Whose Development

http://oss.sagepub.
com
Organization Studies
DOI: 10.1177/0170840603024001341
2003; 24; 143 Organization Studies
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
Reinvention of Nature
Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the
http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/1/143
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
European Group for Organizational Studies
can be found at: Organization Studies Additional services and information for
http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:
http://oss.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints:
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions:
http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/24/1/143 Citations
at COLORADO COLL on December 15, 2009 http://oss.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Who Sustains Whose Development?
Sustainable Development and the Reinvention
of Nature
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
Abstract
This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwords
of today: sustainable development. I argue that, despite claims of a paradigm shift,
the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economic, not ecological,
rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specied
by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the
transformation of nature into environment, a transformation that has important
implications for notions of how development should proceed. The rational
management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on
developing countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this regime of truth
for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and
intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development
threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be
made efcient because of the capitalization of nature.
Keywords: sustainable development, neo-colonialism, NorthSouth relations,
environmentalism, critical management studies
In the early phases of colonization, the white mans burden consisted of the need to
civilize the non-white peoples of the world this meant above all depriving them
of their resources and rights. In the latter phase of colonization, the white mans
burden consisted of the need to develop the Third World, and this again involved
depriving local communities of their resources and rights. We are now on the
threshold of the third phase of colonization, in which the white mans burden is to
protect the environment and this too, involves taking control of rights and
resources. . . . The salvation of the environment cannot be achieved through the old
colonial order based on the white mans burden. The two are ethically, economically
and epistemologically incongruent. Mies and Shiva (1993: 264265)
Introduction
After more than 200 years of industrialization in the Western world and more
than 50 years of development in the Third World, the benets delivered by
the grand design of progress and modernity are, at best, equivocal. Despite
phenomenal advances in science, technology, medicine and agricultural
production, the promise that development would eradicate world poverty
remains unfullled in several parts of the globe, especially in the Third World.
Organization
Studies
24(1): 143180
Copyright 2003
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks,
CA & New Delhi)
143 Authors name
0170-8406[200301]24:1;143180;031341
Subhabrata Bobby
Banerjee
International
Graduate School
of Management,
University of
South Australia,
Australia
Progress has come at a price: global warming, ozone depletion, loss of
biodiversity, soil erosion, air and water pollution are all global problems with
wide-ranging impacts on human populations, impacts that are signicantly
more harmful for the rural poor in Third World countries, and for people who
derive their sustenance from the land.
Let me begin with a cautionary note on terminology so as not to offend
postmodern sensibilities. I use the terms rst world, Third World, devel-
oped, underdeveloped, traditional, modern, colonizer, and colonized
with an understanding of the essentialist and binary nature of these categories.
For instance, I realize there are first worlds within third worlds and third
worlds within rst worlds, but I deploy these and other categories strategically
and politically here, in the spirit of what Spivak calls strategic essentialism.
In some ways, my critique examines the foundations of knowledge
construction about the Third World and the ways in which it becomes
constituted and represented by a particular set of discursive power relations
that underlie the development discourse. As Escobar (1992: 25) argues, Third
World reality is inscribed with precision and persistence by the discourses
and practices of economists, planners, nutritionists, demographers and
the like, making it difcult for people to dene their own interests in their
own terms in many cases actually disabling them to do so. Perhaps
we can now add the discourses and practices of environmentalists and
conservationists to the list, as the earlier quote by Mies and Shiva implies.
Although such categorizations might preclude a sense of agency for Third
World resistance movements, I discuss in the conclusion of the paper how
transgressions of these categories could create new spaces of resistance.
The concept of sustainable development has emerged in recent years in an
effort to address environmental problems caused by economic growth. There
are several different interpretations of sustainable development, but its broad
aim is to describe a process of economic growth without environmental
destruction. Exactly what is being sustained (economic growth or the global
ecosystem, or both) is currently at the root of several debates, although many
scholars argue that the apparent reconciliation of economic growth and the
environment is simply a green sleight-of-hand that fails to address genuine
environmental problems (Escobar 1995; Redclift 1987).
In this paper I look critically at the concept of sustainable development.
I examine the political, economic, and developmental assumptions that inform
the notion of sustainable development and discuss the consequences of these
assumptions. I argue that sustainable development, rather than representing
a major theoretical breakthrough, is very much subsumed under the dominant
economic paradigm. As with development, the meanings, practices, and
policies of sustainable development continue to be informed by colonial
thought, resulting in disempowerment of a majority of the worlds
populations, especially rural populations in the Third World. Discourses of
sustainable development are also based on a unitary system of knowledge
and, despite its claims of accepting plurality, there is a danger of margin-
alizing or co-opting traditional knowledges to the detriment of communities
who depend on the land for their survival.
144 Organization Studies 24(2)
The papers main argument is at the broader level of political economy rather
than an individual organization. However, I would argue that the critique is
also relevant for organization studies because of the role played by
supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO),
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. Although these
are not corporate organizations in the traditional sense of the term, they
are powerful agents in advancing discourses of sustainable development.
Moreover, there is a nexus between the policies of these organizations and
business organizations, especially large transnational corporations which are
at the forefront of the debate on biotechnology and sustainable development.
Transnational corporations are major agents that inuence the environmental
and trade policies of the World Trade Organization as well as other global
agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a broader sense, the various
agents that determine global environmental policies form a loose network
of powerful bodies that construct a particular form of reality about the
natural environment. Thus, examining the political discourse of sustainable
development will reveal its role in shaping organizational discourses on the
environment. Sustainability means different things to different people: what I
attempt to demonstrate in the paper is how colonial thought informs this
meaning creation and its resultant disempowering effects on sections of society
such as rural populations. I conclude by discussing alternate formulations of
sustainable development and implications for the study of organizations.
Theoretical Genealogy
Four theoretical streams inform my critique of sustainable development. I
draw upon insights from postcolonial theory to understand the construction
and representation of the Third World. The work of Edward Said, Homi
Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Radhakrishnan, Ngugi wa
Thiongo, and Vincent Mudimbe are particularly relevant in developing
a postcolonial critique of colonialism and imperialism. I also present
contemporary critiques of development as a prelude to developing a critique
of sustainable development. This critique draws from the work of Arturo
Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Vandana Shiva, Ramachandra Guha, and Gustavo
Esteva, among others. I use the Foucauldian notion of power, in particular
his formulation of disciplinary power, as an analytic that examines the
production of truths about nature and sustainability through disciplinary
power and the subsequent control of knowledge.
And last, but definitely not the least, when theory fails me, when I have
difculty in formulating notions of agency, I draw upon insights from many
grass-roots activist movements all over the world: Aboriginal land rights
movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Chipko movement, and the
Zapatista uprising, to name a few.
A comprehensive review of postcolonial theory is beyond the scope of this
paper (see Mani 1989; McClintock 1992; Prakash 1992; Pugliese 1995;
Banerjee: Who Sustains Whose Development? 145
Radhakrishnan 1993; and Said 1986 for a variety of insights into the eld).
In a broad sense this school of thought attempts to problematize issues arising
from colonial relations (Shohat 1992) through a retrospective reflection
on colonialism, the better to understand the difficulties of the present in
newly independent states (Said 1986: 45). However, using the term post
in postcolonialism is problematic because it assumes that colonialism as a
historical reality has somehow ended (Mani 1989) without acknowledging
the complicity of colonial relations in contemporary discourses of develop-
ment and progress in NorthSouth relations. As a result, the post absolves
itself of any claims for present consequences of the damages caused by
colonization (Said 1986).
Examining discourses of sustainable development using theoretical
perspectives from colonialism and imperialism might allow us to see how
contemporary global environmental discourses serve as markers for the third
phase of colonization that Mies and Shiva (1993) allude to. In this postmodern
age of liberal democracy, the concept of imperialism seems almost quaint,
which probably explains the silences in theorizing imperialism in contem-
porary social sciences (Patnaik 1990). Imperialism has been conceptualized
in a variety of ways, primarily using a political framework. For instance,
imperialism described theories and practices developed by a dominant
metropolitan center to rule distant territories, by force, by political means or
by economic, social, and cultural dependence. Doyle (1986: 45) defines
empire as a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the
effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved
by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural depen-
dence. Colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism,
involves the establishment of settlements on outlying territories. The end of
empires and direct colonial rule did not mean the end of imperialism, and its
traces can be observed in the general cultural sphere . . . in specic political,
ideological, economic and social practice (Said 1993: 8). The traditional
politics of power, i.e. military strength, diplomacy, and weapons develop-
ment, have evolved into an age of geo-economics in which winners and
losers in the global economy are created by state-assisted private entities
(Luttwak 1999). However, as Said (1993) argues, accumulation and
acquisition are not the only actions of imperialism or colonialism. Their
ideological formations assume that certain territories and people actually
require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge afliated
with domination.
In the context of management and organizations, it might be more
appropriate to understand imperialism as an economic system of external
investment and the penetration and control of markets and sources of
raw materials (Williams 1976: 159). Political and military imperialism
shows itself clearly; the problem lies in articulating the different guises of
imperialism in liberal free market economies. Thus, if imperialism is to be
viewed as a fundamental set of economic relations, then examining the range
of relations (such as the relationship between nation states, international
institutions, and transnational corporations) becomes an important task in
order to uncover the presence of imperialism in current institutional structures
and processes. Placed in the context of imperialism, the operation of interna-
tional nance capital becomes signicant in its hegemonic institutionalization
through the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. Therefore, conicts between
countries of the North and South in various international trade forums, as well
as protests by peasants and workers in the poorer countries of the world over
property and resource rights, are often aptly framed as anti-imperialist
struggles.
Thus, imperialism today is inextricably linked with culture, society, economy
and polity. Its operation is often masked and, because imperialism has learned
to manage things better, it is difcult to identify its disciplinary power in
all its nuances a power that normalizes experiences, rather than provides
avenues for resistance and change. Imperialism is operationalized through
different kinds of power: institutional power (agencies such as the IMF, the
WTO, and the World Bank), economic power (of corporations and nation
states), and discursive power, which constructs and describes uncontested
notions of development, backwardness, subsistence economies, while
preventing other narratives from emerging. As Said (1993: 8) points out, the
rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when
deployed in an imperial setting.
Foucaults (1980) analysis of power reveals how disciplinary practices
constitute the boundaries of discourse, determining what is and what is not,
what can be done and what cannot, what should be and what should not
(Clegg 1989). These practices are discursive in the sense that they constitute
and are constituted by knowledge appearing as specific institutional and
organizational practices. They become discursive because they reproduce
knowledge through practices that are made possible by the structural
assumptions of that knowledge (Clegg 1989). The rules generated by
discourse are not derived from some sovereign source but instead become
natural rules or norms. The power of science and the scientic method in
everyday discourse is an example of how science normalizes social and
cultural realms, not because of the superior rationality of science but because
of its procedures of normalization arising from its disciplinary power. This
power is not necessarily between sovereign and subject or state-controlled
economic or political power; in fact Foucault (1980: 102) argues that these
are limited sites of power and calls instead to shift our focus of inquiry to the
study of the techniques and tactics of domination. This disciplinary power
is not located at a legitimate site of sovereign or state but transmits itself
through a complex system of institutions, regulations, texts, policies, and
practices signifying not relations of sovereignty but relations of domination
what Foucault describes as subjugation through a constitution of subjects.
Thus,
. . . [disciplinary power] is a mechanism of power that permits time and labor, rather
than wealth and commodities, to be extracted from bodies. It is a type of power which
is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner
through levies and obligations over time. It presupposes a tight knit grid of material
coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign. This new type of power,
which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty is one of the great
inventions of bourgeois society, a fundamental instrument in the constitution of
industrial capitalism and the type of society that is its accompaniment. (Foucault
1980: 105)
Sovereignty still exists; in the modern era it has become democratized and
functions along with the mechanisms of discipline, concealing the fact that
the democratization of sovereignty was fundamentally determined by and
grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion coercion that was more
apparent and visible during colonial times but operates in increasingly
sophisticated ways in the postcolonial era.
Mudimbe (1988) highlights three characteristics of colonialism: the
domination of physical space, reformation of the natives minds (particularly
in terms of knowledge systems and culture), and incorporation of local
economic histories into a Western perspective. As we shall see, all these
practices are very much evident in contemporary discourses of sustainable
development, which are informed by either Enlightenment notions of taming
a savage wilderness through Western scientific rationality or Romantic
notions of a pristine, unspoiled wilderness that needs to be conserved at all
costs (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). In either case, the implications for non-
Western cultures, especially indigenous communities, are particularly severe.
The domination of physical space can include both domination of nature
and the appropriation of nature. The former involves the destruction of
nature; the latter involves its consumption, predominantly through a visual
sense incorporating the spectacularization of life (Lefebvre 1991: 286), as
evidenced by the rise of ecotourism in afuent countries where consumers
pay premium prices for the authentic nature experience. Here meanings of
nature and the environment arise in a network of signs, messages, and
images, which seems to suggest that design rather than nature is the
organizing principle of todays society (Chaloupka and Cawley 1993). Or, as
Baudrillard (1981: 201) declares, nothing escapes design. Everything
belongs to design and there is no nature out there. . . . This designed
universe is what properly constitutes the environment. The past decade has
seen a rise in this kind of designer environmentalism, whose basic message
is that the worlds environmental ills can be solved by buying green and
natural products, The Body Shop and Ben & Jerrys being two prominent
examples that come to mind.
In the postcolonial era, the colonizercolonized relationships are played
out in trade conflicts between developed and underdeveloped countries,
resulting in the so-called NorthSouth divide, a complex relationship
characterized by rhetoric, defensiveness, and ideology. Analyzing Third
World experiences of imperialism and colonialism in the context of
sustainable development discourses might transform our understanding of the
past while enabling us to construct a history of the present and our attitude
toward the future. As Said (1993: 47) points out, despite the great
contributions of Western theorists such as Foucault and Williams, the imperial
experience for these scholars is quite irrelevant, a theoretical oversight that
is the norm in Western cultural and scientic disciplines. The twin discourses
of development and sustainable development share structural characteristics
of colonizing discourses. Like Orientalism, a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 1979: 3),
development functioned as a discipline for the production and management
of the Third World in the postWorld War II period, as we shall see in the
next section.
The Invention of Development and the Creation of
Underdevelopment
A useful starting point might be to locate current discourses of sustainable
development within the larger discourse of development in order to highlight
its continuities and discontinuities. Although the term development has been
in common usage for over 200 years, most scholars agree that the
contemporary notion of development was endorsed by President Harry
Truman. In his inaugural address on January 20, 1949, Truman outlined a
global program for development:
We must embark on a bold new program for making the benets of our scientic
advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of
underdeveloped areas. . . . The old imperialism exploitation for foreign prot
has no place in our plans. (Cited in Escobar 1995)
This of course set the stage for the new imperialism the creation of
underdevelopment, resulting in a new perception of the West and the rest of
the world. This was the rst time that the term development was used in the
context of underdevelopment, giving it a new meaning. The Third World was
born at that moment: on that day, over 2 billion people became under-
developed because, as Esteva (1992: 7) argues, they were transmogried into
an inverted mirror of others reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends
them off to the end of the queue, a mirror that denes their identity, which is
really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of a
homogenizing and narrow minority.
Many Third World countries have paid and continue to pay a disastrous price
for this catching-up development and, as several scholars have pointed out,
the consequences have been particularly severe for rural populations (Adams
1990; Escobar 1995; Esteva 1987, 1992; Mies and Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989).
Farmers and peasants in the Third World as well as indigenous peoples in
different parts of the world were classified as living in a subsistence
economy and needed to develop in order to reach acceptable standards of
living. This had enormous economic and sociocultural influences on
indigenous peoples and farmers throughout the world; for instance, all
resources were directed at producing cash crops rather than the traditional
crops people used to grow. The detrimental effects of this form of develop-
ment actually undermined subsistence and led to underdevelopment (Shiva
1989; Hyndman 1987; Mies and Shiva 1993).
In an insightful analysis of the development discourse, Escobar (1995) has
demonstrated how development rst created the notion of poverty (based on
modern, capitalist indicators such as dollar income per capita, material
possessions, resource extraction, science and technology, market economies)
then modernized the poor, transforming them into the assisted. This set in
place new modes of relations and mechanisms of control under the clarion
call of development. Development proceeded by constructing problems,
applying solutions and creating abnormalities, such as the illiterate, the
underdeveloped, the landless peasants who would later be treated and
reformed (Escobar 1995: 56). This was a scientic and technological process
that subsumed differences in culture, constructing people as variables in the
grand model of progress and validating the assimilative imperatives of
development under the banner of national interest, which was frequently the
case for the new nations of the Third World.
Placed in this context, development simply became another name for
economic growth. The rationale was that economic growth should be made
paramount. Economic growth would alleviate poverty by creating wealth,
which could then be used to solve social problems. This separation of the
economic from the social is characteristic of modern Western economic
thought, whereas in many non-Western sites no clear separation existed.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was becoming obvious to develop-
ment planners that economic growth did not necessarily mean equity and that
unbridled economic growth had several adverse social consequences. The
gap between rich and poor continued to widen: on a per capita income basis,
the rich to poor ratio was 2:1 in 1800, 20:1 in 1945, and 40:1 by 1975. The
richest 20 percent of the world account for 82.7 percent of global income,
while the poorest 20 percent earn 1.6 percent of global income (Waters 1995).
In the newly industrializing countries, economic growth was inevitably
accompanied by an increase in income disparity. The social aspects that
accompanied development, such as unemployment, underemployment,
environmental and habitat destruction, and increasing inequalities, were seen
as social obstacles that needed to be overcome for development to proceed
smoothly. There was no recognition that some development programs
actually led to poverty and social problems, resulting in a sort of global
apartheid that separates the world into people who participate in the global
economy and others whose basic conditions of life have been destroyed (Beck
2000; Shiva 1993).
Increasingly the economic realm began to dene social and cultural aspects
for Third World populations. This regime of development depended solely
on the modern Western knowledge system, and rejected and marginalized
non-Western forms of knowledge. Development became a metaphor [that
gave] global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbing
people of different cultures of the opportunity to dene forms of their social
life (Esteva 1992: 9). What had been produced in the particular politico-
sociocultural context of industrialized countries in the West was now
generalized to the rest. In Foucauldian terms, development derived its power
from subjugated knowledge . . . a whole set of knowledges that have been
disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated; nave
knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level
of cognition or scienticity (Foucault 1980: 82). If the history of develop-
ment is to be seen as a history of imperialism and colonialism, it is the
powerknowledge nexus that can illustrate how development came to be seen
as a version of reality and entrenched as the only normative reality (Spivak
1988). To quote Harvey (1996: 131):
[The genius of the 18th-century political economy] was that it mobilized the human
imaginary of emancipation, progress, and self-realization into forms of discourse that
could alter the application of political power and the construction of institutions in
ways that were consistent with the growing prevalence of the material practices of
market exchange. It did so, furthermore, while masking social relations and the
domination of the laborer that was to follow while subsuming the cosmic question of
the relation to nature into a technical discourse concerning the proper allocation
of scarce resources (including those in nature) for the benet of human welfare. . . .
The practice and theory of capitalistic political economy with respect to the environ-
ment has [sic] consequently become hegemonic in recent history.
The real success of development, as Escobar (1995: 71) points out, was to
synthesize, arrange, manage, and direct entire populations and countries based
on a unitary system, resulting in the colonization and domination of natural
and human ecologies. In the postcolonial era, these mechanisms of control
are still very much in place whether through international institutions such as
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade
Organization, or through government policies of industrialization and
modernization. The escalation of environmental problems also led to the
struggle for natural resources, which resulted in a number of battles between
poor farmers, peasants, and indigenous populations on one side and corporate
and government interests on the other. The notion of sustainable development
was conceived in the midst of these struggles as nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), environmental organizations, and various peasant and
indigenous groups, as well as international institutions such as the United
Nations, called for a conceptual and political re-examination of development.
Sustainable Development: The Concept and Its Implications
The concept of sustainable development emerged in the 1980s in an attempt
to explore the relationship between development and the environment.
Although there are over 100 current denitions of sustainable development
(Holmberg and Sandbrook 1992), the one most commonly used is that
of Brundtland (WCED 1987). According to the Brundtland Commission,
sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of
resources, direction of investments, orientation of technological development,
and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present
needs (WCED 1987: 9). This broad definition is at the root of several
controversies and there is considerable disagreement among scholars in
different disciplines over how this denition should be operationalized and
how sustainability should be measured. The Brundtland denition is not really
a denition; it is a slogan, and slogans, however pretty, do not make theory.
As several authors have pointed out, the Brundtland definition does not
elaborate on the notion of human needs and wants (Kirkby et al. 1995;
Redclift 1987), and the concern for future generations is problematic in its
operationalization as well. Given the scenario of limited resources, this
assumption becomes a contradiction because most potential consumers
(future generations) are unable to access the present market or, as Martinez-
Alier (1987: 17) elegantly puts it, individuals not yet born have ontological
difficulties in making their presence felt in todays market for exhaustible
resources.
Apart from attempting to reconcile economic growth with environmental
protection, the sustainable development agenda of Brundtland also focuses on
social justice and human development within the framework of social equity
and the equitable distribution and utilization of resources. Sustainability, as
Redclift (1987) points out, means different things to different people. Although
theories of sustainability sometimes stress the primacy of social justice, the
position is often reversed and justice is looked upon as subordinate to
sustainability, and since neither sustainability nor social justice has determinate
meanings, this opens the way to legitimizing one of them in terms of the other
(Dobson 1998: 242). The terms sustainability and sustainable development
are used interchangeably in both academic and popular discourses and the
concept is promoted by situating it against the background of sustaining a
particular set of social relations by way of a particular set of ecological
projects (Harvey 1996: 148). Thus, the debate about resource scarcity,
biodiversity, population, and ecological limits is ultimately a debate about the
preservation of a particular social order rather than a debate about the
preservation of nature per se (Harvey 1996: 148).
Discourses of development and sustainable development construct a
particular view of nature and the environment. A detailed exploration of
the various meanings of nature is beyond the scope of this paper given the
historical, geographical, and cultural complexities that inform its meanings,
including Western notions of democracy, theology, society, enlightenment,
romanticism, and modernity. However, I do not use the terms nature and
environment interchangeably. The transformation of nature (depicted
in European traditions as a wild, untamed, often hostile force) into
environment (more manageable and goal directed) is one of the hallmarks
of modernity, in which domination of nature becomes a key indicator of
human progress rather than a transformation of the relationship between
humans and nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). One consequence of
conceptualizing nature as environment is the abstraction of singularity from
the multiple meanings of nature, ranging from the essence or character of an
object; the physical world around us; living and nonliving things; the specic
ecology of places; notions of wilderness and ruralness; and the aesthetic or
spiritual values assigned to nature. As Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue,
modernistic conceptualizations of nature do not reveal its contested meanings:
nature as landscape, as an object of scientic scrutiny, as threatened and in
need of protection, as a resource-providing system, or as a source of spiritual
renewal. Nature is thus made more real when it becomes the environment,
something that is separate from social and cultural practices and that can be
managed to produce discrete, observable and measurable outcomes. Although
the natureculture dichotomy underlying the Enlightenment tradition has been
criticized for being largely responsible for the environmental degradation of
the planet in the name of development (Dunlap and Catton 1979; Escobar
1995), contemporary discourses of sustainable development are plagued by
the same modernistic assumptions of rationality in their reliance on scientic
inquiry and the separation of people from the biophysical environment
(Merchant 1980; Macnaghten and Urry 1998).
In a content analysis of different definitions of sustainable development,
Gladwin et al. (1995) identied several themes, including human develop-
ment, inclusiveness (of ecological, economic, political, technological, and
social systems), connectivity (of sociopolitical, economic, and environmental
goals), equity (fair distribution of resources and property rights), prudence
(avoiding irreversibilities and recognizing carrying capacities), and security
(achieving a safe, healthy, and high quality of life). Despite its broad goals,
what is being sustained does not seem to be in question because, as Hart
(1997: 67) points out, the challenge is to develop a sustainable global
economy: an economy that the planet is capable of supporting indenitely.
Thus, the challenge is to nd new technologies and to expand the role of the
market in allocating environmental resources, on the assumption that putting
a price on the natural environment is the only way to protect it, unless
degrading it becomes more protable (Beder 1994). Thus, even in the popular
Brundtland report, development is accorded a priority over the environment:
environmental protection constitutes an integral part of the development
process (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). If the debate truly was about
environmental and social sustainability, surely one would expect the relation-
ship to be reversed, on the assumption that development proceeds within the
constraints and limits of the biophysical environment. Rather than reshaping
markets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainable
development uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation to
determine the future of nature (Shiva 1991).
The language of capital is quite apparent in discourses of sustainable
development. For instance, Pearce et al. (1989) emphasize constancy of
natural capital stock as a necessary condition for sustainability. According
to Pearce et al., changes in the stock of natural resources should be non-
negative, and man-made capital (products and services as measured by
traditional economics and accounting) should not be created at the expense
of natural capital (including both renewable and nonrenewable natural
resources). In other words, growth or wealth must be created without resource
depletion. Exactly how this is to be achieved remains a mystery. A majority
of the sustainable development literature is of this eco-modernist variety
(Bandy 1996) and addresses ways to operationalize the Brundtland concept.
Thus, concepts such as sustainable cost, natural capital or sustainable
capital are developed and touted as evidence of a paradigm shift (Bebbington
and Gray 1993). There is limited awareness of the fact that traditional notions
of capital, income, and growth continue to inform this new paradigm. The
uncritical acceptance of the current system of markets is also problematic:
although markets are indeed efficient mechanisms to set prices they
are incapable of reflecting true costs, such as the replacement costs of an
old-growth tropical rainforest or the social costs of tobacco and liquor
consumption (Hawken 1995).
In an analysis of the sociology of nature, Macnaghten and Urry (1998: 2)
argue that current discourses of nature and the environment all assume the
existence of a singular nature rather than emphasize that it is specic social
practices, especially of peoples dwellings, which produce, reproduce and
transform different natures and different values. They argue against three
doctrines of the received view of the environment, or what they call environ-
mental realism, environmental idealism, and environmental instrumentalism.
Environmentalism realism refers to the transformation of nature into a
scientifically researchable environment in which modern Western
science can identify environmental problems and articulate appropriate
solutions. Social and cultural environmental practices are subsumed by
the realities of scientific inquiry. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue
against this singular view of nature by describing the cultural processes
involved in the naturalization of nature. They describe how the
environment entered social discourse through specic social and cultural
processes, such as student activism and the countercultural movements
of the 1960s.
Environmental idealism analyzes nature by examining the range of
values held by people about nature; these environmental values are
assumed to be stable and consistent. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) refute
the notion of investigating environmental values without contextualizing
the temporal and spatial arrangements of peoples lives. Individual
valuation of nature, they argue, is ambiguous, contradictory, and context
specic.
Environmental instrumentalismrefers to the responses of individuals and
groups to environmental problems that are determined by evaluating
individual or collective interests against environmental trade-offs through
costbenet analysis or other market-based mechanisms. The assumption
here is that the individual subject will weigh the costs and benefits of
different behaviors and, once presented with the facts, will understand
that it is in their interest to behave in an environmentally responsible
manner, believing that governments and public institutions will also act
to protect the environment. Macnaghten and Urrys (1998) research on
British consumers shows little support for this proposition: few
respondents appeared to possess such a strong sense of agency and high
levels of trust in public institutions.
Elements of these three doctrines can be observed in discourses of sustainable
development, whether at the level of international and national policy (as
manifested in the policies of the United Nations, the World Bank, national
governments, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Agenda 21) or
regional and local governments. For instance, Article 35.3 of Agenda 21
developed at the Rio Summit of 1992 declares that:
Scientific knowledge should be applied to articulate and support the goals of
sustainable development. . . . [T]here needs to be an increased output from the sciences
in order to enhance understanding and facilitate interaction between science and
society . . . [aimed at] strengthening the scientic basis for sustainable management
. . . enhancing scientific understanding . . . building up scientific capacity and
capability. (Emphasis added)
The report goes on to say, of crucial importance is the need for scientists in
developing countries to participate fully in international scientic research
programs dealing with the global problems of environment and development
so as to allow all countries to participate on equal footing in negotiations on
global environmental and developmental issues. How all countries can
participate on equal footing remains unclear, given the structural inequalities
between the North and the South. There is also the implicit (and incorrect)
assumption that scientists from developing countries represent the interests
of the rural poor, who are dependent on the natural environment for their
survival and who value and manage nature differently. For instance, in
its social and environmental report, the mining giant Rio Tinto describes
the companys values of land use . . . in particular, that science should be the
basis of understanding and managing the environment (Rio Tinto 1999: 15).
This is precisely the point: whose science are we talking about here? Certainly
not indigenous ecology, a science used by communities for more than 70,000
years to manage their environment. This scientic and economic reinvention
of nature does not recognize that the environmental and social objectives of
diverse populations are often different and sometimes incompatible (Redclift
2000). The new language of sustainable development scientific
understanding, citizenship, species rights, intergenerational equity
obscures the inequalities and cultural distinctions surrounding environmental
resources.
A similar sleight-of-hand is used in justifying opposition to environmental
protection policies. A recent report (paid for by the coal industry lobby in the
United States) found that millions of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities
could be pushed into poverty by tough new restrictions on energy use called
for by the Kyoto Protocol (Mokhiber and Weissman 2000). The fact that
minority communities in the USA have been used as dumping grounds for
decades did not enter the debate and neither did the risks of global warming
to these communities.
The role of science in validating indigenous knowledge is also problematic,
with a double-edged irony. Scientic agriculture led to modern practices
of monocropping with high-input intensive farming techniques. The environ-
mental problems that were created as a result also needed scientific
solutions. A recent study found that planting different varieties of rice
produced larger harvests (Yoon 2000); this success of polyculture was
presented either as a discovery of modern science or as validating centuries-
old indigenous agricultural practices. This is another example of colonial
discourse in which local economic histories are incorporated into Western
scientic and economic perspectives. Why modern scientic practices escape
this validation test is not a question that gets asked often in the promotion of
new and sustainable agricultural practices.
This is not to deny the many benefits delivered by Western science and
technology; rather it is to understand which systems and peoples have been
marginalized in this process and how control of natural and biological
resources has shifted from peasant populations to transnational corporations.
In recent years, a number of subdisciplines such as evolutionary biology,
conservation biology, and ecology have attempted to produce a greener
version of science (Barlow 1997) under the assumption this would lead to
deeper meanings about nature and ecology. However, these arguments do not
address the inequalities of resource use among the worlds populations. It is
possible for a science to be valid in its knowledge claims and still produce
domination effects. And, despite the advances in science and technology,
considerable disagreement still exists among scientists about the causes and
consequences of, as well as solutions to, the worlds environmental problems.
The noted biologist Edward Wilson (1992: 325) advocates caution in
developing ways to regenerate existing ecosystems: ecology is still too
primitive a science to predict the outcome of predesigned biotas. However,
there is still the assumption that scientic knowledge will help solve these
problems in the future.
Environmental realism and idealism underlie many of the policy documents
of the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the
Convention on Biodiversity, and multinational trade agreements such as
NAFTA and ASEAN, as well as texts on biodiversity and the environment
and books on green business (Agenda 21; Barlow 1997; Hawken 1995;
Wilson 1992). Barlow (1997: 26), discussing Edward Wilsons thesis on
biodiversity, writes: Edward Wilson believes that science offers humankinds
not only an awareness of the biodiversity crisis and the tools for saving species
but also a story that can change our very souls to take on the task. There is
also a cozy relationship between economic ideology and Western science:
although admitting that traditional economic valuation methods almost
always undervalue biological diversity, Wilson (1992: 271) calls for new
ways to draw income from wildlands: the race is on to develop methods,
to draw more income from the wildlands without killing them, and so to give
the invisible hand of free-market economics a green thumb. Hawken (1995:
81) pursues a similar line of reasoning: I believe customers and buyers are
getting incomplete information, because markets do not carry the true costs
of our purchases. When customers start receiving proper information the
whole story things will change. Again, the instrumentalist assumption is
clear: there is a collective will to change consumption behavior all that
is needed is proper information.
The Brundtland approach to sustainable development aims at achieving
economic growth, environmental protection, and equity simultaneously by
reconciling the irreconcilable. Although such a goal is laudable, there are
serious concerns about whether it is achievable (Kirkby et al. 1995). The
major proposals of the Brundtland agenda include changing the quality of
growth, ensuring a sustainable level of population, conserving and enhancing
the resource base, managing technology and environmental risks, and
incorporating the environment into decision-making. There is also an under-
lying assumption that market forces can be relied upon to achieve sustainable
development, although political interventions, international agreements, and
national environmental regulation also have a role to play. However, the
notion of global sustainability is problematic in that it obscures structural
inequalities in resource access and use amongst different regions of the world.
As we shall see in the next section, discourses of sustainable development
serve to deepen the existing NorthSouth divide in terms of natural resource
conservation and utilization.
Who Sustains Whose Development?
Definitions employing global perspectives are usually subsumed under a
monocultural denition of global, dened according to a perception of the
world shared by its rulers (Escobar 1995). The reframing of the relationship
between economic growth and the environment and the ecocentric philosophy
of spaceship earth is simply an attempt to socialize environmental costs
globally (McAfee 1999), which assumes equal responsibility for environ-
mental degradation while obscuring signicant differences and inequities in
resource utilization between countries. The sustainability of local cultures,
especially peasant cultures, is not addressed; instead, global survival is
problematized as sustainable development, an articulation that privileges
Western notions of environmentalism and conservation. The problem does
not recognize that Western environmentalism has effects similar to those of
development: rather than empower peasant populations throughout the world,
environmental and conservation policies transfer control of rights and
resources to national and international institutions that have failed these
populations for over 50 years (Mies and Shiva 1993).
Global environmentalism, espoused as a solution to the environmental ills
facing the planet, remains rmly rooted in the tradition of Western economic
thought and dehistoricizes and marginalizes the environmental traditions of
non-Western cultures. Environmental problems such as pollution do not
recognize national or regional boundaries, yet the global solutions advocated
by the industrialized countries perpetuate the dependency relations of
colonialism. Images of polluted Third World cities abound in the media with
no acknowledgment of the corresponding responsibility of industrialized
countries, which consume 80 percent of the worlds aluminum, paper, iron
and steel; 75 percent of the worlds energy; 75 percent of its sh resources;
70 percent of its ozone-destroying CFCs; and 61 percent of its meat (Renner
1997). The poorer regions of the world destroy or export their natural
resources to meet the demands of the richer nations or to meet debt-servicing
needs arising from the austerity measures dictated by the World Bank. It is
ironic to the point of absurdity that the poorer countries of the world have to
be austere in their development while the richer nations continue to enjoy
standards of living that are dependent on the austerity measures of the poorer
nations. Neither the dangers of environmental destruction nor the benefits
of environmental protection are equally distributed: protection measures
continue to be dictated by the industrialized countries, often at the expense
of local rural communities. This perverse logic pervades notions of sustain-
able growth. Consumer spending and condence are primary criteria for
sustaining the socioeconomic system whereas welfare policies for the poor
are dismantled because they are a pernicious drain on growth (Harvey 1996).
Thus, the teeming millions in the Third World are responsible for damage
to the biosphere whereas conspicuous consumption in the first world is a
necessary condition for sustainable growth (Harvey 1996).
Exploitation of these communities in the name of environmental protection
and conservation continues despite 50 years of decolonization in the Third
World. Colonial modes of conservation are still deployed by the new nation
states. In India, for instance, vast tracts of land used by peasant communities
are designated as tiger reserves for the enjoyment of foreign tourists and
local elites, while the communities who depend on the land for sustenance
are displaced. This has happened with the Chenchu community in southern
India. The community pays for the protection of tigers but no one pays for
the conservation of their communities, something they have been doing for
thousands of years (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). An alternative solution
proposed by the Chenchu tribe did not merit serious consideration by state
government ofcials: the proposal was to transfer all the tigers to the capital
city of Hyderabad, after evacuating all its residents, and to designate the city
a tiger reserve.
Sustainable development attempts to reconcile these opposing interests and
aims to maximize economic and environmental benets simultaneously. This
is a contradiction in terms, because sustainability and development are based
on very different and often incompatible assumptions. To sustain means to
support from below, to supply with nourishment; it is about care and concern,
a concept that is far removed from development, which is an act of control,
often a program of violence, organized and managed by nation states,
international institutions, and business corporations operating under the tenets
of modern Western science (Visvanathan 1991). Environmental concerns
articulated in the discourse of sustainable development are concerns because
they threaten the sustainability of the economic system. The assumption
is that the only way these concerns can be addressed is by putting a price
on environmental assets. Current environmental policies are based on this
logic and do not address the damaging consequences these policies can
have for millions of people who depend on the land for survival and for
whom environmentalism is not a quality of life issue but a matter of survival
(Guha 1989).
These differing environmental objectives in industrialized and Third
World countries pose another contradiction for sustainable development.
Environmental concerns in the industrialized countries revolve around
conserving rural spaces, valuing the aesthetics of nature, keeping beaches
clean, and providing the opportunity to acquire a suntan without the risk of
cancer. Environmentalism in the Third World, especially in rural areas, is
about keeping control over natural resources, about having control over the
technology that transforms the environment (Redclift 1987). As the rate of
international transactions continues to increase in todays global market
economy, environmental degradation in the developing countries also
continues steadily to worsen. As several researchers have pointed out, the so-
called greening of industry in developed countries has, in many cases, been
achieved at the expense of Third World environments through the relocation
of polluting industries to developing countries (Escobar 1995; Goldsmith
1997; Redclift 1987).
Critics of sustainable development also argue that it can colonize areas of
Third World social life that are not yet ruled by the logic of the market or the
consumer, areas such as forests, water rights, and sacred sites (Escobar 1995;
Visvanathan 1991). The rural poor directly depend on the biophysical
environment for survival, and notions of conservation and protection that are
common in developed countries are contestable in developing countries.
Although poverty and environmental degradation are often linked in the
literature, the role of development in diminishing the rural populations
access to natural resources is not frequently discussed. Rather, the tendency
is to blame the victim: farmers and peasants who engage in industrialized
farming using fertilizers and pesticides are blamed without examining the
role of the chemical industry or the market-based institutions that are
responsible for promoting their use. Global discourses of sustainable
development, as evidenced by the policies of the World Bank, the United
Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization,
all assume that poverty rather than affluence is the real problem of
environmental destruction. Slash-and-burn peasants are blamed for the
destruction of the forests, whereas logging and timber companies, which have
a far greater impact, are given tax incentives for following sustainable
practices (Banerjee 1998). Green incentives are provided for corporations
and policy measures are put in place to evaluate and minimize the ecological
impacts of logging. There are no indicators that can measure the devastating
impact on local communities. Even the construction of a single road has
multiplier effects: it reduces the transaction costs of the logging company (at
public expense) while increasing land alienation of local communities,
converting a hitherto knowledgeable and resourceful community into a pool
of unskilled labor (Gupta 1997). This sustainable process is praised by
corporations and governments for creating employment opportunities for
local communities, but they fail to recognize the disempowerment and
poverty created as a result of the dispossession of land and natural resources.
In the sustainable development discourse, poverty is identied as the agent
of environmental destruction, thus legitimating prior notions of growth and
development.
The global denition of environmental problems by the North results in local
problems for the South because the handful of industrialized countries that
set the global agenda are guided by narrow, local and parochial interests
(Shiva 1993: 150). Conicting objectives over resource use further exacerbate
the equity problem because the industrialized countries sustain inequalities by
imposing a monopoly knowledge that constitutes the parameters of global
environmental problems (Beck 1996; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Global
environmental policy regimes, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness, do little
to address the concerns of indigenous peoples. The Second International
Indigenous Forum on Climate Change at The Hague in November 2000 issued
a declaration listing their concerns. Of primary concern was the exclusion
of indigenous peoples from participating in the development and the
implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. The Forum also professed concern that
. . . the measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based on
a worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only their
carbon absorption capacity. This worldview and its practices adversely affect the lives
of Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly,
our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which are
consecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations. (IIFC 2000)
The notion of carbon sinks leads to a system of tradable emissions: countries
are allowed not to reduce their emissions if they plant trees instead. This
system can have perverse outcomes: a country can get environmental credit
for (a) not reducing its emissions, (b) leveling old-growth forests, and (c)
replanting trees to grow new forests, i.e. creating carbon sinks. This is
typical of the reductionism inherent in modern science whereby forests are
valued only for their carbon sequestration capacity. This monocultural
mindset of scientific forestry does not recognize that forests are not
just carbon sinks or timber mines for local communities: they are their
source of food, agriculture, and medicine, in short, their entire liveli-
hood. Despite highlighting issues of poverty and equity, contemporary
discourses of sustainable development do not criticize the structural
conditions that characterize the increasing intrusion of capital into the domain
of nature, which results in the capitalization, expropriation, commodifi-
cation, and homogenization of nature. The economic relations that underpin
contemporary sustainable development strategies have evolved from the
violent histories of colonial capitalist relations, which informed development
for much of the 20th century. If discourses of sustainable development
articulate notions of equity, democracy inclusion, then a critical perspective
will allow us also to see it as a product of a racialized justification for
modernization, in which marginalized peoples are subject to a new
dependency and a new colonialism (Bandy 1996: 542).
Sustainable Development in Organizations: Implications for
Organization Theory and Practice
How and why did the discourse on the environment arise in the rst place?
Many historians trace the modern Western environmental movement to the
publication of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in 1962. Whereas earlier
environmental concerns focused mainly on suburban aesthetics or localized
pollution problems, Carsons representation of environmental problems
highlighted the threats to nature (and the human body) posed by widespread
use of pesticides. The ensuing scientific debates on the limits to growth,
population pressures, and the carrying capacity of the planet were part of
a larger cultural critique of industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s. Public
perceptions of environmental problems and increased environmental
legislation were two key reasons the environment became an important issue
for corporations, resulting in the need for companies to sell environ-
mentalism in order to be perceived as green (Banerjee 2001b; Newton
and Harte 1997). Newton and Harte (1997: 91) argue that organizations also
paint themselves green to avoid regulatory control: one of the aims of the
Vision of Sustainable Development promoted by the Business Council for
Sustainable Development is to maintain entrepreneurial freedom through
voluntary initiatives rather than regulatory coercion.
In recent years there has been a minor explosion of articles dealing with
corporate greening in the management literature. Much of this literature
attempts to incorporate current notions of sustainable development into
corporate strategy (see, for example, the 2000 special issue on the
management of organizations in the natural environment in the Academy of
Management Journal, the 1995 special issue on ecologically sustainable
organizations in the Academy of Management Review, or the 1992 special
issue on strategic management of the environment in Long Range Planning)
and discusses the emergence of corporate environmentalism and organi-
zational processes of environmental management (Banerjee 2001b; Crane
2000; Fineman 1996).
That corporations play a signicant role in achieving sustainability is not in
doubt. The question is, are current environmental practices compatible with
notions of sustainability? Some researchers caution that the greening of
industry should not be confused with the notion of sustainable development
(Pearce et al. 1989; Schot et al. 1997; Welford 1997; Westley and Vredenburg
1996). Although there have been signicant advances in pollution control and
emissions reduction, this does not mean that current modes of development
are sustainable for the planet as a whole (Hart 1997). Most companies focus
on operational issues when it comes to greening and lack a vision of
sustainability (Hart 1997). In a recent Greening of Industry conference, the
proposed corporate strategy for sustainable development had no surprises:
the focus was on scientic innovation, public service and turning the world
populations into active consumers of its new products, and expanding global
business into the less affluent segments of the worlds population (Rossi
et al. 2000: 275).
Echoing Wilsons (1992) call for a biology of restoration, Hawken (1995:
11) suggests an economy of restoration as a solution to the environmental
crisis. Corporations would compete to conserve and increase resources rather
than deplete them. Hawken proposes three ways by which this can be
achieved: eliminate waste from all industrial production; change our energy
use from carbon based to solar and hydrogen based; and create feedback and
accountability systems that reward restorative behavior. Although these
solutions are also informed by environmental realism and idealism and
assume there is both a scientic solution and a collective will of consumers
in the afuent countries to serve and nurture the aspirations of the poor and
educated (Hawken 1995: 214), developing technologies, processes, and
regulatory mechanisms to reduce the environmental impact of business is
definitely one area in which there is agreement among all constituents of
society. In addition, Hawken suggests that the small- and medium-scale sector
is better able to carry out the task of restoration effectively than are large
transnational corporations.
Efforts to broaden the scope of greening to include social sustainability are
also under way. This triple bottom line approach assesses the social and
environmental impacts of business, as distinct from its economic impact
(Elkington, 1999). Elkington (1999: 73) describes interactions between the
environment, society, and the economy as three shear zones that produce
a variety of opportunities and challenges for organizations. Many of the
advances in cleaner technologies and emissions reductions have arisen from
the economicenvironment shear zone, which is an area that business
corporations are most comfortable with since it delivers measurable benets
to them. Outcomes of the socialenvironment and socialeconomy shear
zones are more ambiguous (for corporations at least), although the assumption
here is that organizations need to integrate these as well in order to survive
in the long term.
Theoretical perspectives of the triple bottom line approach focus on
maximizing sustainability opportunities (corporate social responsibility,
stakeholder relations, and corporate governance) while minimizing
sustainability-related risks (corporate risk management, environmental, health
and safety audits, and reporting). Proponents of the triple bottom line
claim that, by using these and other parameters, it is possible to map the
environmental and social domains of sustainability and ultimately to assess
the performance of corporations. However, research on the environmental
and social dimensions of corporate sustainability is very much in its infancy.
Although this approach is proving to be popular among large transnational
corporations, the impact on local communities is unclear. The same
companies that are being targeted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
and indigenous communities because of their negative environmental and
social impacts are the leaders in espousing triple bottom line principles;
it remains to be seen whether this approach can deliver real benefits to
communities or whether it becomes a more sophisticated form of green-
washing. There is a real danger that the glossy social performance reports
of transnational corporations may deect attention from the grim realities of
their environmental performance.
Discourses of sustainable development are becoming increasingly
corporatized. For instance, the Dow Jones recently launched a Sustainability
Group Index after a survey of Fortune 500 companies. A sustainable
corporation was dened as one that aims at increasing long-term shareholder
value by integrating economic, environmental and social growth opportunities
into its corporate and business strategies (Dow Jones Sustainability Group
Index 2000). It is interesting to observe how notions of sustainability are
constructed, manipulated, and represented in both the popular business press
and academic literature. As evidence of the deleterious effects of development
mounts, the discourse shifts from sustainable development to the more
positive sounding sustainability and then shifts the focus to corporate
sustainability. Corporate discourses on sustainability produce an elision that
displaces the focus from global planetary sustainability to sustaining the
corporation through growth opportunities. What happens if environmental
and social issues do not result in growth opportunities remains unclear, the
assumption being that global sustainability can be achieved only through
market exchanges. This (post)modern form of corporate social responsi-
bility produces a truth effect that is not dissimilar to Milton Friedmans
(1962) concept of corporate social responsibility involving the maxi-
mization of shareholder value, despite the rhetoric of stakeholders and
corporate citizenship (Banerjee 2000; 2001a). Despite framing sustain-
able development as a strategic discontinuity that will change todays
fundamental economics, corporate discourses on sustainable development,
not surprisingly, promote the business-as-usual (except greener) line and do
not describe any radical change in world-views. As Monsantos ex-CEO
Robert Shapiro puts it, Far from being a soft issue grounded in emotion
or ethics, sustainable development involves cold, rational business logic
(Magretta 1997: 81).
So what implications does this critique of sustainable development have for
the study of organizations? Given how this discourse is constructed at higher
levels of the political economy, it is unlikely that any radical revision of
sustainable development will emerge from organizations. For any such
rethinking to occur, a more critical approach to organization theory is required
and new questions need to be raised not only about the ecological and social
sustainability of business corporations but about the political economy itself.
Corporate environmental management practices are informed by the larger
debate on sustainable development and, consequently, radical revisions can
occur only if there is a shift in thinking at a macro level. I will discuss three
implications of a critique of sustainable development for the study of
organizations.
First, we need to broaden our denition of organizations and open up new
spaces for critique. An overwhelming proportion of research in management
focuses on traditional prot-oriented corporations. The bulk of research on
not-for-prot organizations is framed by similar corporate goals: how can we
raise more money for charity, how can we get more people into museums or
libraries or zoos? Very little research takes place on strategies for activist
groups and organizations, and the theories and practices required to oppose
corporate actions (Frooman 1999). There are very few studies in the
management literature about the operations of international bodies such as
the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank.
Although these are not corporate organizations in the traditional sense of the
term, they are powerful agents in advancing the discourse on sustainability
and should come under the purview of organization studies. We also need to
acknowledge that modern organizations often reflect colonial formations.
Employing a postcolonial perspective for the study of organizations might
provide new spaces for critique and resistance. Although critical organization
theorists portray organizations as structures of domination, legitimacy, and
reexive social systems (Courpasson 2000; Leaive 1996), recent debates
in organization theory between modernist and postmodernist forms of
organization are curiously silent on the colonial dimensions that frame
organizationenvironment relationships.
Second, we need to open up new spaces and provide new frameworks for
organizationstakeholder dialogues as well as critically to examine the
dynamics of the relationships between corporations, NGOs, governments,
community groups, and funding agencies. Contemporary discourses of
organizations and their stakeholders are inevitably constrained by practical
reasons such as the profit-seeking behavior of corporations (Trevio and
Weaver 1999). Although the vast literature on corporate social responsibility,
stakeholder integration, and business ethics is based on the assumption that
business is inuenced by societal concerns, the dominance of societal interests
in radically reshaping business practices is in some question (Mueller 1994).
The domain of corporate social responsibility cannot be assessed by primarily
economic criteria and neither can an environmental ethic be developed
through an ethically pragmatic managerial morality that primarily serves
organizational interests (Snell 2000; ten Bos 1997). Although NGOs do
serve as important counterpoints, their relationships with corporations and
governments are often ambiguous and framed by categories furnished by
international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank,
categories that are inimical to many groups that are negatively affected by
corporations (Spivak 1999). Increasing accountability of both corporations
and NGOs to local communities and translating participation in more
meaningful local contexts without reducing social movements to some other
form of domination (the prerogatives of donor agencies, for example) are
challenges for the future (Escobar 1992; Derman 1995).
Third, we need to question espoused corporate practices of sustainability.
Discourses of corporate greening, whether based on deep ecology,
ecocentric or sustaincentric management, need to be interrogated and their
constructs and concepts examined with a critical lens. Despite calls for
a fundamental revision of organization studies concepts and theories
(Shrivastava 1994), there are no explanations as to how this will occur. It is
unclear how alternate conceptualizations of an organizations environment
(Shrivastava 1994) or a complete moral transformation within the
corporation (Crane 2000: 673) will naturally lead to social justice or a more
equitable distribution of resources. Fundamental changes in organizations
cannot occur unless there are corresponding shifts in the larger political
economy and crucial questions regarding the role of a corporation and its
license to operate in society are addressed. All the exhortations of green
organization theorists do not begin to address the tremendous impediments
to restructuring the political economy and abandoning conventional notions
of competition and consumption (Newton and Harte 1997). If organizational
analysis involves understanding the processes of how organizations are
produced in particular societal contexts (Leaive 1996) and how external
constraints of the environment are translated into organizational imperatives
(Knights and Morgan 1993: 212), then a critique of contemporary notions
of sustainable development should allow us to examine the emergence of
grassroots organizations involved in resistance movements as well as
highlight corporate strategies of co-optation and management of the
environment. It should examine the structures and processes that discursively
produce external environmental constraints and how social and cultural
relations are changed by organizations. It should broaden the debate to include
the political economy and alternative approaches to addressing environmental
problems, something that the current environmental management discourse
fails to do (Levy 1997). It should also allow us to see how nation states,
international organizations, and transnational corporations support the needs
of international capital. A critique of capital and capitalisms should be placed
rmly at the center of the debate rather than in the uneasy invisible position
it currently occupies in most organizational theories (Pitelis 1993).
Arguments that question the sustainability of current economic systems are
rarely found in the literature and much of the theorizing on green business is
what Newton and Harte (1997) call technicist kitsch, laced with liberal doses
of evangelical rhetoric. As long as conceptions of sustainable development
continue to be driven solely by rationalizations of competitive advantage, no
paradigmatic shift in world views of nature and sustainability can take place.
Green consumption will not save the world because, rather than attempting
politically to reconstitute the mode of modern production to meet ecological
constraints, it advocates nonpolitical, nonsocial, noninstitutional solutions
to environmental problems (Luke 1994: 158). Corporate green marketing
strategies continue to focus on the economic bottom line at the organizational
level (Banerjee 1999) without addressing the macro marketing implications
of the relationships between technological, political, and economic
institutions and their role in environmental decline (Kilbourne et al. 1997).
A critical examination of the relationship between the dominant socio-
economic paradigm and the environment will highlight how colonial capitalist
development increases social inequalities and, despite its knowledge claims,
results in a loss of ecological knowledge. Any effort at envisioning alternate
ecologies must involve visions of alternate societies and politics as well (Guha
1989).
The debate over biotechnology is a pertinent example of how broader
scientic, political, and economic discourses, structured by colonial formations
that frame NorthSouth relations, can produce discursive effects at the
organizational level. The loss of biodiversity owing to industrial agriculture
involving heavy chemical inputs is recognized as a global environmental
problem. The solution proposed by the scientic and business community is
a new revolution: biotechnology. This new revolution is simply a logical
extension of the chemical revolution of the 1950s and not only serves to
sustain corporate and scientic structures of power by creating intellectual
property rights in life forms but also threatens to colonize life forms and
recolonize spaces in the Third World, a region that contains two-thirds of the
worlds plant species. Patents and intellectual property laws on genetic
resources such as seeds protect and serve the corporate and institutional
interests of developed countries while violating peasants and farmers rights
in the Third World. Medicinal plants, nurtured and sustained by indigenous
cultures, were appropriated by pharmaceutical companies without any
payment and later used to develop protable drugs protected by patents and
trademarks. The knowledge of indigenous cultures in recognizing and using
the medicinal properties of these plants is positioned as traditional and not
novel and hence can be obtained without payment, whereas the knowledge
of pharmaceutical companies requires protection.
The recent NorthSouth conflict over the World Trade Organizations
controversial Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) at the Uruguay Round of the GATT (WTO 2000) is a case
in point. The TRIPS agreement legitimizes private intellectual property rights
over life forms. These rights apply to individuals, states, and corporations,
not to indigenous peoples and local communities. In effect, governments
are asked to change their national intellectual property rights laws to
allow patenting of micro-organisms, non-biological and micro-biological
processes. Two related problems arise from imposing a regime of intellectual
property rights in indigenous knowledge. First, traditional knowledge
belongs to the indigenous community rather than to specific individuals.
Second, as indigenous communities all over the world have discovered,
national governments are increasingly employing neoliberal agendas (some
willingly, a majority through coercion) that have adverse impacts on their
livelihoods by restricting community access to natural resources. Equitable
sharing of commercial benets through mutually benecial contracts between
indigenous groups and transnational corporations are unlikely to occur
given the disparities in resources and capacities to monitor or enforce the
terms of any contract. The TRIPS agreement resulted in mass protests by
indigenous and peasant communities as well as NGOs in Asia, Africa, and
South America that continue to this day (Dawkins, 1997). These resistance
movements, along with widespread protests by European consumers, have
had some effect in slowing the adoption rates of biotechnology by
transnational corporations. After an aggressive campaign to promote bio-
technology in agriculture, several leading transnational corporations have
now retreated from this arena, at least temporarily, because of the backlash
by European consumers.
The regime of intellectual property rights creates a new meaning of bio-
diversity that focuses on commodifying and trading the benefits of
biodiversity. For this to occur, privatization and ownership are necessary
conditions (Redclift, 1987). Once again, biodiversity becomes framed in
terms of market preferences, resulting in the poor (but biodiversity rich
populations) sustaining the rich. Assessing market preferences for nature is
based on invalid assumptions, as McAfee (1999: 133) argues: contrary to
the premise of the global economic paradigm there can be no universal metric
for comparing and exchanging the real values of nature among different
groups of people from different cultures, and with vastly different degrees of
political and economic power.
The reinvention of nature by biotechnology, apart from assuming no material
ecological impact, provides legitimacy for the dominant order and ruling
elites. As Harvey (1996: 147) points out, notions of scarcity and limits in
natural resources are rooted in social systems in which a natural resource
becomes a cultural, technical and economic appraisal of elements and
processes in nature that can be applied to full social objectives and goals
through specic material practices. For example, the proposed mechanisms
for ensuring a free and fair ow of information, such as intellectual property
rights over genetically modified living organisms, serve to protect certain
interests. The controversial TRIPS agreement was developed in large part
by the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC), which consisted of many
transnational rms including Bristol Myers, Merck, Monsanto, Du Pont and
Pzer. Monsantos representative described the TRIPS strategy:
[We were able to] distill from the laws of the more advanced countries the
fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property. . . Besides
selling our concept at home, we went to Geneva where we presented our document
to the staff of the GATT Secretariat. . . . What I have described to you is absolutely
unprecedented in GATT. Industry identied a major problem for international trade.
It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and other
governments . . . the industries and traders of the world have played simultaneously
the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians. (Cited in
Rifkin, 1999: 52)
The colonial capitalist undertones of this statement are not hard to discern:
the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property
obviously have to be developed based on the laws of the advanced countries.
Thus, nature, once a commons and a resource, is reinvented as a vast gene
pool, inspiring todays molecular biologists and corporate entrepreneurs in
their quest to capture and colonize the last frontier, the genetic commons that
is the heart of the natural world (Rifkin, 1999: 170).
The recent battle over patenting extracts from the Neem tree, known and used
for its medicinal properties for thousands of years, is an example of this
biopiracy. Claiming intellectual property rights over Neem extracts is based
on a system of multiple exclusions that denies indigenous knowledge and
agricultural practices. The knowledge that these extracts could be used for
medicinal purposes, as pesticides, and for contraception already existed and
was in the prior public domain, which is what patenting laws seek to
establish. If this knowledge had existed in the West, these patent applications
would never have been considered. The fact that this prior knowledge existed
in poor rural communities allowed a non-novel entity to be constructed as
novel and patented under current intellectual property rights legislation
(Shiva, 1993). The struggle is far from over: legislative changes in the
European Union recently allowed patents to cover life forms (Downes, 1996).
The number of applications for genetic patents received in the United States
rose from 4,000 in 1991 to 500,000 in 1996 (Enriquez and Goldberg, 2000).
The World Trade Organization is also under pressure by the United States to
remove the exception it currently has on life forms and to accept, as well as
enforce, patents on life forms. Another argument made by proponents of
biotechnology is that the Third World is too poor and cannot afford to worry
about bioethics. As Shiva (1993) has pointed out, the dichotomy between
ethics and knowledge is a Western construct that enables the colonization
and control of cultures where no such dichotomy exists. It is the illusion
of neutrality of this ethics-free knowledge that is able to deny alternate
knowledge systems.
Alternate Visions
Although I have painted a fairly dismal picture of the domination effects of
environmental discourse, it is important to realize that these practices and
policies are contested. Resistance movements against globalized corporate
agriculture and biotechnology have emerged in different parts of the world.
Global alliances among diverse groups have had recent successes, most
notably the failure of the WTO Third Ministerial Meeting in Seattle in 1999.
As Shiva (2000) argues, solidarity among different groups scientists,
planners, environmentalists, producers, and consumers is needed to
prevent resistance being marginalized (or polarized as being between
uninformed citizens and informed scientists) and for the debate to continue
in the public sphere.
Many groups all over the world are engaged in dialogue, protests, and violent
and non-violent action with corporations, governments, and international
institutions. They vary from small, locally based activists to large, powerful
NGOs and environmental organizations, as well as coalitions of different
groups. These include the 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global
Economic Justice, a coalition of over 200 organizations (grassroots,
womens, solidarity, policy, social and economic justice, youth, labor, and
development) working at international, national, and local levels in an attempt
to transform the lending policies and structural adjustment programs of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The 50 years is enough
refers to 50 years of development policies in Africa, which the coalition
claims have been a complete failure, with overall standards of living lower
than they were 50 years ago. One of the more successful resistance move-
ments, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, used a similar slogan Basta ya!
(Enough!) when it presented its 11-word program to the Mexican govern-
ment: Trabajo, Tierra, Techo, Pan, Salud, Educacin, Democracia, Libertad,
Paz, Independencia, y Justica (work, land, shelter, bread, health, education,
democracy, liberty, peace, independence, and justice) (Ross 2000: 20).
If visions of sustainable development are to have an emancipatory goal, there
needs to be a reconceptualization of current notions of progress and
development. These concepts not only are limiting but represent a failure of
the imagination: the Western technocentric approach serves only to empower
corporate and national economic interests and prevents communities from
preserving their rights to control their resources. An unpacking of the notion
of development is required and concepts of sustainability must go beyond
seeking a compromise between environmental protection and economic
growth. This involves reversing the industrial appropriation of nature as well
as recognizing the structural and natural limits of sustainable development
(Redclift 1987). It requires a search not for developmental alternatives but
for alternatives to development (Escobar 1995). The current focus on capital
and markets to achieve sustainable development is restrictive and disallows
alternate ways of thinking and knowing. We need to apply insights from
other forms of knowledge, however traditional they may be, and interpret
these knowledges in economic, scientific, political, cultural, and social
terms that challenge existing views of the world and of nature. Sustainable
development is not just about managerial efciency (although that has a part
to play); it is about rethinking humannature relationships, re-examining
current doctrines of progress and modernity, and privileging alternate visions
of the world. It requires a retracing of steps to the juncture where nature
became transformed into environment, distancing the natural world and
positioning it as a resource to be mastered, in the way that human feelings
and expression become mastered through culture. Contemporary notions
of sustainable development are embedded in the development discourse
that requires the death of nature and the rise of environment. Alternate visions
can be imagined only by rescuing sustainable development from this
dichotomy.
A critical perspective will enable us to recognize that current norms for
sustainable development have emerged within a particular historical context,
which is the modern capitalist notion of the business corporation operating
within a Judeo-Christian ethical framework. In addition to making this
assumption explicit and critically examining its implications, we should seek
alternate ways of constructing knowledge and developing norms. Current
management theories rarely question whose norms are used; rather they tend
to normalize conflicting criteria for development and progress. As Rifkin
(1999) points out, rather than focusing on the good and bad aspects of the
new biotechnologies, we need to ask difficult questions. What are the
consequences for the global economy and society of reducing the worlds
gene pool to patented intellectual property controlled exclusively by a handful
of transnational corporations? What are the structures and processes of power
inherent in the new technologies? What impact do they have on the biological
diversity of the planet? Who controls this technology? What are its social and
cultural impacts? Although developing countries continue to argue for access
to these new technologies in various international forums, caution should
be exercised in monitoring the impact of these technologies in order not to
repeat the mistakes of the Green Revolution, which, while enhancing crop
production in a few regions, also accentuated inequalities and increased
income disparities (Shiva 1991).
Deconstructing singular constructions of nature is important since it allows
us to examine how notions of nature are linked with dominant ideas of society,
or what Catton and Dunlap (1978) call the dominant western world view.
An understanding that meanings of nature are derived from societies and
cultures allows us to examine what ideas of society and of its ordering
become reproduced, legitimated, excluded, validated through appeals to
nature or the natural (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 15). For instance,
universalized scientific discourses of the environment tend to ignore local
cultural differences in NorthSouth trade and environmental relations while
masking neo-colonial modes of development in which global environ-
mental problems create the moral base for green imperialism (Shiva 1991).
The scientific rationality of ecological modernization constructs a global
discourse of environmental problems to which the only solution is for society
to modernize itself out of the environmental crisis by increased investments
in new environmentally friendly technologies.
In many ways the critique of sustainable development and its ancillary
corporate environmental management practices is a critique of modernity,
with its metanarratives of progress and development. Nature has been
deployed as a singular category in this discourse to promote an ecological
world order that continues to repress alternate formulations. As mentioned
earlier, there is no one global solution. I am not suggesting that the way out
is a return to the premodern, even if this were possible. Modernity has
produced uneven effects in the Third World, where premodern, modern, and
postmodern forms coexist in heterogeneous congurations (Escobar 1992).
Although much is to be gained by using insights from postmodernism to
expose the fallacies behind rationality and progress, this must be accompanied
by questions of social justice and a position of visible political interest. The
politics of representation and the nexus between interests and identity (despite
their essentialist overtones) continue to play a crucial role in indigenous
struggles throughout the world. Despite postmodernisms disavowal of
metanarratives, there are problems with the way the post in postmodernism
can operate in the guise of knowledge (see Radhakrishnan 1994). Postmodern
insights into the fragmentation of identities, the multiplicity of political
spaces, and the decentered character of social life can contribute to the
creation of new collective organizations and social movements that
acknowledge multiplicity and contradictions without imposing a unitary logic
(Escobar 1992). Postmodern formulations of nature and the environment
might draw attention to the ideologies that reify and reduce nature, including
human nature, in the service of clarity and order (Phelan 1994: 59). As Phelan
(1994: 59) points out, the questions that need to be asked are not what should
we do or not do to nature to save it, but instead how do we understand
ourselves and our world and how should we negotiate our relationships with
ourselves? This would displace categories that have been used to construct
Third World groups while generating alternate ways of seeing and
constructing social and cultural self-descriptions in grassroots social
movements (Escobar 1992).
Recovering biodiversity and the commons involves a refusal to recognize life
forms as corporate inventions and property and allow their privatization.
Environmental struggles by peasant populations are not just about land or
resources: these are cultural struggles in defense of cultural diversity.
We should not entertain notions about global sustainability unless we know
whose globe and whose sustainability we are talking about. Grassroots social
movements do not focus on the whole of society but are concerned with
local and regional communities. As Escobar (1992) argues, these are not
teleological projects with predetermined directions, but they foster a sense of
agency in the communities. This requires a transformation of the political,
economic, and institutional arrangements that characterized the regime of
development, in Estevas words, to intensify the process of construction
of direct democracy (Esteva 1986, cited in Escobar 1992), which several
social movements are attempting to do (the Zapatista movement in Mexico
comes to mind).
The rhetoric of democracy and participation in contemporary discourses of
free markets and in international forums on sustainable development also
needs to be examined with a critical lens. At the 1992 Rio Summit there were
open conflicts between corporations, their trade associations, NGOs, and
indigenous community leaders over environmental regulations. The demands
of NGOs were shelved, and instead a voluntary code of conduct developed
by the Business Council for Sustainable Development (consisting of a number
of transnational corporations) was approved in what was supposed to be a
democratic process of developing an action plan for sustainable development
(Hawken 1995). The policies from the Rio Earth Summit and the more
recent Johannesburg Earth Summit (an even bigger failure according to
many NGOs and environmentalists) stressed the role of transnational corpor-
ations in promoting sustainable development, but they are silent about
corporate responsibility and accountability for environmental destruction.
Development, sustainable or otherwise, in a globalizing world is inherently
anti-democratic, as several indigenous groups have found. As Subcomandante
Marcos, a leader of the Zapitistas, stated:
When we rose up against a national government, we found that it did not exist. In
reality we were up against nancial capital, against speculation, which is what makes
decisions in Mexico as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America,
South America everywhere. (Zapatista 1998).
The story is depressingly familiar to indigenous communities all over the
world. In this case, ofcials of the World Bank met in Geneva and decided
to give a loan to Mexico on condition it exports meat under the agreements
laid down by the World Trade Organization. Land used by indigenous
communities to grow corn is now used to raise cattle for fast food markets
in the United States. This is an inherently undemocratic process in which
peasant populations do not have the right to decide how they want to live. It
is another example of how imperialism operates in the Third World: one
state (in this case representing the interests of the rich countries, the
international institutions they support, and their transnational corporations)
controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society, by
force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence.
The following was a response to the Zapatista uprising by a transnational
bank, a major nancer in the restructuring of Mexicos economy:
The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective
control of the national territory and security policy. (Mexico, Political Update, Chase
Manhattan Bank; cited in Zapatista 1998)
If this is an example of a corporate triple bottom line strategy to integrate
social and environmental issues, the future for resistance movements is very
bleak indeed.
The diversity of social movements in different parts of the world might
provide an alternative reading guide that could transform hegemonic notions
of development and modernity (Escobar 1992). The study of traditional
ecological knowledge is becoming increasingly in vogue for Western
scientists and pharmaceutical corporations. It is crucial to examine this
practice with a critical lens in order to understand the stakes involved: who
is doing the study and for what purpose? For example, an ongoing United
Nations Development Programme project is called Global Sustainable
Development Facility 2B2M: 2 Billion to the Market By the Year 2020.
The project title itself embodies what is wrong with current notions of
sustainable development in that it reveals the continuities of this alleged
discontinuity from prior notions of economic growth and development. The
fact that a significant proportion of the projects team members are from
transnational corporations with documented negative environmental and
social impacts on indigenous and rural populations simply strengthens
the notion that these international organizations do not and cannot serve
community interests. Not one of several hundreds of United Nations projects
has ever challenged economic globalism or growth-oriented solutions despite
their rhetoric of empowering rural communities. In the current political
economy it is simply not possible simultaneously to empower rural
communities and transnational corporations, and, as we have seen, any
compromise tends seriously to disadvantage the former group. In the search
for alternatives to development, apart from a critique of contemporary notions
of development, we need to situate our theories within appropriate social
movements: for example, traditional ecological knowledge should not be
separated from the political, economic, and cultural struggles of indigenous
peoples and peasant populations (Carruthers 1996).
Conclusion
Just as the development era consolidated the hegemony of expansionist
monopoly capital in Third World sites through large-scale, export-oriented
programs and policies that inverted the survival needs of local cultures, the
sustainable development era also threatens to map people into certain
coordinates of control (Escobar 1995). Any activity outside the market
economy is disallowed, which seriously disadvantages the subsistence
activities of peasants and indigenous communities all over the world. The
reliance on technology to solve all problems the hallmark of the
development era continues today with the comforting caveat that
technology use should be appropriate. The violence that the so-called Green
Revolution perpetrated on peasant populations is well documented (Mies
and Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989, 1991). The same agencies and corporations
that hailed the development of pesticides and herbicides as a technological
green revolution (now deemed unsustainable) are extolling the virtues of
biotechnology. Farmers and indigenous communities continue actively to
resist this new imposition, which once again threatens their survival in the
name of sustainable development.
Sustainable development, despite its promise of local autonomy, is not
egalitarian because environmental destruction is not egalitarian: it is more
devastating for people who possess few resources to prevent the destruction
of their natural spaces (Bullard 1993). If, as Amartya Sen (1999: 3) states,
the quality of life should be measured not by our wealth but by our
freedoms, then contemporary discourses of sustainable development, despite
their emphasis on quality of life, fall short on delivering freedom; in fact, like
development, sustainable development delivers economic unfreedoms to a
marginalized majority of the worlds population. These populations are more
often than not composed of the poor, the people of color, the women and the
children of the Third World (Bandy 1996). The literature on sustainable
development has virtually no discussion on the empowerment of local
communities, except for some passing references to consulting with commu-
nities or ensuring their participation, without providing any framework
for how this is to be achieved (Derman 1995). It does criticize the growth
model of development, but it positions marginalized local communities as
either victims or beneficiaries of development. In the era of sustainable
development, it appears these communities will continue to be inscribed as
passive objects of Western history and to bear the brunt of what Mies and
Shiva (1993) ironically call the white mans burden, a burden that means
further loss of community rights and resources. The new biotechnologies of
sustainable development have the potential to transform farmers into factory
workers on a global scale (Dawkins 1997). This will convert seed custodians
into seed consumers, a development that is not sustainable.
Sustainable development is to be managed in the same way development was
managed: through ethnocentric, capitalist notions of managerial efciency
that simply reproduce earlier articulations of decentralized capitalism in the
guise of sustainable capitalism. The macroeconomic criteria of sustainable
development have now become corporatized: development is sustainable only
if it is profitable, it is sustainable only if it can be transacted through the
market. This notion of sustainable development packaged and sold by
international agencies, governments, and transnational corporations needs to
be unpacked and deconstructed, which is what I have attempted to do in this
paper. As Visvanathan (1991: 380) points out, the Brundtland report, Our
Common Future, focuses on uniformity and order; it organizes the future into
resources, energy, populations, cities and towns, with little place for plurality,
difference or multiplicity. There is still a belief that better technology and
management and better and more inclusive procedures by international
institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization can
save the planet. Eco-efciency, green marketing, and eco-modernization will
not save the planet. Current discourses on sustainability ensure that economic
rationality determines ecological rationality, resulting in even further erosion
of alternate cultural and social values assigned to nature. In effect they
extinguish the very cultural and social forces from which possible solutions
to the present crisis might emerge. As Redclift (2000) points out, there is a
danger that current discourses of sustainability, with their focus on what is
sustainable and how it is measured, will lose their radical and political edge.
Perhaps sustainable development will follow the fate of the modern
environmental movement, which is being increasingly depoliticized by
environmental policies that translate environmental choices into market
preferences.
As Gould (2000: 12) argues, if discourses of sustainable development are to
retain their radical and political edge, they must ultimately be rooted in the
relationship between specific human populations and specific ecosystems
located in specific places. Transnationalism and international institutions
operating under neoliberal economic regimes have little regard for the
specicities of places or the communities that inhabit them and cannot and
will not generate sustainable local economies. Current development patterns
(even those touted as sustainable) disrupt social system and ecosystem
relations rather than ensuring that natural resource use by local communities
meets their basic needs at a level of comfort that is satisfactory as assessed
by those same communities. What is needed is not a common future but the
future as commons, the plurality of life worlds to which all citizens have
access. It is not merely the availability of nature as being but of alternative
imaginations, skills that survival in the future might require (Visvanathan
1991: 383).
While continuing the epistemic violence of colonial development, sustain-
able development simultaneously reies global capitalism as the liberating
and protecting force that can ensure survival of the human race this is the
logic of the world it seeks to construct and impose. The Third World, still in
need of development, now needs to be told how to develop sustainably. The
consumer is still the king: nature is not so much understood as consumed, and
the power dynamics in this new era of globalization and postdevelopment
remain unchanged (Banerjee and Linstead 2001). As Bandy (1996) argues,
the sustainable development discourse is a new rhetoric of legitimation
the legitimation of markets, of transnational capital, of Western science
and technology, and of Western notions of progress that in turn legitimizes
the violence of (post)modernity. The challenge of sustainable development
is ultimately about challenging this legitimacy, it is about challenging the
epistemological foundations of knowledge and of the power this knowledge
has in dening reality. Perhaps revisiting other knowledges will enable us to
define another reality, a reality that does not privilege the natureculture
dichotomy, which has proved so disempowering for billions of people. But
that is another story.
Academy of Management Review
1995 Special issue on ecologically sustain-
able organizations. 20/4.
Academy of Management Journal
2000 Special issue on the management of
organizations in the natural environ-
ment. 25/4.
Adams, William M.
1990 Green development: Environment
and sustainability in the Third World.
New York: Routledge.
Agenda 21
1992 http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/
agenda21.htm. Accessed 15 December
2001.
Bandy, Joe
1996 Managing the other of nature:
Sustainability, spectacle, and global
regimes of capital in ecotourism.
Public Culture 8/3: 539566.
Banerjee, Subhabrata B.
1998 Globalization, sustainable develop-
ment and ecology: A critical examina-
tion in Globalization, privatization,
and the market economy. C. P. Rao
(ed.), 4762. Connecticut: Quorum
Books.
Banerjee, Subhabrata.B.
1999 Corporate environmentalism and the
greening of strategic marketing in
Greener marketing: A global per-
spective to greening marketing prac-
tice. M. Charter and M. Polonsky
(eds), 1640. Sheffield: Greenleaf
Publishing.
2000 Whose land is it anyway? National
interest, indigenous stakeholders and
colonial discourses: The case of the
Jabiluka uranium mine. Organiz-
ation & Environment 13/1: 338.
2001a Corporate citizenship and indige-
nous stakeholders: Exploring a new
dynamic of organizational stake-
holder relationships. Journal of
Corporate Citizenship 1/1: 3955.
2001b Managerial perceptions of corporate
environmentalism: Interpretations
from industry and strategic implica-
tions for organizations. Journal of
Management Studies 38/4: 489513.
Banerjee, Subhabrata B., and Stephen
Linstead
2001 Globalization, multiculturalism and
other fictions: Colonialism for the
new millennium? Organization 8/4:
711750.
Barlow, Connie
1997 Green space, green time: The way of
science. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Baudrillard, Jean
1981 For a critique of the political
economy of the sign. St. Louis, MO:
Telos.
Bebbington, Jan, and Rob Gray
1993 Corporate accountability and the
physical environment: Social respon-
sibility and accounting beyond
profit. Business Strategy and the
Environment 2/2: 111.
Beck, Ulrich
1996 World risk society as cosmopolitan
society? Ecological questions in a
framework of manufactured uncer-
tainties. Theory, Culture & Society
9: 97123.
Beck, Ulrich
2000 The brave new world of work.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beder, Sharon
1994 Revoltin developments: The politics
of sustainable development. Arena
Magazine June/July: 3739.
Bos, Rene ten
1997 Business ethics and Bauman ethics.
Organization Studies 18/6: 9971014.
Bullard, Robert D.
1993 Anatomy of environmental racism
and the environmental justice move-
ment in Confronting environmental
racism: Voices from the grassroots.
R. D. Bullard (ed.). Boston, MA:
South End Press.
Carruthers, David V.
1996 Indigenous ecology and the politics of
linkage in Mexican social move-
ments. Third World Quarterly 17/5:
10071028.
Carson, Rachel
1962 Silent spring. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifin.
References
Catton, William, and Riley Dunlap
1978 Environmental sociology: A new
paradigm. American Sociologist 13:
4149.
Chaloupka, William, and R. McGreggor
Cawley
1993 The great wild hope: Nature,
environmentalism and the open
secret in In the nature of things.
J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka (eds),
323. Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press.
Chatterjee, Pratap, and Mathias Finger
1994 The earthbrokers: Power, politics
and world development. London:
Routledge.
Clegg, Stewart
1989 Frameworks of power. London:
Sage.
Courpasson, David
2000 Managerial strategies of domination.
Power in soft bureaucracies. Organ-
ization Studies 21/1: 141161.
Crane, Andrew
2000 Corporate greening as amoraliz-
ation. Organization Studies 21/4:
673696.
Dawkins, Kristin
1997 Gene wars: The politics of bio-
technology. New York: Seven Stories
Press.
Derman, Bill
1995 Environmental NGOs, disposses-
sion, and the state: The ideology and
praxis of African nature and develop-
ment. Human Ecology 23/2: 199
215.
Dobson, Andrew
1998 Social justice and the environment.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index
2000 http://www.dowjones.com/djsgi/
index/concept.html. Accessed 15
December, 2001.
Downes, D. R.
1996 Global trade, local economies, and
the Biodiversity Convention in Bio-
diversity and the law. W. J. Snape III
and O. A. Houcj (eds). Washington
DC: Island Press.
Doyle, Michael
1986 Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Dunlap, Riley, and William Catton
1979 Environmental sociology. Annual
Review of Sociology 5: 243273.
Elkington, John
1999 Cannibals with forks: The triple
bottom line of 21st century business.
Oxford: Capstone.
Enriquez, Juan, and Ray A. Goldberg
2000 Transforming life, transforming
business: The life-science revolu-
tion. Harvard Business Review
March/April: 96104.
Escobar, Arturo
1992 Imagining a post-development era:
Critical thought, development and
social movements. Social Text
31/32: 2056.
Escobar, Arturo
1995 Encountering development: The
making and unmaking of the Third
World, 19451992. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Esteva, Gustav
1987 Regenerating peoples space.
Alternatives 12/1: 125152.
Esteva, Gustav
1992 Development in The development
dictionary. W. Sachs (ed.), 625.
London: Zed Books.
Fineman, Stephen
1996 Emotional subtexts in corporate
greening. Organization Studies 17/3:
479500.
Foucault, Michel
1980 Power/knowledge: Selected inter-
views and other writings. New York:
Pantheon.
Friedman, Milton
1962 Capitalism and freedom. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Frooman, Jeff
1999 Stakeholder influence strategies.
24/2: 191205.
Gladwin, Thomas N., James J. Kennelly, and
Tara-Shelomith Krause
1995 Shifting paradigms for sustainable
development: Implications for man-
agement theory and research.
20/4: 874907.
Goldsmith, Edward
1997 Development as colonialism. The
Ecologist 27/2: 6079.
Gould, Kenneth A.
2000 Sustainability across borders: Trans-
national ecotourism, globalization
and place in Western Belize. Paper
presented at the International Socio-
logical Association RC24 Minicon-
ference, Rio de Janeiro, 13 August.
Guha, Ramachandra
1989 Radical American environmentalism
and wilderness preservation: A Third
World critique. Environmental
Ethics 11/1: 7181.
Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-
Alier
1997 Varieties of environmentalism.
London: Earthscan.
Gupta, Anil, and the Honey Bee Network
1997 Linking grassroots innovations,
enterprise, investments, incentives
and institutions: Democratizing
knowledge through Honey Bee
network. Paper presented at the
World Bank for Global Knowledge
Conference, Toronto.
Hart, Stuart L.
1997 Beyond greening: Strategies for a
sustainable world. Harvard Business
Review January/February: 676.
Harvey, David
1996 Justice, nature and the geography of
difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hawken, Paul
1995 The ecology of commerce: A declar-
ation of sustainability. London:
Phoenix.
Holmberg, Johan, and Richard Sandbrook
1992 Sustainable development: What is to
be done? in Policies for a small
planet. J. Holmberg (ed.). London:
Earthscan.
Hyndman, David C.
1987 Mining, modernization, and move-
ments of social protest in Papua New
Guinea. Social Analysis 21 (August):
2038.
IIFC (International Indigenous Forum on
Climate Change)
2000 Declaration of indigenous peoples
on climate change. Second
International Indigenous Forum on
Climate Change, The Hague, 1112
November.
Kilbourne, William, Pierre McDonagh, and
Andrea Prothero
1997 Sustainable consumption and the
quality of life: A macromarketing
challenge to the dominant social
paradigm. Journal of Macro-
marketing 14: 4253.
Kirkby, John, Philip OKeefe, and Lloyd
Timberlake
1995 Sustainable development. London:
Earthscan.
Knights, David, and Glenn Morgan
1993 Organization theory and consump-
tion in a post-modern era. Organiz-
ation Studies 14/2: 211218.
Lefebvre, Henri
1991 The production of space. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Leaive, Xavier
1996 Organizations as structures of
domination. Organization Studies
17/1: 2337.
Levy, David
1997 Environmental management as
political sustainability. Organization
& Environment 10/2: 126147.
Long Range Planning
1992 Special issue on strategic
management of the environment.
25/4.
Luke, Timothy W.
1994 Green consumerism: Ecology and the
ruse of recycling in In the nature of
things. J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka
(eds), 154172. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minneapolis Press.
Luttwak, Edward
1999 Turbo-capitalism: Winners and
losers in the global economy.
London: Orion Books.
McAfee, Kathleen
1999 Selling nature to save it? Bio-
diversity and green developmen-
talism. Environment and Planning D
17/2: 133154.
McClintock, Anne
1992 The angel of progress: Pitfalls of the
term postcolonialism. Social Text
31/32: 8498.
Macnaghten, Phil, and John Urry
1998 Contested natures. London: Sage.
Magretta, Joan
1997 Growth through global sustainability:
An interview with Monsantos CEO,
Robert B. Shapiro. Harvard Business
Review January/February: 7988.
Mani, Lata
1989 Multiple mediations: Feminist
scholarship in the age of multinational
reception. Inscriptions 5: 123.
Martinez-Alier, Juan
1987 Ecological economics: Energy,
environment and society. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Merchant, Carolyn
1980 The death of nature: Women, ecology
and the scientic revolution. London:
Wildwood House.
Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva
1993 Ecofeminism. Melbourne: Spinifex
Press.
Mokhiber, Russell, and Robert Weissman
2000 Fronting for big coal, Focus on the
Corporation, http://www.
corporatepredators.org. Accessed 15
December 2001.
Mudimbe, Vincent Y.
1988 The invention of Africa. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press.
Mueller, Frank
1994 Societal effect, organization effect
and globalization. Organization
Studies 15/3: 407423.
Newton, Tim, and George Harte
1997 Green business; technicist kitsch?
Journal of Management Studies 34/1:
7598.
Ngugi wa Thongo
1986 Decolonizing the mind: The politics
of language in Africa. London/
Nairobi: James Currey/Heinemann.
Patnaik, Prabhat
1990 Whatever happened to imperialism
and other essays. New Delhi: Tulika.
Pearce, David W., Anil Markandya, and
Edward B. Barbier
1989 Blueprint for a green economy.
London: Earthscan.
Phelan, Shane
1994 Intimate distance: The dislocation of
nature in modernity in In the nature
of things. J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka
(eds), 4462. Minneapolis: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pitelis, Christos
1993 Transnationals, international organ-
ization and deindustrialization.
Organization Studies 14/4: 527543.
Prakash, Gyan
1992 Postcolonial criticism and Indian
historiography. Social Text 31/32:
819.
Pugliese, Joseph
1995 Parasiting post-colonialism: On
the (im)possibility of a disappropri-
ative practice. Southern Review
28/3: 345357.
Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan
1993 Postcoloniality and the boundaries
of identity. Callaloo 16/4: 750771.
Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan
1994 Postmodernism and the rest of the
world. Organization 1/2: 305340.
Redclift, Michael
1987 Sustainable development: Exploring
the contradictions. London: Methuen.
Redclift, Michael
2000 Post-sustainability. Paper presented
at the International Sociological
Association RC24 Miniconference,
Rio de Janeiro, 13 August.
Renner, Michael
1997 Fighting for survival: Environmental
decline, social conflict and the new
age of insecurity. London: Earthscan.
Rifkin, Jeremy
1999 The biotech century: How genetic
commerce will change the world.
London: Phoenix.
Rio Tinto
1999 Social and environmental report.
Melbourne: Rio Tinto Limited.
Ross, John
2000 The war against oblivion: The
Zapatista chronicles. Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press.
Rossi, Mark S., Halina Szejnwald Brown,
and Leo W. Baas
2000 Leaders in sustainable development:
How agents of change define the
agenda. Business Strategy and the
Environment 9: 273286.
Said, Edward
1979 Orientalism. New York: Vintage
Books.
Said, Edward
1986 Intellectuals in the postcolonial
world. Salmagundi 70/71: 4464.
Said, Edward
1993 Culture and imperialism. London:
Vintage.
Schot, Johan, Ellis Brand, and Kurt Fischer
1997 The greening of industry or a
sustainable future: Building an inter-
national research agenda. Business
Strategy and the Environment 6:
153162.
Sen, Amartya
1999 Development as freedom. New York:
Anchor Books.
Shiva, Vandana
1989 Staying alive: Women, ecology and
development. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana
1991 The violence of the Green Revolution:
Third World agriculture, ecology and
politics. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana
1993 Monocultures of the mind: Perspec-
tives on biodiversity and biotech-
nology. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana
2000 Stolen harvest: The hijacking of the
global food supply. Cambridge:
South End Press.
Shohat, Ella
1992 Notes on the postcolonial. Social
Text 31/32: 99113.
Shrivastava, Paul
1994 Castrated environment: Greening
organizational studies. Organization
Studies 15/5: 705721.
Snell, Robin S.
2000 Studying moral ethos using an
adapted Kohlbergian model. Organ-
ization Studies 21/1: 267295.
Spivak, Gayatri C.
1988 Can the subaltern speak? in
Marxism and the interpretation of
culture. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg
(eds). London: Macmillan.
Spivak, Gayatri C.
1999 A critique of postcolonial reason:
Toward a history of the vanishing
present. Cambridge. MA: Harvard
University Press.
Trevio, Linda K., and Gary R. Weaver
1999 The stakeholder research tradition:
Converging theorists not conver-
gent theory. Academy of Manage-
ment Review 24/2: 222227.
Visvanathan, Shiv
1991 Mrs Brundtlands disenchanted
cosmos. Alternatives 16/3: 377384.
Waters, Malcolm
1995 Globalization. London: Routledge.
WCED (World Commission for Economic
Development)
1987 Our common future. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Welford, Richard
1997 Hijacking environmentalism: Corpor-
ate responses to sustainable develop-
ment. London: Earthscan.
Westley, Frances, and Harrie Vredenburg
1996 Sustainability and the corporation:
Criteria for aligning economic
practice with environmental pro-
tection. Journal of Management
Inquiry 5/2: 104119.
Williams, Raymond
1976 Keywords: A vocabulary of culture
and society. London: Fontana.
Wilson, Edward O.
1992 The diversity of life. London: Penguin
Books.
WTO (World Trade Organization)
2000 Trade Related Intellectual Property
Rights, http://www.wto.org/english/
tratop_e/trips_e/t_agm3_e.htm#1.
Accessed 15 December 2001.
Yoon, Carol K.
2000 Simple method found to vastly
increase crop yields. New York
Times Science Section 22 August;
http://www.nytimes.com/library/nati
ona l / s c i e nc e / 082200s c i - gm-
rice.html. Accessed 15 December
2001.
Zapatista
1998 Documentary film produced by Big
Noise Films, Cambridge, MA.
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management at the International
Graduate School of Management, University of South Australia, Adelaide. He
received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996. He has
taught there as well as at the University of Wollongong, where he headed the doctoral
program, and RMIT University, where he was Director of the Doctor of Business
Administration program. His research interests are in the areas of sustainable
development, corporate environmentalism, sociocultural aspects of globalization,
postcolonial theories, and Indigenous ecology. His work has appeared in
Organization, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Marketing,
Organization & Environment, Media, Culture & Society, the Journal of Business
Research, the Journal of Environmental Education, the Journal of Advertising, and
Advances in Consumer Research.
Address: International Graduate School of Management, University of South
Australia, Level 5, Way Lee Building, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide,
SA 5000, Australia.
E-mail: apache@unisa.edu.au
Subhabrata
Bobby
Banerjee

Whose Development

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Whose Development

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

http://oss.sagepub.

You might also like