – illustrated the need for changing the value basis for agents, in order to achieve effective multilayered governance. Furthermore, an issue-specific regime focused on specific negative effects of some human activity will not go very far when that activity is deeply rooted in the prevailing structures for livelihoods at local level and economic development at larger scales, whether it concerns systems of food
production, transport or consumption. Then the analysis has to reach beyond minor tinkering with institutions towards societal transformations at a deeper level. I conclude that we need to further develop the methodological tools and theories to discuss aspects of ethics and justice for globalised issues that involve the allocation of responsibility for governance at several levels from the local to the global, and to thus move beyond the national/international dichotomy which has outlived its empirical and moral relevance. Notes 1. Distanciation for Giddens is the “stretching” aspect of globalisation processes, where “[i]n the modern era, the level of time-space distanciation is much higher than in any previous period, and the relations between local and distant social forms and events become correspondingly stretched” (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). Fragmegration is the term Rosenau (2000, p. 170) uses to capture the “interactive causal links between fragmentation and integration” in a globalising world. 2. Driving forces or pressures is a term for expressing the causality links between different parts of a system. It is primarily used in natural science dominated research on global biogeochemical cycles and global environmental change. 3. Barry (2005, p. 106) refers to this as the association principle, as it is based on agents’ “associative connections with those suffering”. 4. For a discussion on the possibility for other motivations for human action than mere self-interest, see for example Mansbridge (1990). 5. For more specific information on environmental effects observed in the (sub)-tropics, see for example, (Dinham, 1995; Everts et al., 1997; Everts et al., 1998). 6. The countries were chosen partly due to their, on paper at least, rather advanced pesticide legislation compared to many other developing countries (Karlsson, 2000). Both Kenya and Costa Rica are economically heavily dependent on agricultural exports, and have traditionally been dominated by very few cash crops (coffee and tea, and bananas and coffee, respectively). However, in recent years non-traditional crops such as pineapples, vegetables, and ornamentals have expanded fast. The large number of export crops, the involvement of large businesses in their production, and other factors have made the countries substantial users of agricultural pesticides. 7. The applicable WTO agreement is the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). The SPS Agreement rules that the standards for the levels of pesticide residues in traded agricultural products (so called Maximum Residue Limits) should be accepted by all signing parties of the Uruguay Agreements. Indirectly these standards have therefore become legally binding on the member countries of the WTO (WTO, 1998). 8. For a comprehensive list of the list of respondents and interviews see Karlsson (2000). 9. In principle, a sprayer dressed as an astronaut could avoid being exposed to pesticides. Even then the environment would still be exposed. 10. In developing countries with no legislation on the registration of pesticides, this situation would be entirely different and little decision-making on which pesticides to use will take place at national level. 11. This is not to say that local situations had no significant influence on which products were sprayed. The types of crops grown and the types of pest problems largely deter-mined which products the farmers were recommended to use.
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Note from the publisher Emerald at 40 This year Emerald Group Publishing Limited celebrates its 40th Anniversary. As anyone with more than two score years under their belt (or approaching it) will know, forty represents a milestone. It marks a point at which we have, or we are supposed to have, come to terms with the world and reached a good understanding of what we want from life. And for those of a more contemplative persuasion, it prompts us to reflect upon our earlier years and how we got to where we are. It is perhaps not so different for a company. In many ways, to reach the age of forty for an organisation is quite an achievement. Emerald’s own history began in 1967 with the acquisition of one journal, Management Decision. The company was begun as a part-time enterprise by a group of senior management academics from Bradford Management Centre. The decision to found the company, known as MCB University Press until 2001 was made due to a general dissatisfaction with the opportunities to publish in management and the limited international publishing distribution outlets at this time. Through the creation and development of the journals, not only was this particular goal achieved, but the foundations of a successful business were laid. By 1970 the first full-time employee was appointed and by 1975 there were five members of staff on the pay roll. In 1981, there were twenty members of staff and three years later the company had grown to a size which meant we had to move to larger premises – one half of the current site at 62 Toller Lane. Through the 1990s Emerald came of age. In 1990 the first marketing database was introduced and several years later we acquired a number of engineering journals to add to our increasing portfolio of management titles. The IT revolution also began to impact upon the publishing and content delivery processes during this period. Writing in 2007, it seems hard to remember a time when information was not available at the click of a button and articles weren’t written and supplied in electronic format – and yet it was only eleven years ago that Emerald launched the online digital collection of articles as a database. The move was seen as pioneering and helped to shape the future of the company thereafter. The name of the database was Emerald (the Electronic Management Research Library Database) and in 2001 we adopted this name for the company. So, how does Emerald look in 2007? Emerald has grown into an important journal publisher on the world stage. The company now publishes over 150 journals and we have more than 160 members of staff. Emerald has always stressed the importance of internationality and relevance to practice in its publishing philosophy. These two principles remain the cornerstones of our editorial objective. The link between the organisation and academe that was so crucial in the foundation of the company continues to influence corporate thinking; we uphold the principle of theory into practice. Emerald also continues to carry the tag of an innovative company. Through our professionalism and focus on building strong networks with our various communities, we have launched and developed initiatives such as the Literati Network for our authors and a dedicated website for managers. These innovations and many more, help
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to set us apart from other publishers. For this reason, we feel confident in stating that we are the world’s leading publisher of management journals and databases. It is important to us that we continue to strengthen the links with our readers and authors and to encourage research that is relevant across the globe. In more recent history we have, for example, awarded research grants in Africa, China and India. We also opened offices in China and India in 2006, adding to our existing offices in Australia, Malaysia, Japan and the United States. We would like to thank the editors, editorial advisory board members, authors, advisers, colleagues and contacts who, for the past forty years, have contributed to the success of Emerald. We look forward to working with you for many years to come. Rebecca Marsh Director of Editorial and Production
Call for papers International Journal of Social Economics Special issue on India About the journal Increasing economic interaction, allied to the social and political changes evident in many parts of the world, has created a need for more sophisticated understanding of the social, political and cultural influences which govern our societies. The International Journal of Social Economics provides its readers with a unique forum for the exchange and sharing of information in this complex area. Philosophical discussions of research findings combine with commentary on international developments in social economics to make a genuinely valuable contribution to current understanding of the subject and the growth of new ideas. The journal is being brought out under the banner of Emerald Group, which is a leading English language publisher of academic and professional literature in the fields of management; and library and information management.
The special issue Despite numerous critiques of globalization, however, some observers believe that greater equity and justice can be achieved through global operations for a developing nation like India. Could global business be a possible source of equitable social justice and, if so, what are the roles that businesses is and can be expected to play in helping to secure equity and justice or can foster ecological sustainability on the one hand and ensure morality and maintain transparency in the openmarket conditions? These issues are pertinent as it is being observed that, of late, there has been an erosion of values at every level, against a backdrop of traditional Indian culture and a rich legacy of spirituality inherited from the past down the line to the significant contributions made by Gandhi, Vivekananda and Tagore. Where is the way-out? What are the alternatives
towards achieving a sacro-civic society in the face of an aggressive and cut-throat competitive milieu? With these points in the backdrop, we wish to encourage empirical work as well as big-picture thinking on issues related to the roles that business can play in fostering a moral, equitable and ecologically sustainable India. Papers are invited which address the theme of this issue. Possible aspects include: .
ethics and corporate behaviour;
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human rights and corporate activity;
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Gandhian Economics;
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injustice and gender issues;
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Hinduism and Economics;
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sustainability and Environmental issues; and
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impact of ICT in social and economic development.
Guest Editor of this special issue on India is Ananda Das Gupta (Indian Institute of Plantation Management Bangalore, India). Please submit your paper not exceeding 6,000 words by 20 February 2007 (or preferably earlier) to Ananda Das Gupta (
[email protected]) with a copy to Simon Linacre, Managing Editor (
[email protected]) Contribution Guidelines can be obtained from: Simon Linacre, Managing Editor (Accounting, Finance & Economics), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 60/62 Toller Lane, Bradford BD8 9BY, West Yorkshire, UK, Tel: 44 (0)1274 777700, Fax: 44 (0)1274 785200, E-mail:
[email protected], web site: www.emeraldinsight.com
