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DOI: 10.1177/0170840603024001341 2003; 24; 143 Organization Studies

Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee Reinvention of Nature

Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the

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Who Sustains Whose Development?Sustainable Development and the Reinventionof NatureSubhabrata Bobby Banerjee

Abstract

This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwordsof 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 specifiedby modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves thetransformation of ‘nature’ into ‘environment’, a transformation that has importantimplications for notions of how development should proceed. The ‘rational’management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition ondeveloping countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this ‘regime of truth’for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity andintellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable developmentthreaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to bemade ‘efficient’ because of the capitalization of nature.

Keywords: sustainable development, neo-colonialism, North–South relations,environmentalism, critical management studies

‘In the early phases of colonization, the white man’s burden consisted of the need to“civilize” the non-white peoples of the world — this meant above all depriving themof their resources and rights. In the latter phase of colonization, the white man’sburden consisted of the need to “develop” the Third World, and this again involveddepriving local communities of their resources and rights. We are now on thethreshold of the third phase of colonization, in which the white man’s burden is toprotect the environment — and this too, involves taking control of rights andresources. . . . The salvation of the environment cannot be achieved through the oldcolonial order based on the white man’s burden. The two are ethically, economicallyand epistemologically incongruent.’ Mies and Shiva (1993: 264–265)

Introduction

After more than 200 years of industrialization in the Western world and morethan 50 years of ‘development’ in the Third World, the benefits delivered bythe grand design of progress and modernity are, at best, equivocal. Despitephenomenal advances in science, technology, medicine and agriculturalproduction, the promise that ‘development’ would eradicate world povertyremains unfulfilled in several parts of the globe, especially in the Third World.

OrganizationStudies24(1): 143–180Copyright © 2003SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks,CA & New Delhi)

143 Authors name

0170-8406[200301]24:1;143–180;031341

Subhabrata BobbyBanerjeeInternationalGraduate Schoolof Management,University ofSouth Australia,Australia


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‘Progress’ has come at a price: global warming, ozone depletion, loss ofbiodiversity, soil erosion, air and water pollution are all global problems withwide-ranging impacts on human populations, impacts that are significantlymore harmful for the rural poor in Third World countries, and for people whoderive their sustenance from the land.Let me begin with a cautionary note on terminology so as not to offendpostmodern sensibilities. I use the terms ‘first 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 thirdworlds within first worlds, but I deploy these and other categories strategicallyand politically here, in the spirit of what Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’.In some ways, my critique examines the foundations of knowledgeconstruction about the Third World and the ways in which it becomesconstituted and represented by a particular set of discursive power relationsthat underlie the development discourse. As Escobar (1992: 25) argues, ‘ThirdWorld reality is inscribed with precision and persistence by the discoursesand practices of economists, planners, nutritionists, demographers and the like, making it difficult for people to define their own interests in theirown terms — in many cases actually disabling them to do so.’ Perhaps we can now add the discourses and practices of environmentalists andconservationists to the list, as the earlier quote by Mies and Shiva implies.Although such categorizations might preclude a sense of agency for ThirdWorld resistance movements, I discuss in the conclusion of the paper howtransgressions of these categories could create new spaces of resistance.The concept of sustainable development has emerged in recent years in aneffort to address environmental problems caused by economic growth. Thereare several different interpretations of sustainable development, but its broadaim is to describe a process of economic growth without environmentaldestruction. Exactly what is being sustained (economic growth or the globalecosystem, or both) is currently at the root of several debates, although manyscholars argue that the apparent reconciliation of economic growth and theenvironment is simply a green sleight-of-hand that fails to address genuineenvironmental 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 informthe notion of sustainable development and discuss the consequences of theseassumptions. I argue that sustainable development, rather than representinga major theoretical breakthrough, is very much subsumed under the dominanteconomic paradigm. As with development, the meanings, practices, andpolicies of sustainable development continue to be informed by colonialthought, resulting in disempowerment of a majority of the world’spopulations, especially rural populations in the Third World. Discourses ofsustainable development are also based on a unitary system of knowledgeand, despite its claims of accepting plurality, there is a danger of margin-alizing or co-opting traditional knowledges to the detriment of communitieswho depend on the land for their survival.

144 Organization Studies 24(2)



The paper’s main argument is at the broader level of political economy ratherthan an individual organization. However, I would argue that the critique isalso relevant for organization studies because of the role played bysupranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO),the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. Although theseare 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 andbusiness organizations, especially large transnational corporations which areat the forefront of the debate on biotechnology and sustainable development.Transnational corporations are major agents that influence the environmentaland trade policies of the World Trade Organization as well as other globalagreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a broader sense, the variousagents 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 sustainabledevelopment will reveal its role in shaping organizational discourses on theenvironment. Sustainability means different things to different people: what Iattempt to demonstrate in the paper is how colonial thought informs thismeaning creation and its resultant disempowering effects on sections of societysuch as rural populations. I conclude by discussing alternate formulations ofsustainable development and implications for the study of organizations.

Theoretical Genealogy

Four theoretical streams inform my critique of sustainable development. Idraw upon insights from postcolonial theory to understand the constructionand representation of the ‘Third World’. The work of Edward Said, HomiBhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Radhakrishnan, Ngugi waThiong’o, and Vincent Mudimbe are particularly relevant in developing a postcolonial critique of colonialism and imperialism. I also presentcontemporary critiques of development as a prelude to developing a critiqueof sustainable development. This critique draws from the work of ArturoEscobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Vandana Shiva, Ramachandra Guha, and GustavoEsteva, among others. I use the Foucauldian notion of power, in particularhis formulation of disciplinary power, as an analytic that examines theproduction of ‘truths’ about nature and sustainability through disciplinarypower and the subsequent control of knowledge.And last, but definitely not the least, when theory fails me, when I havedifficulty in formulating notions of agency, I draw upon insights from manygrass-roots activist movements all over the world: Aboriginal land rightsmovements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Chipko movement, and theZapatista uprising, to name a few.A comprehensive review of postcolonial theory is beyond the scope of thispaper (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 field).In a broad sense this school of thought attempts to problematize issues arisingfrom 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 postin postcolonialism is problematic because it assumes that colonialism as ahistorical reality has somehow ended (Mani 1989) without acknowledgingthe complicity of colonial relations in contemporary discourses of ‘develop-ment’ and ‘progress’ in North–South relations. As a result, the post absolvesitself of any claims for present consequences of the damages caused bycolonization (Said 1986).Examining discourses of sustainable development using theoreticalperspectives from colonialism and imperialism might allow us to see howcontemporary global environmental discourses serve as markers for the thirdphase of colonization that Mies and Shiva (1993) allude to. In this postmodernage 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 conceptualizedin a variety of ways, primarily using a political framework. For instance,imperialism described theories and practices developed by a dominantmetropolitan center to rule distant territories, by force, by political means orby economic, social, and cultural dependence. Doyle (1986: 45) definesempire as ‘a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls theeffective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achievedby 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 ofempires and direct colonial rule did not mean the end of imperialism, and itstraces can be observed in ‘the general cultural sphere . . . in specific political,ideological, economic and social practice’ (Said 1993: 8). The traditionalpolitics of power, i.e. military strength, diplomacy, and weapons develop-ment, have evolved into an age of ‘geo-economics’ in which winners andlosers in the global economy are created by state-assisted private entities(Luttwak 1999). However, as Said (1993) argues, accumulation andacquisition are not the only actions of imperialism or colonialism. Theirideological formations assume that certain territories and people actually‘require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliatedwith domination’.In the context of management and organizations, it might be moreappropriate to understand imperialism as ‘an economic system of externalinvestment 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 ofimperialism in liberal ‘free’ market economies. Thus, if imperialism is to beviewed as a fundamental set of economic relations, then examining the rangeof relations (such as the relationship between nation states, internationalinstitutions, and transnational corporations) becomes an important task in




order to uncover the presence of imperialism in current institutional structuresand processes. Placed in the context of imperialism, the operation of interna-tional finance capital becomes significant in its hegemonic institutionalizationthrough the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. Therefore, conflicts betweencountries of the North and South in various international trade forums, as wellas protests by peasants and workers in the poorer countries of the world overproperty and resource rights, are often aptly framed as anti-imperialiststruggles.Thus, imperialism today is inextricably linked with culture, society, economyand polity. Its operation is often masked and, because imperialism has learnedto ‘manage’ things better, it is difficult to identify its disciplinary power inall its nuances — a power that normalizes experiences, rather than providesavenues for resistance and change. Imperialism is operationalized throughdifferent kinds of power: institutional power (agencies such as the IMF, theWTO, and the World Bank), economic power (of corporations and nationstates), and discursive power, which constructs and describes uncontestednotions of ‘development’, ‘backwardness’, ‘subsistence economies’, whilepreventing other narratives from emerging. As Said (1993: 8) points out, ‘therhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence whendeployed in an imperial setting’.Foucault’s (1980) analysis of power reveals how disciplinary practicesconstitute 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 constituteand are constituted by knowledge appearing as specific institutional andorganizational practices. They become discursive because they reproduceknowledge through practices that are made possible by the structuralassumptions of that knowledge (Clegg 1989). The rules generated bydiscourse are not derived from some sovereign source but instead become‘natural’ rules or norms. The power of science and the scientific method ineveryday discourse is an example of how science normalizes social andcultural realms, not because of the superior rationality of science but becauseof its procedures of normalization arising from its disciplinary power. Thispower is not necessarily between sovereign and subject or state-controlledeconomic or political power; in fact Foucault (1980: 102) argues that theseare 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 poweris not located at a ‘legitimate’ site of sovereign or state but transmits itselfthrough a complex system of institutions, regulations, texts, policies, andpractices 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, ratherthan wealth and commodities, to be extracted from bodies. It is a type of power whichis constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous mannerthrough levies and obligations over time. It presupposes a tight knit grid of materialcoercions 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 greatinventions of bourgeois society, a fundamental instrument in the constitution ofindustrial capitalism and the type of society that is its accompaniment.’ (Foucault1980: 105)

Sovereignty still exists; in the modern era it has become democratized andfunctions along with the mechanisms of discipline, concealing the fact thatthe democratization of sovereignty was fundamentally determined by andgrounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion — coercion that was moreapparent and visible during colonial times but operates in increasinglysophisticated ways in the postcolonial era.Mudimbe (1988) highlights three characteristics of colonialism: thedomination of physical space, reformation of the natives’ minds (particularlyin terms of knowledge systems and culture), and incorporation of localeconomic histories into a Western perspective. As we shall see, all thesepractices are very much evident in contemporary discourses of sustainabledevelopment, which are informed by either Enlightenment notions of taminga ‘savage wilderness’ through Western scientific rationality or Romanticnotions of a pristine, unspoiled wilderness that needs to be conserved at allcosts (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 visualsense incorporating the ‘spectacularization of life’ (Lefebvre 1991: 286), asevidenced by the rise of ecotourism in affluent countries where consumerspay premium prices for the ‘authentic’ nature experience. Here meanings of‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ arise in a network of signs, messages, andimages, which seems to suggest that design rather than nature is theorganizing principle of today’s society (Chaloupka and Cawley 1993). Or, asBaudrillard (1981: 201) declares, ‘nothing escapes design. Everythingbelongs to design and there is no nature out there. . . . This “designed”universe is what properly constitutes the environment.’ The past decade hasseen a rise in this kind of ‘designer environmentalism’, whose basic messageis that the world’s environmental ills can be solved by buying ‘green’ and‘natural’ products, The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s being two prominentexamples that come to mind.In the postcolonial era, the colonizer–colonized relationships are played out in trade conflicts between developed and underdeveloped countries,resulting in the so-called North–South divide, a complex relationshipcharacterized by rhetoric, defensiveness, and ideology. Analyzing ThirdWorld experiences of imperialism and colonialism in the context ofsustainable development discourses might transform our understanding of thepast while enabling us to construct a history of the present and our attitudetoward the future. As Said (1993: 47) points out, despite the greatcontributions of Western theorists such as Foucault and Williams, the imperialexperience for these scholars is quite irrelevant, ‘a theoretical oversight thatis the norm in Western cultural and scientific disciplines’. The twin discourses




of development and sustainable development share structural characteristicsof 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 managementof the Third World in the post–World War II period, as we shall see in thenext section.

The Invention of Development and the Creation ofUnderdevelopment

A useful starting point might be to locate current discourses of sustainabledevelopment within the larger discourse of development in order to highlightits continuities and discontinuities. Although the term ‘development’ has beenin common usage for over 200 years, most scholars agree that thecontemporary notion of development was endorsed by President HarryTruman. In his inaugural address on January 20, 1949, Truman outlined aglobal program for development:

‘We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientificadvances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth ofunderdeveloped areas. . . . The old imperialism — exploitation for foreign profit —has no place in our plans.’ (Cited in Escobar 1995)

This of course set the stage for the new imperialism — the creation ofunderdevelopment, resulting in a new perception of the West and the rest ofthe world. This was the first time that the term ‘development’ was used in thecontext of underdevelopment, giving it a new meaning. The Third World wasborn at that moment: on that day, over 2 billion people became under-developed because, as Esteva (1992: 7) argues, they were ‘transmogrified intoan inverted mirror of others’ reality: a mirror that belittles them and sendsthem off to the end of the queue, a mirror that defines their identity, which isreally that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of ahomogenizing and narrow minority’.Many Third World countries have paid and continue to pay a disastrous pricefor this ‘catching-up development’ and, as several scholars have pointed out,the consequences have been particularly severe for rural populations (Adams1990; Escobar 1995; Esteva 1987, 1992; Mies and Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989).Farmers and peasants in the Third World as well as indigenous peoples indifferent parts of the world were classified as living in a ‘subsistence’economy and needed to ‘develop’ in order to reach ‘acceptable’ standards ofliving. This had enormous economic and sociocultural influences onindigenous peoples and farmers throughout the world; for instance, allresources were directed at producing cash crops rather than the traditionalcrops people used to grow. The detrimental effects of this form of develop-ment actually undermined subsistence and led to underdevelopment (Shiva1989; Hyndman 1987; Mies and Shiva 1993).In an insightful analysis of the development discourse, Escobar (1995) has




demonstrated how development first created the notion of poverty (based onmodern, capitalist indicators such as dollar income per capita, materialpossessions, resource extraction, science and technology, market economies)then ‘modernized’ the poor, transforming them into the ‘assisted’. This set inplace new modes of relations and mechanisms of control under the clarioncall 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 andreformed (Escobar 1995: 56). This was a scientific and technological processthat subsumed differences in culture, constructing people as variables in thegrand model of ‘progress’ and validating the assimilative imperatives ofdevelopment under the banner of national interest, which was frequently thecase for the new nations of the Third World.Placed in this context, development simply became another name foreconomic growth. The rationale was that economic growth should be madeparamount. Economic growth would alleviate poverty by creating wealth,which could then be used to solve ‘social’ problems. This separation of theeconomic from the social is characteristic of modern Western economicthought, 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 thatunbridled economic growth had several adverse social consequences. Thegap 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. Therichest 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 inevitablyaccompanied by an increase in income disparity. The ‘social’ aspects thataccompanied development, such as unemployment, underemployment,environmental and habitat destruction, and increasing inequalities, were seenas ‘social obstacles’ that needed to be overcome for development to proceedsmoothly. There was no recognition that some development programsactually led to poverty and social problems, resulting in a sort of ‘globalapartheid’ that separates the world into people who participate in the globaleconomy and others whose basic conditions of life have been destroyed (Beck2000; Shiva 1993).Increasingly the economic realm began to define social and cultural aspectsfor Third World populations. This regime of development depended solelyon the modern Western knowledge system, and rejected and marginalizednon-Western forms of knowledge. Development became ‘a metaphor [thatgave] global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbingpeople of different cultures of the opportunity to define forms of their sociallife’ (Esteva 1992: 9). What had been produced in the particular politico-sociocultural context of industrialized countries in the West was nowgeneralized to the rest. In Foucauldian terms, development derived its powerfrom ‘subjugated knowledge . . . a whole set of knowledges that have beendisqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated; naïve




knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required levelof cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault 1980: 82). If the history of develop-ment is to be seen as a history of imperialism and colonialism, it is thepower–knowledge nexus that can illustrate how development came to be seenas a version of reality and entrenched as the only normative reality (Spivak1988). To quote Harvey (1996: 131):

‘[The genius of the 18th-century political economy] was that it mobilized the humanimaginary of emancipation, progress, and self-realization into forms of discourse thatcould alter the application of political power and the construction of institutions inways that were consistent with the growing prevalence of the material practices ofmarket exchange. It did so, furthermore, while masking social relations and thedomination of the laborer that was to follow while subsuming the cosmic question ofthe relation to nature into a technical discourse concerning the proper allocation of scarce resources (including those in nature) for the benefit 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 tosynthesize, arrange, manage, and direct entire populations and countries basedon a unitary system, resulting in the ‘colonization and domination of naturaland human ecologies’. In the postcolonial era, these mechanisms of controlare still very much in place whether through international institutions such asthe World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World TradeOrganization, or through government policies of industrialization andmodernization. The escalation of environmental problems also led to thestruggle for natural resources, which resulted in a number of battles betweenpoor farmers, peasants, and indigenous populations on one side and corporateand government interests on the other. The notion of sustainable developmentwas conceived in the midst of these struggles as nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs), environmental organizations, and various peasant andindigenous groups, as well as international institutions such as the UnitedNations, 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 attemptto explore the relationship between development and the environment.Although there are over 100 current definitions 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 ofresources, direction of investments, orientation of technological development,and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as presentneeds’ (WCED 1987: 9). This broad ‘definition’ is at the root of severalcontroversies and there is considerable disagreement among scholars indifferent disciplines over how this definition should be operationalized andhow sustainability should be measured. The Brundtland definition is not really




a definition; it is a slogan, and slogans, however pretty, do not make theory.As several authors have pointed out, the Brundtland definition does notelaborate on the notion of human needs and wants (Kirkby et al. 1995;Redclift 1987), and the concern for future generations is problematic in itsoperationalization as well. Given the scenario of limited resources, thisassumption 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 ontologicaldifficulties in making their presence felt in today’s market for exhaustibleresources’.Apart from attempting to reconcile economic growth with environmentalprotection, the sustainable development agenda of Brundtland also focuses onsocial justice and human development within the framework of social equityand the equitable distribution and utilization of resources. Sustainability, asRedclift (1987) points out, means different things to different people. Althoughtheories of sustainability sometimes stress the primacy of social justice, theposition is often reversed and ‘justice is looked upon as subordinate tosustainability, and since neither sustainability nor social justice has determinatemeanings, 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 theconcept is promoted by ‘situating it against the background of sustaining aparticular set of social relations by way of a particular set of ecologicalprojects’ (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 thepreservation of nature per se’ (Harvey 1996: 148).Discourses of development and sustainable development construct aparticular view of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’. A detailed exploration ofthe various meanings of nature is beyond the scope of this paper given thehistorical, 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) intoenvironment (more ‘manageable’ and goal directed) is one of the hallmarksof modernity, in which domination of nature becomes a key indicator ofhuman progress rather than a transformation of the relationship betweenhumans and nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). One consequence ofconceptualizing nature as environment is the abstraction of singularity fromthe multiple meanings of nature, ranging from the essence or character of anobject; the physical world around us; living and nonliving things; the specificecology of places; notions of wilderness and ruralness; and the aesthetic orspiritual 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 scientific scrutiny, as threatened and inneed 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 bemanaged to produce discrete, observable and measurable outcomes. Althoughthe nature–culture dichotomy underlying the Enlightenment tradition has beencriticized for being largely responsible for the environmental degradation ofthe planet in the name of ‘development’ (Dunlap and Catton 1979; Escobar1995), contemporary discourses of sustainable development are plagued bythe same modernistic assumptions of rationality in their reliance on scientificinquiry 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) identified several themes, including human develop-ment, inclusiveness (of ecological, economic, political, technological, andsocial systems), connectivity (of sociopolitical, economic, and environmentalgoals), 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 globaleconomy: an economy that the planet is capable of supporting indefinitely’.Thus, the challenge is to find new technologies and to expand the role of themarket in allocating environmental resources, on the assumption that puttinga price on the natural environment is the only way to protect it, unlessdegrading it becomes more profitable (Beder 1994). Thus, even in the popularBrundtland report, development is accorded a priority over the environment:‘environmental protection constitutes an integral part of the developmentprocess’ (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). If the debate truly was aboutenvironmental and social sustainability, surely one would expect the relation-ship to be reversed, on the assumption that development proceeds within theconstraints and limits of the biophysical environment. Rather than reshapingmarkets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainabledevelopment uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation todetermine the future of nature (Shiva 1991).The language of capital is quite apparent in discourses of sustainabledevelopment. For instance, Pearce et al. (1989) emphasize ‘constancy ofnatural capital stock’ as a necessary condition for sustainability. Accordingto Pearce et al., changes in the stock of natural resources should be ‘non-negative’, and man-made capital (products and services as measured bytraditional economics and accounting) should not be created at the expenseof natural capital (including both renewable and nonrenewable naturalresources). In other words, growth or wealth must be created without resourcedepletion. Exactly how this is to be achieved remains a mystery. A majorityof 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 ‘sustainablecapital’ are developed and touted as evidence of a paradigm shift (Bebbingtonand Gray 1993). There is limited awareness of the fact that traditional notions




of capital, income, and growth continue to inform this ‘new’ paradigm. Theuncritical 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 liquorconsumption (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 theexistence of a singular ‘nature’ rather than emphasize that it is ‘specific socialpractices, especially of people’s dwellings, which produce, reproduce andtransform 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 Westernscience can identify environmental problems and articulate appropriatesolutions. Social and cultural environmental practices are subsumed bythe realities of scientific inquiry. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argueagainst this singular view of nature by describing the cultural processesinvolved in the naturalization of nature. They describe how theenvironment entered social discourse through specific social and culturalprocesses, such as student activism and the countercultural movementsof the 1960s.

� Environmental idealism analyzes nature by examining the range of‘values’ held by people about nature; these environmental values areassumed to be stable and consistent. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) refutethe notion of investigating environmental values without contextualizingthe temporal and spatial arrangements of people’s lives. Individualvaluation of nature, they argue, is ambiguous, contradictory, and contextspecific.

� Environmental instrumentalism refers to the responses of individuals andgroups to environmental problems that are determined by evaluatingindividual or collective interests against environmental trade-offs throughcost–benefit analysis or other market-based mechanisms. The assumptionhere is that the individual subject will weigh the costs and benefits ofdifferent behaviors and, once presented with the facts, will understandthat it is in their interest to behave in an environmentally responsiblemanner, believing that governments and public institutions will also actto protect the environment. Macnaghten and Urry’s (1998) research onBritish consumers shows little support for this proposition: fewrespondents appeared to possess such a strong sense of agency and highlevels of trust in public institutions.

Elements of these three doctrines can be observed in discourses of sustainabledevelopment, whether at the level of international and national policy (asmanifested in the policies of the United Nations, the World Bank, nationalgovernments, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Agenda 21) or




regional and local governments. For instance, Article 35.3 of Agenda 21developed at the Rio Summit of 1992 declares that:

‘Scientific knowledge should be applied to articulate and support the goals ofsustainable development. . . . [T]here needs to be an increased output from the sciencesin order to enhance understanding and facilitate interaction between science andsociety . . . [aimed at] strengthening the scientific basis for sustainable management. . . enhancing scientific understanding . . . building up scientific capacity andcapability.’ (Emphasis added)

The report goes on to say, ‘of crucial importance is the need for scientists indeveloping countries to participate fully in international scientific researchprograms dealing with the global problems of environment and developmentso as to allow all countries to participate on equal footing in negotiations onglobal environmental and developmental issues’. How all countries can‘participate on equal footing’ remains unclear, given the structural inequalitiesbetween the North and the South. There is also the implicit (and incorrect)assumption that scientists from developing countries represent the interestsof the rural poor, who are dependent on the natural environment for theirsurvival and who value and manage nature differently. For instance, in its social and environmental report, the mining giant Rio Tinto describes the company’s ‘values of land use . . . in particular, that science should be thebasis of understanding and managing the environment’ (Rio Tinto 1999: 15).This is precisely the point: whose science are we talking about here? Certainlynot indigenous ecology, a science used by communities for more than 70,000years to ‘manage’ their environment. This scientific and economic reinventionof nature does not recognize that the environmental and social objectives ofdiverse populations are often different and sometimes incompatible (Redclift2000). The new language of sustainable development — ‘scientificunderstanding’, ‘citizenship’, ‘species rights’, ‘intergenerational equity’ —obscures the inequalities and cultural distinctions surrounding environmentalresources.A similar sleight-of-hand is used in justifying opposition to environmentalprotection policies. A recent report (paid for by the coal industry lobby in theUnited States) found that ‘millions of blacks, Hispanics and other minoritiescould be pushed into poverty by tough new restrictions on energy use’ calledfor by the Kyoto Protocol (Mokhiber and Weissman 2000). The fact thatminority communities in the USA have been used as dumping grounds fordecades did not enter the debate and neither did the risks of global warmingto these communities.The role of science in ‘validating’ indigenous knowledge is also problematic,with a double-edged irony. ‘Scientific’ 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 riceproduced larger harvests (Yoon 2000); this ‘success’ of polyculture waspresented 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 Westernscientific and economic perspectives. Why modern scientific practices escapethis 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 andtechnology; rather it is to understand which systems and peoples have beenmarginalized in this process and how control of natural and biologicalresources 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 todeeper meanings about nature and ecology. However, these arguments do notaddress the inequalities of resource use among the world’s populations. It ispossible for a science to be ‘valid’ in its knowledge claims and still producedomination effects. And, despite the advances in science and technology,considerable disagreement still exists among scientists about the causes andconsequences of, as well as solutions to, the world’s environmental problems.The noted biologist Edward Wilson (1992: 325) advocates caution indeveloping ways to regenerate existing ecosystems: ‘ecology is still tooprimitive a science to predict the outcome of predesigned biotas.’ However,there is still the assumption that scientific knowledge will help solve theseproblems in the future.Environmental realism and idealism underlie many of the policy documentsof the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, theConvention on Biodiversity, and multinational trade agreements such asNAFTA and ASEAN, as well as texts on biodiversity and the environmentand books on ‘green business’ (Agenda 21; Barlow 1997; Hawken 1995;Wilson 1992). Barlow (1997: 26), discussing Edward Wilson’s thesis onbiodiversity, writes: ‘Edward Wilson believes that science offers humankindsnot only an awareness of the biodiversity crisis and the tools for saving speciesbut also a story that can change our very souls to take on the task.’ There isalso a cozy relationship between economic ideology and Western science:although admitting that traditional economic valuation methods almostalways undervalue biological diversity, Wilson (1992: 271) calls for newways 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 givethe invisible hand of free-market economics a green thumb.’ Hawken (1995:81) pursues a similar line of reasoning: ‘I believe customers and buyers aregetting incomplete information, because markets do not carry the true costsof our purchases. When customers start receiving proper information — thewhole story — things will change.’ Again, the instrumentalist assumption isclear: there is a collective will to change consumption behavior — all that is needed is ‘proper information’.The Brundtland approach to sustainable development aims at achievingeconomic growth, environmental protection, and equity simultaneously byreconciling the irreconcilable. Although such a goal is laudable, there areserious concerns about whether it is achievable (Kirkby et al. 1995). The




major proposals of the Brundtland agenda include changing the ‘quality’ ofgrowth, ensuring a sustainable level of population, conserving and enhancingthe resource base, managing technology and environmental risks, andincorporating the environment into decision-making. There is also an under-lying assumption that market forces can be relied upon to achieve sustainabledevelopment, although political interventions, international agreements, andnational environmental regulation also have a role to play. However, thenotion of ‘global sustainability’ is problematic in that it obscures structuralinequalities in resource access and use amongst different regions of the world.As we shall see in the next section, discourses of sustainable developmentserve to deepen the existing North–South divide in terms of natural resourceconservation and utilization.

Who Sustains Whose Development?

Definitions employing global perspectives are usually subsumed under amonocultural definition of ‘global’, defined according to a perception of theworld shared by its rulers (Escobar 1995). The reframing of the relationshipbetween economic growth and the environment and the ecocentric philosophyof ‘spaceship earth’ is simply an attempt to socialize environmental costs‘globally’ (McAfee 1999), which assumes equal responsibility for environ-mental degradation while obscuring significant differences and inequities inresource utilization between countries. The sustainability of local cultures,especially peasant cultures, is not addressed; instead, global survival isproblematized as sustainable development, an articulation that privilegesWestern notions of environmentalism and conservation. The ‘problem’ doesnot recognize that Western environmentalism has effects similar to those ofdevelopment: rather than empower peasant populations throughout the world,environmental and conservation policies transfer control of rights andresources to national and international institutions that have failed thesepopulations for over 50 years (Mies and Shiva 1993).‘Global’ environmentalism, espoused as a solution to the environmental illsfacing the planet, remains firmly rooted in the tradition of Western economicthought and dehistoricizes and marginalizes the environmental traditions ofnon-Western cultures. Environmental problems such as pollution do notrecognize national or regional boundaries, yet the ‘global’ solutions advocatedby the industrialized countries perpetuate the dependency relations ofcolonialism. Images of polluted Third World cities abound in the media withno acknowledgment of the corresponding responsibility of industrializedcountries, which consume 80 percent of the world’s aluminum, paper, ironand steel; 75 percent of the world’s energy; 75 percent of its fish resources;70 percent of its ozone-destroying CFCs; and 61 percent of its meat (Renner1997). The poorer regions of the world destroy or export their naturalresources to meet the demands of the richer nations or to meet debt-servicingneeds arising from the ‘austerity’ measures dictated by the World Bank. It isironic 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 enjoystandards of living that are dependent on the ‘austerity’ measures of the poorernations. Neither the dangers of environmental destruction nor the benefits of environmental protection are equally distributed: protection measurescontinue to be dictated by the industrialized countries, often at the expenseof local rural communities. This perverse logic pervades notions of ‘sustain-able’ growth. Consumer spending and ‘confidence’ are primary criteria forsustaining the socioeconomic system whereas welfare policies for the poorare 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 anecessary condition for ‘sustainable growth’ (Harvey 1996).Exploitation of these communities in the name of environmental protectionand conservation continues despite 50 years of ‘decolonization’ in the ThirdWorld. Colonial modes of conservation are still deployed by the new nationstates. In India, for instance, vast tracts of land used by peasant communitiesare designated as ‘tiger reserves’ for the enjoyment of foreign tourists andlocal elites, while the communities who depend on the land for sustenanceare displaced. This has happened with the Chenchu community in southernIndia. The community pays for the protection of tigers but no one pays forthe conservation of their communities, something they have been doing forthousands of years (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). An alternative solutionproposed by the Chenchu tribe did not merit serious consideration by stategovernment officials: the proposal was to transfer all the tigers to the capitalcity of Hyderabad, after evacuating all its residents, and to designate the citya ‘tiger reserve’.Sustainable development attempts to reconcile these opposing interests andaims to maximize economic and environmental benefits simultaneously. Thisis a contradiction in terms, because sustainability and development are basedon very different and often incompatible assumptions. To sustain means tosupport 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 tenetsof modern Western science (Visvanathan 1991). Environmental concernsarticulated in the discourse of sustainable development are concerns becausethey 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 thislogic 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 aroundconserving rural spaces, valuing the aesthetics of nature, keeping beaches




clean, and providing the opportunity to acquire a suntan without the risk ofcancer. Environmentalism in the Third World, especially in rural areas, isabout keeping control over natural resources, about having control over thetechnology that transforms the environment (Redclift 1987). As the rate ofinternational transactions continues to increase in today’s global marketeconomy, environmental degradation in the developing countries alsocontinues steadily to worsen. As several researchers have pointed out, the so-called ‘greening’ of industry in developed countries has, in many cases, beenachieved at the expense of Third World environments through the relocationof polluting industries to developing countries (Escobar 1995; Goldsmith1997; Redclift 1987).Critics of sustainable development also argue that it can colonize areas ofThird World social life that are not yet ruled by the logic of the market or theconsumer, areas such as forests, water rights, and sacred sites (Escobar 1995;Visvanathan 1991). The rural poor directly depend on the biophysicalenvironment for survival, and notions of conservation and protection that arecommon in developed countries are contestable in developing countries.Although poverty and environmental degradation are often linked in theliterature, the role of ‘development’ in diminishing the rural population’saccess to natural resources is not frequently discussed. Rather, the tendencyis to blame the victim: farmers and peasants who engage in industrializedfarming using fertilizers and pesticides are blamed without examining therole of the chemical industry or the market-based institutions that areresponsible for promoting their use. Global discourses of sustainabledevelopment, as evidenced by the policies of the World Bank, the UnitedNations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization,all assume that poverty rather than affluence is the real problem ofenvironmental destruction. Slash-and-burn peasants are blamed for thedestruction of the forests, whereas logging and timber companies, which havea far greater impact, are given tax incentives for following ‘sustainable’practices (Banerjee 1998). ‘Green’ incentives are provided for corporationsand policy measures are put in place to evaluate and minimize the ecologicalimpacts of logging. There are no indicators that can measure the devastatingimpact on local communities. Even the construction of a single road hasmultiplier effects: it reduces the transaction costs of the logging company (atpublic expense) while increasing land alienation of local communities,converting a hitherto knowledgeable and resourceful community into a poolof ‘unskilled labor’ (Gupta 1997). This ‘sustainable’ process is praised bycorporations and governments for creating employment opportunities forlocal communities, but they fail to recognize the disempowerment andpoverty created as a result of the dispossession of land and natural resources.In the sustainable development discourse, poverty is identified as the agentof environmental destruction, thus legitimating prior notions of growth anddevelopment.The global definition of environmental problems by the North results in localproblems for the South because the handful of industrialized countries thatset the global agenda are guided by ‘narrow, local and parochial interests’




(Shiva 1993: 150). Conflicting objectives over resource use further exacerbatethe equity problem because the industrialized countries sustain inequalities byimposing a monopoly knowledge that constitutes the parameters of globalenvironmental problems (Beck 1996; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Globalenvironmental policy regimes, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness, do littleto address the concerns of indigenous peoples. The Second InternationalIndigenous Forum on Climate Change at The Hague in November 2000 issueda declaration listing their concerns. Of primary concern was the exclusion of indigenous peoples from participating in the development and theimplementation of the Kyoto Protocol. The Forum also professed concern that

‘. . . the measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based ona worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only theircarbon absorption capacity. This worldview and its practices adversely affect the livesof Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly,our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which areconsecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations.’ (IIFC 2000)

The notion of ‘carbon sinks’ leads to a system of tradable emissions: countriesare allowed not to reduce their emissions if they plant trees instead. Thissystem 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 arevalued only for their ‘carbon sequestration capacity’. This monoculturalmindset of ‘scientific’ forestry does not recognize that forests are not just ‘carbon sinks’ or timber mines for local communities: they are theirsource of food, agriculture, and medicine, in short, their entire liveli-hood. Despite highlighting issues of poverty and equity, contemporarydiscourses of sustainable development do not criticize the structuralconditions that characterize the increasing intrusion of capital into the domainof nature, which results in the capitalization, expropriation, commodifi-cation, and homogenization of nature. The economic relations that underpincontemporary sustainable development strategies have evolved from theviolent histories of colonial capitalist relations, which informed developmentfor much of the 20th century. If discourses of sustainable developmentarticulate notions of equity, democracy inclusion, then a critical perspectivewill allow us also to see it as ‘a product of a racialized justification formodernization, in which marginalized peoples are subject to a newdependency and a new colonialism’ (Bandy 1996: 542).

Sustainable Development in Organizations: Implications forOrganization Theory and Practice

How and why did the discourse on the environment arise in the first place?Many historians trace the modern Western environmental movement to thepublication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Whereas earlierenvironmental concerns focused mainly on suburban aesthetics or localized




pollution problems, Carson’s representation of environmental problemshighlighted the threats to nature (and the human body) posed by widespreaduse 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. Publicperceptions of environmental problems and increased environmentallegislation were two key reasons the environment became an important issuefor 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 alsopaint themselves green to avoid regulatory control: one of the aims of the‘Vision of Sustainable Development’ promoted by the Business Council forSustainable Development is to ‘maintain entrepreneurial freedom throughvoluntary initiatives rather than regulatory coercion’.In recent years there has been a minor explosion of articles dealing withcorporate greening in the management literature. Much of this literatureattempts to incorporate current notions of sustainable development intocorporate strategy (see, for example, the 2000 special issue on themanagement of organizations in the natural environment in the Academy ofManagement Journal, the 1995 special issue on ecologically sustainableorganizations in the Academy of Management Review, or the 1992 specialissue 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; Crane2000; Fineman 1996).That corporations play a significant role in achieving sustainability is not indoubt. The question is, are current environmental practices compatible withnotions of sustainability? Some researchers caution that the greening ofindustry should not be confused with the notion of sustainable development(Pearce et al. 1989; Schot et al. 1997; Welford 1997; Westley and Vredenburg1996). Although there have been significant advances in pollution control andemissions reduction, this does not mean that current modes of developmentare sustainable for the planet as a whole (Hart 1997). Most companies focuson operational issues when it comes to greening and lack a ‘vision ofsustainability’ (Hart 1997). In a recent ‘Greening of Industry’ conference, theproposed corporate strategy for sustainable development had no surprises:the focus was on ‘scientific innovation, public service and turning the worldpopulations into active consumers of its new products, and expanding globalbusiness into the less affluent segments of the world’s population’ (Rossi et al. 2000: 275).Echoing Wilson’s (1992) call for a ‘biology of restoration’, Hawken (1995:11) suggests an ‘economy of restoration’ as a solution to the environmentalcrisis. Corporations would ‘compete to conserve and increase resources ratherthan deplete them’. Hawken proposes three ways by which this can beachieved: eliminate waste from all industrial production; change our energyuse from carbon based to solar and hydrogen based; and create feedback andaccountability systems that reward restorative behavior. Although these




solutions are also informed by environmental realism and idealism andassume there is both a scientific solution and a collective will of consumersin the affluent countries to ‘serve and nurture the aspirations of the poor andeducated’ (Hawken 1995: 214), developing technologies, processes, andregulatory mechanisms to reduce the environmental impact of business isdefinitely one area in which there is agreement among all constituents ofsociety. In addition, Hawken suggests that the small- and medium-scale sectoris better able to carry out the task of restoration effectively than are largetransnational corporations.Efforts to broaden the scope of greening to include social sustainability arealso under way. This ‘triple bottom line’ approach assesses the social andenvironmental impacts of business, as distinct from its economic impact(Elkington, 1999). Elkington (1999: 73) describes interactions between theenvironment, society, and the economy as three ‘shear zones’ that produce a variety of opportunities and challenges for organizations. Many of theadvances in cleaner technologies and emissions reductions have arisen fromthe economic–environment shear zone, which is an area that businesscorporations are most comfortable with since it delivers measurable benefitsto them. Outcomes of the social–environment and social–economy shearzones are more ambiguous (for corporations at least), although the assumptionhere is that organizations need to integrate these as well in order to survivein the long term.Theoretical perspectives of the triple bottom line approach focus onmaximizing sustainability opportunities (corporate social responsibility,stakeholder relations, and corporate governance) while minimizingsustainability-related risks (corporate risk management, environmental, healthand safety audits, and reporting). Proponents of the triple bottom line claim that, by using these and other parameters, it is possible to map theenvironmental and social domains of sustainability and ultimately to assessthe performance of corporations. However, research on the environmentaland social dimensions of corporate sustainability is very much in its infancy.Although this approach is proving to be popular among large transnationalcorporations, the impact on local communities is unclear. The samecompanies that are being targeted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)and indigenous communities because of their negative environmental andsocial impacts are the leaders in espousing triple bottom line principles; it remains to be seen whether this approach can deliver real benefits tocommunities or whether it becomes a more sophisticated form of green-washing. There is a real danger that the glossy ‘social performance’ reportsof transnational corporations may deflect attention from the grim realities oftheir environmental performance.Discourses of sustainable development are becoming increasinglycorporatized. For instance, the Dow Jones recently launched a ‘SustainabilityGroup Index’ after a survey of Fortune 500 companies. A sustainablecorporation was defined as one ‘that aims at increasing long-term shareholdervalue by integrating economic, environmental and social growth opportunitiesinto its corporate and business strategies’ (Dow Jones Sustainability Group




Index 2000). It is interesting to observe how notions of sustainability areconstructed, manipulated, and represented in both the popular business pressand academic literature. As evidence of the deleterious effects of developmentmounts, the discourse shifts from sustainable development to the morepositive sounding sustainability and then shifts the focus to corporatesustainability. Corporate discourses on sustainability produce an elision thatdisplaces the focus from global planetary sustainability to sustaining thecorporation through ‘growth opportunities’. What happens if environmentaland social issues do not result in growth opportunities remains unclear, theassumption being that global sustainability can be achieved only throughmarket exchanges. This (post)modern form of corporate social responsi-bility produces a truth effect that is not dissimilar to Milton Friedman’s (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 ‘today’sfundamental economics’, corporate discourses on sustainable development,not surprisingly, promote the business-as-usual (except greener) line and donot describe any radical change in world-views. As Monsanto’s ex-CEORobert 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 forthe study of organizations? Given how this discourse is constructed at higherlevels of the political economy, it is unlikely that any radical revision ofsustainable development will emerge from organizations. For any suchrethinking to occur, a more critical approach to organization theory is requiredand new questions need to be raised not only about the ecological and socialsustainability of business corporations but about the political economy itself.Corporate environmental management practices are informed by the largerdebate on sustainable development and, consequently, radical revisions canoccur only if there is a shift in thinking at a macro level. I will discuss threeimplications of a critique of sustainable development for the study oforganizations.First, we need to broaden our definition of organizations and open up newspaces for critique. An overwhelming proportion of research in managementfocuses on traditional profit-oriented corporations. The bulk of research onnot-for-profit organizations is framed by similar corporate goals: how can weraise more money for charity, how can we get more people into museums orlibraries or zoos? Very little research takes place on strategies for activistgroups and organizations, and the theories and practices required to opposecorporate actions (Frooman 1999). There are very few studies in themanagement literature about the operations of international bodies such asthe World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank.Although these are not corporate organizations in the traditional sense of theterm, they are powerful agents in advancing the discourse on sustainabilityand 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 mightprovide new spaces for critique and resistance. Although critical organizationtheorists portray organizations as structures of domination, legitimacy, and‘reflexive social systems’ (Courpasson 2000; Leflaive 1996), recent debatesin organization theory between modernist and postmodernist forms oforganization are curiously silent on the colonial dimensions that frameorganization–environment relationships.Second, we need to open up new spaces and provide new frameworks fororganization–stakeholder dialogues as well as critically to examine thedynamics of the relationships between corporations, NGOs, governments,community groups, and funding agencies. Contemporary discourses oforganizations and their stakeholders are inevitably constrained by ‘practical’reasons such as the profit-seeking behavior of corporations (Treviño andWeaver 1999). Although the vast literature on corporate social responsibility,stakeholder integration, and business ethics is based on the assumption thatbusiness is influenced by societal concerns, the dominance of societal interestsin radically reshaping business practices is in some question (Mueller 1994).The domain of corporate social responsibility cannot be assessed by primarilyeconomic criteria and neither can an environmental ethic be developedthrough an ‘ethically pragmatic managerial’ morality that primarily servesorganizational interests (Snell 2000; ten Bos 1997). Although NGOs do serve as important counterpoints, their relationships with corporations andgovernments are often ambiguous and framed by categories furnished byinternational institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank,categories that are inimical to many groups that are negatively affected bycorporations (Spivak 1999). Increasing accountability of both corporationsand NGOs to local communities and translating ‘participation’ in moremeaningful local contexts without reducing social movements to some otherform of domination (the prerogatives of donor agencies, for example) arechallenges 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 theirconstructs 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 isunclear how alternate conceptualizations of an organization’s environment(Shrivastava 1994) or ‘a complete moral transformation within thecorporation’ (Crane 2000: 673) will naturally lead to social justice or a moreequitable distribution of resources. Fundamental changes in organizationscannot occur unless there are corresponding shifts in the larger politicaleconomy and crucial questions regarding the role of a corporation and itslicense to operate in society are addressed. All the exhortations of greenorganization theorists do not begin to address the tremendous impedimentsto restructuring the political economy and abandoning conventional notionsof competition and consumption (Newton and Harte 1997). If organizational




analysis involves understanding the processes of how organizations areproduced in particular societal contexts (Leflaive 1996) and how ‘externalconstraints 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 ofgrassroots organizations involved in resistance movements as well ashighlight corporate strategies of co-optation and ‘management’ of theenvironment. It should examine the structures and processes that discursivelyproduce ‘external environmental constraints’ and how social and culturalrelations are changed by organizations. It should broaden the debate to includethe political economy and alternative approaches to addressing environmentalproblems, something that the current ‘environmental management’ discoursefails to do (Levy 1997). It should also allow us to see how nation states,international organizations, and transnational corporations support the needsof international capital. A critique of capital and capitalisms should be placedfirmly at the center of the debate rather than in the uneasy invisible positionit currently occupies in most organizational theories (Pitelis 1993).Arguments that question the sustainability of current economic systems arerarely found in the literature and much of the theorizing on green business iswhat Newton and Harte (1997) call ‘technicist kitsch’, laced with liberal dosesof evangelical rhetoric. As long as conceptions of sustainable developmentcontinue to be driven solely by rationalizations of competitive advantage, noparadigmatic shift in world views of nature and sustainability can take place.‘Green consumption’ will not save the world because, rather than attemptingpolitically to reconstitute the mode of modern production to meet ecologicalconstraints, it advocates ‘nonpolitical, nonsocial, noninstitutional solutionsto environmental problems’ (Luke 1994: 158). Corporate ‘green marketing’strategies continue to focus on the economic bottom line at the organizationallevel (Banerjee 1999) without addressing the macro marketing implicationsof the relationships between technological, political, and economicinstitutions 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 capitalistdevelopment increases social inequalities and, despite its knowledge claims,results in a loss of ecological knowledge. Any effort at envisioning alternateecologies must involve visions of alternate societies and politics as well (Guha1989).The debate over biotechnology is a pertinent example of how broaderscientific, political, and economic discourses, structured by colonial formationsthat frame North–South relations, can produce discursive effects at theorganizational level. The loss of biodiversity owing to industrial agricultureinvolving heavy chemical inputs is recognized as a global environmentalproblem. The solution proposed by the scientific and business community isa new revolution: biotechnology. This new revolution is simply a logicalextension of the ‘chemical revolution’ of the 1950s and not only serves tosustain corporate and scientific structures of power by creating intellectualproperty 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 theworld’s plant species. Patents and intellectual property laws on geneticresources such as seeds protect and serve the corporate and institutionalinterests of developed countries while violating peasants’ and farmers’ rightsin the Third World. Medicinal plants, nurtured and sustained by indigenouscultures, were appropriated by pharmaceutical companies without anypayment and later used to develop profitable drugs protected by patents andtrademarks. The knowledge of indigenous cultures in recognizing and usingthe 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 North–South conflict over the World Trade Organization’scontroversial Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual PropertyRights (TRIPS) at the Uruguay Round of the GATT (WTO 2000) is a casein point. The TRIPS agreement legitimizes private intellectual property rightsover 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-biologicalprocesses’. Two related problems arise from imposing a regime of intellectualproperty rights in indigenous knowledge. First, ‘traditional’ knowledgebelongs 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 (somewillingly, a majority through coercion) that have adverse impacts on theirlivelihoods by restricting community access to natural resources. ‘Equitable’sharing of commercial benefits through mutually beneficial contracts betweenindigenous groups and transnational corporations are unlikely to occur given the disparities in resources and capacities to monitor or enforce theterms of any contract. The TRIPS agreement resulted in mass protests byindigenous and peasant communities as well as NGOs in Asia, Africa, andSouth America that continue to this day (Dawkins, 1997). These resistancemovements, along with widespread protests by European consumers, havehad some effect in slowing the adoption rates of biotechnology bytransnational corporations. After an aggressive campaign to promote bio-technology in agriculture, several leading transnational corporations havenow retreated from this arena, at least temporarily, because of the backlashby European consumers.The regime of intellectual property rights creates a new meaning of bio-diversity that focuses on commodifying and trading the benefits ofbiodiversity. For this to occur, privatization and ownership are necessaryconditions (Redclift, 1987). Once again, biodiversity becomes framed interms of market preferences, resulting in the poor (but ‘biodiversity rich’populations) sustaining the rich. Assessing market preferences for nature isbased on invalid assumptions, as McAfee (1999: 133) argues: ‘contrary tothe premise of the global economic paradigm there can be no universal metricfor comparing and exchanging the real values of nature among different




groups of people from different cultures, and with vastly different degrees ofpolitical and economic power.’The reinvention of nature by biotechnology, apart from assuming no materialecological impact, provides legitimacy for the dominant order and rulingelites. As Harvey (1996: 147) points out, notions of ‘scarcity’ and ‘limits’ innatural resources are rooted in social systems in which a natural resourcebecomes a ‘cultural, technical and economic appraisal of elements andprocesses in nature that can be applied to fulfil social objectives and goalsthrough specific material practices’. For example, the proposed mechanismsfor ensuring a ‘free and fair’ flow of information, such as intellectual propertyrights over genetically modified living organisms, serve to protect certaininterests. The controversial TRIPS agreement was developed ‘in large part’by the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC), which consisted of manytransnational firms including Bristol Myers, Merck, Monsanto, Du Pont andPfizer. Monsanto’s representative described the TRIPS strategy:

‘[We were able to] distill from the laws of the more advanced countries thefundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property. . . Besidesselling our concept at home, we went to Geneva where we presented our documentto the staff of the GATT Secretariat. . . . What I have described to you is absolutelyunprecedented in GATT. Industry identified a major problem for international trade.It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and othergovernments . . . the industries and traders of the world have played simultaneouslythe role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians.’ (Cited inRifkin, 1999: 52)

The colonial capitalist undertones of this statement are not hard to discern:the ‘fundamental principles’ for protecting ‘all forms’ of intellectual propertyobviously 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 genepool, inspiring ‘today’s molecular biologists and corporate entrepreneurs intheir quest to capture and colonize the last frontier, the genetic commons thatis the heart of the natural world’ (Rifkin, 1999: 170).The recent battle over patenting extracts from the Neem tree, known and usedfor its medicinal properties for thousands of years, is an example of this‘biopiracy’. Claiming intellectual property rights over Neem extracts is basedon a system of multiple exclusions that denies indigenous knowledge andagricultural practices. The knowledge that these extracts could be used formedicinal purposes, as pesticides, and for contraception already existed andwas ‘in the prior public domain’, which is what patenting laws seek toestablish. If this knowledge had existed in the West, these patent applicationswould never have been considered. The fact that this prior knowledge existedin poor rural communities allowed a non-novel entity to be constructed asnovel and patented under current intellectual property rights legislation(Shiva, 1993). The struggle is far from over: legislative changes in theEuropean Union recently allowed patents to cover life forms (Downes, 1996).The number of applications for genetic patents received in the United Statesrose 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 asenforce, patents on life forms. Another argument made by proponents ofbiotechnology is that the Third World is too poor and cannot afford to worryabout bioethics. As Shiva (1993) has pointed out, the dichotomy betweenethics 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 alternateknowledge systems.

Alternate Visions

Although I have painted a fairly dismal picture of the domination effects ofenvironmental discourse, it is important to realize that these practices andpolicies are contested. Resistance movements against globalized corporateagriculture and biotechnology have emerged in different parts of the world.Global alliances among diverse groups have had recent successes, mostnotably 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 toprevent resistance being marginalized (or polarized as being between‘uninformed citizens’ and ‘informed scientists’) and for the debate to continuein the public sphere.Many groups all over the world are engaged in dialogue, protests, and violentand non-violent action with corporations, governments, and internationalinstitutions. They vary from small, locally based activists to large, powerfulNGOs and environmental organizations, as well as coalitions of differentgroups. These include the ‘50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for GlobalEconomic Justice’, a coalition of over 200 organizations (grassroots,women’s, solidarity, policy, social and economic justice, youth, labor, anddevelopment) working at international, national, and local levels in an attemptto transform the lending policies and structural adjustment programs of theWorld Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The ‘50 years is enough’refers to 50 years of development policies in Africa, which the coalitionclaims have been a complete failure, with overall standards of living lowerthan 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, Educación, 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, thereneeds to be a reconceptualization of current notions of progress anddevelopment. These concepts not only are limiting but represent a failure ofthe imagination: the Western technocentric approach serves only to empowercorporate and national economic interests and prevents communities frompreserving their rights to control their resources. An unpacking of the notion




of development is required and concepts of sustainability must go beyondseeking a compromise between environmental protection and economicgrowth. This involves reversing the industrial appropriation of nature as wellas recognizing the structural and natural limits of sustainable development(Redclift 1987). It requires a search not for developmental alternatives butfor alternatives to development (Escobar 1995). The current focus on capitaland markets to achieve sustainable development is restrictive and disallowsalternate ways of thinking and knowing. We need to apply insights from other forms of knowledge, however ‘traditional’ they may be, and interpretthese knowledges in economic, scientific, political, cultural, and social terms that challenge existing views of the world and of nature. Sustainabledevelopment is not just about managerial efficiency (although that has a partto play); it is about rethinking human–nature relationships, re-examiningcurrent doctrines of progress and modernity, and privileging alternate visionsof the world. It requires a retracing of steps to the juncture where ‘nature’became transformed into ‘environment’, distancing the natural world andpositioning it as a resource to be mastered, in the way that human feelingsand 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 visionscan be imagined only by rescuing sustainable development from thisdichotomy.A critical perspective will enable us to recognize that current norms forsustainable development have emerged within a particular historical context,which is the modern capitalist notion of the business corporation operatingwithin a Judeo-Christian ethical framework. In addition to making thisassumption explicit and critically examining its implications, we should seekalternate ways of constructing knowledge and developing norms. Currentmanagement theories rarely question whose norms are used; rather they tendto normalize conflicting criteria for development and progress. As Rifkin(1999) points out, rather than focusing on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of thenew biotechnologies, we need to ask difficult questions. What are theconsequences for the global economy and society of reducing the world’sgene pool to patented intellectual property controlled exclusively by a handfulof transnational corporations? What are the structures and processes of powerinherent in the new technologies? What impact do they have on the biologicaldiversity of the planet? Who controls this technology? What are its social andcultural impacts? Although developing countries continue to argue for accessto these new technologies in various international forums, caution should be exercised in monitoring the impact of these technologies in order not torepeat the mistakes of the Green Revolution, which, while enhancing cropproduction in a few regions, also accentuated inequalities and increasedincome disparities (Shiva 1991).Deconstructing singular constructions of nature is important since it allowsus 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 orderingbecome reproduced, legitimated, excluded, validated through appeals tonature or the natural’ (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 15). For instance,universalized scientific discourses of the environment tend to ignore localcultural differences in North–South trade and environmental relations whilemasking 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 globaldiscourse of environmental problems to which the only solution is for societyto ‘modernize itself out of the environmental crisis’ by increased investmentsin new ‘environmentally friendly’ technologies.In many ways the critique of sustainable development and its ancillarycorporate environmental management practices is a critique of modernity,with its metanarratives of progress and development. Nature has beendeployed as a singular category in this discourse to promote an ecologicalworld order that continues to repress alternate formulations. As mentionedearlier, there is no one global solution. I am not suggesting that the way outis a return to the premodern, even if this were possible. Modernity hasproduced uneven effects in the Third World, where premodern, modern, andpostmodern forms coexist in heterogeneous configurations (Escobar 1992).Although much is to be gained by using insights from postmodernism toexpose the fallacies behind rationality and progress, this must be accompaniedby questions of social justice and a position of visible political interest. Thepolitics of representation and the nexus between interests and identity (despitetheir ‘essentialist’ overtones) continue to play a crucial role in indigenousstruggles throughout the world. Despite postmodernism’s disavowal ofmetanarratives, there are problems with the way the post in postmodernismcan operate in the guise of knowledge (see Radhakrishnan 1994). Postmoderninsights into the fragmentation of identities, the multiplicity of politicalspaces, and the decentered character of social life can contribute to thecreation of new collective organizations and social movements thatacknowledge multiplicity and contradictions without imposing a unitary logic(Escobar 1992). Postmodern formulations of nature and the environmentmight draw attention to the ‘ideologies that reify and reduce nature, includinghuman 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 shouldwe do or not do to nature to save it, but instead how do we understandourselves and our world and how should we negotiate our relationships withourselves? This would displace categories that have been used to constructThird World groups while generating alternate ways of seeing andconstructing social and cultural self-descriptions in grassroots socialmovements (Escobar 1992).Recovering biodiversity and the commons involves a refusal to recognize lifeforms as corporate inventions and property and allow their privatization.Environmental struggles by peasant populations are not just about land orresources: 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 socialmovements do not focus on ‘the whole of society’ but are concerned withlocal and regional communities. As Escobar (1992) argues, these are notteleological projects with predetermined directions, but they foster a sense ofagency in the communities. This requires a transformation of the political,economic, and institutional arrangements that characterized the regime ofdevelopment, in Esteva’s words, ‘to intensify the process of construction of direct democracy’ (Esteva 1986, cited in Escobar 1992), which severalsocial movements are attempting to do (the Zapatista movement in Mexicocomes to mind).The rhetoric of democracy and participation in contemporary discourses offree markets and in international forums on sustainable development alsoneeds to be examined with a critical lens. At the 1992 Rio Summit there wereopen conflicts between corporations, their trade associations, NGOs, andindigenous community leaders over environmental regulations. The demandsof NGOs were shelved, and instead a voluntary code of conduct developedby the Business Council for Sustainable Development (consisting of a numberof transnational corporations) was approved in what was supposed to be ademocratic 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 aboutcorporate responsibility and accountability for environmental destruction.Development, sustainable or otherwise, in a globalizing world is inherentlyanti-democratic, as several indigenous groups have found. As SubcomandanteMarcos, a leader of the Zapitistas, stated:

‘When we rose up against a national government, we found that it did not exist. Inreality we were up against financial capital, against speculation, which is what makesdecisions 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 theworld. In this case, officials of the World Bank met in Geneva and decidedto give a loan to Mexico on condition it exports meat under the agreementslaid down by the World Trade Organization. Land used by indigenouscommunities to grow corn is now used to raise cattle for fast food markets in the United States. This is an inherently undemocratic process in whichpeasant populations do not have the right to decide how they want to live. Itis another example of how imperialism operates in the Third World: one‘state’ (in this case representing the interests of the rich countries, theinternational institutions they support, and their transnational corporations)controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society, byforce, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence.The following was a response to the Zapatista uprising by a transnationalbank, a major financer in the restructuring of Mexico’s economy:




‘The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effectivecontrol of the national territory and security policy.’ (Mexico, Political Update, ChaseManhattan Bank; cited in Zapatista 1998)

If this is an example of a corporate ‘triple bottom line’ strategy to integratesocial and environmental issues, the future for resistance movements is verybleak indeed.The diversity of social movements in different parts of the world mightprovide an alternative reading guide that could transform hegemonic notionsof development and modernity (Escobar 1992). The study of ‘traditionalecological knowledge’ is becoming increasingly in vogue for Westernscientists and pharmaceutical corporations. It is crucial to examine thispractice with a critical lens in order to understand the stakes involved: whois doing the study and for what purpose? For example, an ongoing UnitedNations Development Programme project is called ‘Global SustainableDevelopment Facility — 2B2M: 2 Billion to the Market By the Year 2020’.The project title itself embodies what is wrong with current notions ofsustainable development in that it reveals the continuities of this alleged‘discontinuity’ from prior notions of economic growth and development. Thefact that a significant proportion of the project’s team members are fromtransnational corporations with documented negative environmental andsocial impacts on indigenous and rural populations simply strengthens the notion that these international organizations do not and cannot servecommunity interests. Not one of several hundreds of United Nations projectshas ever challenged economic globalism or growth-oriented solutions despitetheir rhetoric of ‘empowering’ rural communities. In the current politicaleconomy it is simply not possible simultaneously to empower ruralcommunities and transnational corporations, and, as we have seen, anycompromise tends seriously to disadvantage the former group. In the searchfor alternatives to development, apart from a critique of contemporary notionsof development, we need to situate our theories within appropriate socialmovements: for example, traditional ecological knowledge should not beseparated from the political, economic, and cultural struggles of indigenouspeoples and peasant populations (Carruthers 1996).

Conclusion

Just as the development era consolidated the hegemony of expansionistmonopoly capital in Third World sites through large-scale, export-orientedprograms and policies that inverted the survival needs of local cultures, thesustainable development era also threatens to ‘map people into certaincoordinates of control’ (Escobar 1995). Any activity outside the marketeconomy is disallowed, which seriously disadvantages the ‘subsistenceactivities’ of peasants and indigenous communities all over the world. Thereliance on technology to solve all problems — the hallmark of thedevelopment era — continues today with the comforting caveat thattechnology use should be ‘appropriate’. The violence that the so-called ‘Green




Revolution’ perpetrated on peasant populations is well documented (Miesand Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989, 1991). The same agencies and corporations that hailed the development of pesticides and herbicides as a technologicalgreen revolution (now deemed ‘unsustainable’) are extolling the virtues ofbiotechnology. Farmers and indigenous communities continue actively toresist this new imposition, which once again threatens their survival in thename of sustainable development.Sustainable development, despite its promise of local autonomy, is notegalitarian because environmental destruction is not egalitarian: it is moredevastating for people who possess few resources to prevent the destructionof 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 ourfreedoms’, then contemporary discourses of sustainable development, despitetheir emphasis on quality of life, fall short on delivering freedom; in fact, likedevelopment, sustainable development delivers economic unfreedoms to amarginalized majority of the world’s population. These populations are moreoften than not composed of the poor, the people of color, the women and thechildren of the Third World (Bandy 1996). The literature on sustainabledevelopment has virtually no discussion on the empowerment of localcommunities, 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 growthmodel of development, but it positions marginalized local communities aseither victims or beneficiaries of development. In the era of sustainabledevelopment, it appears these communities will continue to be inscribed aspassive objects of Western history and to bear the brunt of what Mies andShiva (1993) ironically call the ‘white man’s burden’, a burden that meansfurther loss of community rights and resources. The new biotechnologies ofsustainable development have the potential to transform farmers into factoryworkers on a global scale (Dawkins 1997). This will convert seed custodiansinto seed consumers, a development that is not sustainable.Sustainable development is to be managed in the same way development wasmanaged: through ethnocentric, capitalist notions of managerial efficiencythat simply reproduce earlier articulations of decentralized capitalism in theguise of ‘sustainable capitalism’. The macroeconomic criteria of sustainabledevelopment have now become corporatized: development is sustainable onlyif it is profitable, it is sustainable only if it can be transacted through themarket. This notion of sustainable development packaged and sold byinternational agencies, governments, and transnational corporations needs tobe unpacked and deconstructed, which is what I have attempted to do in thispaper. As Visvanathan (1991: 380) points out, the Brundtland report, OurCommon Future, focuses on uniformity and order; it organizes the future intoresources, energy, populations, cities and towns, with little place for plurality,difference or multiplicity. There is still a belief that better technology andmanagement and better and more ‘inclusive’ procedures by internationalinstitutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization cansave the planet. Eco-efficiency, green marketing, and eco-modernization will




not save the planet. Current discourses on sustainability ensure that economicrationality determines ecological rationality, resulting in even further erosionof alternate cultural and social values assigned to nature. In effect theyextinguish the very cultural and social forces from which possible solutionsto the present crisis might emerge. As Redclift (2000) points out, there is adanger that current discourses of sustainability, with their focus on what issustainable and how it is measured, will lose their radical and political edge.Perhaps sustainable development will follow the fate of the modernenvironmental movement, which is being increasingly depoliticized byenvironmental policies that translate environmental choices into marketpreferences.As Gould (2000: 12) argues, if discourses of sustainable development are toretain their radical and political edge, they ‘must ultimately be rooted in therelationship between specific human populations and specific ecosystemslocated in specific places’. Transnationalism and international institutionsoperating under neoliberal economic regimes have little regard for thespecificities of places or the communities that inhabit them and cannot andwill not generate sustainable local economies. Current development patterns(even those touted as ‘sustainable’) disrupt social system and ecosystemrelations rather than ensuring that natural resource use by local communitiesmeets their basic needs at a level of comfort that is satisfactory as assessedby those same communities. What is needed is not a common future but thefuture as commons, ‘the plurality of life worlds to which all citizens haveaccess. It is not merely the availability of nature as being but of alternativeimaginations, skills that survival in the future might require’ (Visvanathan1991: 383).While continuing the epistemic violence of colonial development, sustain-able development simultaneously reifies global capitalism as the liberatingand protecting force that can ensure survival of the human race — this is thelogic of the world it seeks to construct and impose. The Third World, still inneed of development, now needs to be told how to develop sustainably. Theconsumer is still the king: nature is not so much understood as consumed, andthe power dynamics in this new era of globalization and postdevelopmentremain 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 scienceand technology, and of Western notions of progress that in turn legitimizesthe violence of (post)modernity. The challenge of sustainable developmentis ultimately about challenging this legitimacy, it is about challenging theepistemological foundations of knowledge and of the power this knowledgehas in defining reality. Perhaps revisiting other knowledges will enable us todefine another reality, a reality that does not privilege the nature–culturedichotomy, which has proved so disempowering for billions of people. Butthat is another story.




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Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management at the InternationalGraduate School of Management, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Hereceived his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996. He hastaught there as well as at the University of Wollongong, where he headed the doctoralprogram, and RMIT University, where he was Director of the Doctor of BusinessAdministration program. His research interests are in the areas of sustainabledevelopment, corporate environmentalism, sociocultural aspects of globalization,postcolonial theories, and Indigenous ecology. His work has appeared inOrganization, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Marketing,Organization & Environment, Media, Culture & Society, the Journal of BusinessResearch, the Journal of Environmental Education, the Journal of Advertising, andAdvances in Consumer Research.Address: International Graduate School of Management, University of SouthAustralia, Level 5, Way Lee Building, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide,SA 5000, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

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