The famous1963 song by Bob Dylan The Times They Are A-Changing rings true in the year
2011. As in the1960s, there are young and old people on the streets demanding change
to the economic system, an end of war, climate justice, women’s rights, gender equity
and true democracy. The year has seen Arab revolutions, European governments toppling,
faltering banking systems, and the occupation movement full of young and old
spreading the message of the 99 percent fromWall Street to 900 cities around theworld

Frederique Apfel-Marglin

Wendy Harcourt

Harcourt, W. (Wendy)

Erasmus University Digital Repository

UpfrontEditorial: The Times They Are A-Changin’WENDY HARCOURTThe famous1963 song by Bob Dylan The Times TheyAre A-Changin’rings true in the year2011. As in the1960s, there are young and old people on the streets demanding changeto the economic system, an end of war, climate justice, women’s rights, gender equityand true democracy. The year has seen Arab revolutions, European governments top-pling, faltering banking systems, and the occupation movement full of young and oldspreading themessage of the 99 percent fromWall Street to 900 cities around theworld.All through history, there are major moments of change, bringing fear for the futurefor some but also tremendous hope for new generations. Now with social networkinginformation, complete with images, digital posters, commentary from journalists andany one who cares to and can tweet, spreads so quickly that just by receiving messagesor blogging you feel you are participating in history. New images, new voices, new waysof organizing seem to be spilling into conversations on all levels as people from TahrirSquare to Zuccotti Park demand economic justice and want to hold the financial systemaccountable for the deep inequalities that rip through societies everywhere.For those of usworking in development, this need for change, and the search for socialand economic justice, is not new, not at all; for years we have been saying that we needsystemic change to politics, economic, military, gender hierarchies and social systems.But with the years the intersecting interests, the proliferation of different powers, thecomplexities of negotiations have led to many development activists becoming moreintertwined with the dominant economic logic. As such, we have moved well offthe mark as we became glossier and cleverer in our messaging, more adept at makingthe funding stretch, but somehow not so able to bring about the systemic changes thatperpetuate inequality and injustice.The excitement and determination around theArab revolutions, around the occupa-tion movement and the voice of hope from Latin American cosmovisions takes me backto my student days in the1980s. In Australia, I was one of the1million people who pro-tested in Tasmania to save the wild Franklin River; among the protestors who helpedban Uranium mining, one of the women marched into the US military base in PineGap in solidarity withGreenhamCommon in the UKand Comiso in Italy. It was the daysof the early global sustainable development movement. But we did not know that itwas truly global until thousands of representative civil society members met up in1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development.We mingled in huge sideDevelopment, 2012, 55(1), (1–4)r 2012 Society for International Development 1011-6370/12www.sidint.net/development/Development (2012) 55(1), 1–4. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.119; published online 13 January 2012events held at the Hotel Gloria and in FlamengoPark or in the pressrooms of the Earth Summit inRio di Janeiro. In those pre-Internet, pre-socialnetworking days, it was only in that throng ofpeople that we could see for ourselves that therewas a ‘global civil society’ that could cometogether from different organizations and move-ments (whether peace, environment, women,youth, worker’s rights, human rights, sexualrights, religious rights, farmers rights). Back inthe early1990s, with the fall of the BerlinWall, in1989 and the end of the Cold War and the begin-nings of something called globalization, thereseemed to be a strong possibility that the worldcould become a fairer, more equal, better place.It was in the discussions stirred by Rio that Ifirst heard about greening the economy.The occa-sion was a meeting organized by the Harvardeconomist Stephen Marglin whom I met via TariqBanuri (interviewed in this issue), whom I firstmet in the Women’s Tent in Rio. Banuri was, as Irecall, one of the few men watching the proceed-ings where many famous women environmental-ists were speaking including Wangari Matthai,remembered in this Development issue’s ‘LastWord’. The Marglin conference held in Bellagio,Italy based on a book by Marglin and his partner(Apfel-Marglin and Marglin,1990) was just one ofthe many places where ‘dominant’ knowledgeswere being challenged with the expectation thatpolicymakers would be engaged and listening.Sadly, it turned out not to be the case. Or ratherthose ideas and words and plans about equality,participation, environment and gender wereswept into the dominant neoliberal discourse andthose of us talking about social justice, politicalecology, economic fair play, women’s rights, peacewere labelled idealists, and placed deftly ‘on themargins’.Looking back over the last 20 years, you seehow the ‘social’ ‘ecological’ ‘gender equality’‘cultural diversity’ issues were set as incidental tothe ‘hard’development issues of trade, finance andeconomic policy. Development in these last dec-ades has been about progress through economicgrowth and trade with some democracy and goodgovernance, and perhaps participation of different‘sectors’ and development aid. What very fewpeople dared to question was the assumption onwhich we all lived our lives: that developmentwas to deliver the ‘modern’ market-led consumerdream through high finance, global trade, scienti-fic expertise and technologies.But now, those who created the dream andgreatly benefitted from it acknowledge that it iscollapsing. The ‘dominant knowledge’ has takenus rapidly to a point of no return in terms of unli-vable climate, poorly functioning governability,uncertain provision of basic needs, security andwell-being. The myth that we all can live the mar-ket-led consumer dream is turning sour. Though,on the flip side, with the help of social networkingwe realize that the moment is ripe for change.While there is a sense of hope in the activeengagement of civil to bring about change to thecurrent economic order and power hierarchies,there is also a concern that violence marconstructive change towards a fairer world.DevelopmentVolume no 55 is devoted to lookingat economic justice as central to the developmentproject from four different angles. In the volume,we aim to bring the knowledges ‘on the margins’to the centre of how tomove beyond today’s confu-sions. The first issue will look (again) at what itmeans to talk about greening the economy, enga-ging in the debates around the Rioþ20 review.The second issue will explore the implications ofthe on-going process of the occupation move-ment, and the importance of social networkingfor development change. The third will continuethe journal’s engagement on gender publishingconversations from the Association Women’sRights for Development 2012 Forum, a key bien-nial global event for young and not so youngglobal women’s rights activists. The fourth will beto take a serious look at African self-led strategieswith the occasion of Juma Mwapachu, fromTanzania as the incoming SID President, givingthe Society an even stronger African presenceand lens fromwhich to understand change.1We beginVolume 55 with this issue on green-ing economics in partnership with the UNResearch Institute for Social Development(UNRISD). As the introduction by SarahCook and Kiah Smith explain, many of thearticles were first presented and discussed at aDevelopment 55(1): Upfront2Conference held in UNRISD in October 2011 on‘Green Economy and Sustainable Development:Bringing Back the Social Dimension’.2The articles from that meeting explored waysin which often-neglected social dimensions canbe integrated within a green economy, in orderto move towards sustainable development andpoverty reduction. The topics range from globalcrises to grassroots conservation projects in LainAmerica and indigenous landowners in order toput the social back into sustainable development.In this issue of Development, the UNRISD confer-ence articles are complemented by the interviewsand contributions from development economists,feminists and ecologists looking anew at develop-ment aid, economic growth, climate change andthe function of money, continuing the journal’sin-depth examination of development going‘beyond economics’.The journal is timed to contribute to the discus-sion and debates around Rioþ20 review. One ofthe strong messages of the journal is that we canno longer afford the compromises that we havemade working within the current inequitable,gender-blind, northern-dominated economicsystem. That being said, a complete overhaul ofan economic system producing such unsustain-able production and consumption patternsrequires long-term major changes in our indivi-dual and collective behaviour and lifestyles. Toadd to the buzzwords of the day, we need not only‘green economy’, but also ‘green governance’ thatsynergizes local governance and macro-levelpolicy.As the United Nations Climate Change Confer-ence, Durban 2011, COP 17 has shown, the origi-nal vision of sustainable development has beenreduced to politically acceptable compromisesbetween economic growth and environmentalsustainability. Climate change has become a proxyfor the implementation of the sustainable develop-ment agenda and the negotiated frameworks offera very narrow space for the needed strategic dis-cussions. Sustainable development cannot be leftto governments and policymakers. It is about allof us as consumers, changing our lifestyle expec-tations of what is ‘good’ living and what is fair andequitable.In this context, the journal heavily scrutinizesthe term ‘green economics’, which is emerging asone of the main policy proposals emerging fromthe Rioþ20 processes. The articles point out thatthere is a danger in turning to ‘green economics’when it is based on a vision of the world as a mar-ket that can ‘manage’ the environment throughinternational policies such as Payments forEcosystem Services, REDD (United Nations Colla-borative Programme on Reducing Emissions fromDeforestation and Forest Degradation in Develop-ing Countries) and carbon-offset trading thataddress global warming and promote ‘greendevelopment’.As the leading articles by Jessop and McAfeepoint out the proposed process of greeningeconomics, social goals are submerged in system-wide global ‘eco-economic’ management. Suchgreen economy strategies are based on a commo-dification of nature, reinforcing existing inequal-ities North and South and deepening the globalelite’s control of property and resources.Many of the articles looking at specific policiesin Asia, Latin America and Africa suggest thatpeoples’ livelihoods and the ecosystems they de-pend upon will continue in this green economyscenario to be plundered and excluded from anypolicymaking arena or vision.What Bullard and Muº ller propose in their cri-tique of the eco-governmental approach to climatechange is that the way through the current crisis-ridden impasse is to recognize that economiesare shaped by peoples’abilities to understand andsecure the ecologies and societies within whichlivelihoods and our futures are secured.The journal raises some important concerns forRioþ20 if the world governments try to applybureaucratically a green print of the economywithout ways to differentiate, respect and nurturethe myriad of the world’s cultures and peoples’diverse needs, ways of living and enjoyingwell-being.The question is what kind of process can weagree to collectively that will take into accountdifferent ecological, gendered social contexts andcorrect the hugely uneven social consequencesof market-based policies (Harcourt, 2012). Thegreen economy debates now dominating ‘climate’Harcourt: Editorial3and environment policymaking assume thatplaces and ecosystems are somehow universallyequivalent and thereforemeasurable.The concernraised in the journal is that proposals to ‘green’economics and financialize the environmentthrough monetary pricing and market-basedallocation of environmental resources willcontinue to give the richest people and places thepower to gain environmental benefits and avoidenvironmental harm. In the ‘greening’ economynarrative, the citizen is no longer the focus ofgovernment services, rather it is the businessinvestors in the land and resources. If there areonly highly technical and economistic discus-sions around how to measure nature, put finan-cial value to forests and water and make carbontrade-offs, other types of knowledge will not becalled on to shape better policy and create possibi-lities for better lives.The articles offer various suggestions about thestrategies, questions to be asked and ideas to beshaped, all with a sense of dismay at the mistakesof the past, but hope in the increasing voices ofdiscord, as befits the times inwhichwe write.Notes1 Consequently, please note that the four themes of DevelopmentVolume 55 are Greening the Economy, Citizenshipfor Change, Gender and Economic Justice and AfricanTransformations.2 See summary of the Conference outcomes and papers on http://www.unrisd.org/events/greeneconomy.ReferencesApfel-Marglin, Frederique and Stephen Marglin (1990) Dominating Knowledge: Development, culture resistance,NewYork: Clarendon Press.Harcourt,Wendy (ed.) (2012) Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods: Spaces lost, spaces gained, London: PalgraveMacmillan.Development 55(1): Upfront4

Editorial: The times they are A-Changin

Harcourt, Wendy

EUR Research Repository

UpfrontEditorial: The Times They Are A-Changin’WENDY HARCOURTThe famous1963 song by Bob Dylan The Times TheyAre A-Changin’rings true in the year2011. As in the1960s, there are young and old people on the streets demanding changeto the economic system, an end of war, climate justice, women’s rights, gender equityand true democracy. The year has seen Arab revolutions, European governments top-pling, faltering banking systems, and the occupation movement full of young and oldspreading themessage of the 99 percent fromWall Street to 900 cities around theworld.All through history, there are major moments of change, bringing fear for the futurefor some but also tremendous hope for new generations. Now with social networkinginformation, complete with images, digital posters, commentary from journalists andany one who cares to and can tweet, spreads so quickly that just by receiving messagesor blogging you feel you are participating in history. New images, new voices, new waysof organizing seem to be spilling into conversations on all levels as people from TahrirSquare to Zuccotti Park demand economic justice and want to hold the financial systemaccountable for the deep inequalities that rip through societies everywhere.For those of usworking in development, this need for change, and the search for socialand economic justice, is not new, not at all; for years we have been saying that we needsystemic change to politics, economic, military, gender hierarchies and social systems.But with the years the intersecting interests, the proliferation of different powers, thecomplexities of negotiations have led to many development activists becoming moreintertwined with the dominant economic logic. As such, we have moved well offthe mark as we became glossier and cleverer in our messaging, more adept at makingthe funding stretch, but somehow not so able to bring about the systemic changes thatperpetuate inequality and injustice.The excitement and determination around theArab revolutions, around the occupa-tion movement and the voice of hope from Latin American cosmovisions takes me backto my student days in the1980s. In Australia, I was one of the1million people who pro-tested in Tasmania to save the wild Franklin River; among the protestors who helpedban Uranium mining, one of the women marched into the US military base in PineGap in solidarity withGreenhamCommon in the UKand Comiso in Italy. It was the daysof the early global sustainable development movement. But we did not know that itwas truly global until thousands of representative civil society members met up in1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development.We mingled in huge sideDevelopment, 2012, 55(1), (1–4)r 2012 Society for International Development 1011-6370/12www.sidint.net/development/Development (2012) 55(1), 1–4. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.119; published online 13 January 2012events held at the Hotel Gloria and in FlamengoPark or in the pressrooms of the Earth Summit inRio di Janeiro. In those pre-Internet, pre-socialnetworking days, it was only in that throng ofpeople that we could see for ourselves that therewas a ‘global civil society’ that could cometogether from different organizations and move-ments (whether peace, environment, women,youth, worker’s rights, human rights, sexualrights, religious rights, farmers rights). Back inthe early1990s, with the fall of the BerlinWall, in1989 and the end of the Cold War and the begin-nings of something called globalization, thereseemed to be a strong possibility that the worldcould become a fairer, more equal, better place.It was in the discussions stirred by Rio that Ifirst heard about greening the economy.The occa-sion was a meeting organized by the Harvardeconomist Stephen Marglin whom I met via TariqBanuri (interviewed in this issue), whom I firstmet in the Women’s Tent in Rio. Banuri was, as Irecall, one of the few men watching the proceed-ings where many famous women environmental-ists were speaking including Wangari Matthai,remembered in this Development issue’s ‘LastWord’. The Marglin conference held in Bellagio,Italy based on a book by Marglin and his partner(Apfel-Marglin and Marglin,1990) was just one ofthe many places where ‘dominant’ knowledgeswere being challenged with the expectation thatpolicymakers would be engaged and listening.Sadly, it turned out not to be the case. Or ratherthose ideas and words and plans about equality,participation, environment and gender wereswept into the dominant neoliberal discourse andthose of us talking about social justice, politicalecology, economic fair play, women’s rights, peacewere labelled idealists, and placed deftly ‘on themargins’.Looking back over the last 20 years, you seehow the ‘social’ ‘ecological’ ‘gender equality’‘cultural diversity’ issues were set as incidental tothe ‘hard’development issues of trade, finance andeconomic policy. Development in these last dec-ades has been about progress through economicgrowth and trade with some democracy and goodgovernance, and perhaps participation of different‘sectors’ and development aid. What very fewpeople dared to question was the assumption onwhich we all lived our lives: that developmentwas to deliver the ‘modern’ market-led consumerdream through high finance, global trade, scienti-fic expertise and technologies.But now, those who created the dream andgreatly benefitted from it acknowledge that it iscollapsing. The ‘dominant knowledge’ has takenus rapidly to a point of no return in terms of unli-vable climate, poorly functioning governability,uncertain provision of basic needs, security andwell-being. The myth that we all can live the mar-ket-led consumer dream is turning sour. Though,on the flip side, with the help of social networkingwe realize that the moment is ripe for change.While there is a sense of hope in the activeengagement of civil to bring about change to thecurrent economic order and power hierarchies,there is also a concern that violence marconstructive change towards a fairer world.DevelopmentVolume no 55 is devoted to lookingat economic justice as central to the developmentproject from four different angles. In the volume,we aim to bring the knowledges ‘on the margins’to the centre of how tomove beyond today’s confu-sions. The first issue will look (again) at what itmeans to talk about greening the economy, enga-ging in the debates around the Rio!20 review.The second issue will explore the implications ofthe on-going process of the occupation move-ment, and the importance of social networkingfor development change. The third will continuethe journal’s engagement on gender publishingconversations from the Association Women’sRights for Development 2012 Forum, a key bien-nial global event for young and not so youngglobal women’s rights activists. The fourth will beto take a serious look at African self-led strategieswith the occasion of Juma Mwapachu, fromTanzania as the incoming SID President, givingthe Society an even stronger African presenceand lens fromwhich to understand change.1We beginVolume 55 with this issue on green-ing economics in partnership with the UNResearch Institute for Social Development(UNRISD). As the introduction by SarahCook and Kiah Smith explain, many of thearticles were first presented and discussed at aDevelopment 55(1): Upfront2Conference held in UNRISD in October 2011 on‘Green Economy and Sustainable Development:Bringing Back the Social Dimension’.2The articles from that meeting explored waysin which often-neglected social dimensions canbe integrated within a green economy, in orderto move towards sustainable development andpoverty reduction. The topics range from globalcrises to grassroots conservation projects in LainAmerica and indigenous landowners in order toput the social back into sustainable development.In this issue of Development, the UNRISD confer-ence articles are complemented by the interviewsand contributions from development economists,feminists and ecologists looking anew at develop-ment aid, economic growth, climate change andthe function of money, continuing the journal’sin-depth examination of development going‘beyond economics’.The journal is timed to contribute to the discus-sion and debates around Rio!20 review. One ofthe strong messages of the journal is that we canno longer afford the compromises that we havemade working within the current inequitable,gender-blind, northern-dominated economicsystem. That being said, a complete overhaul ofan economic system producing such unsustain-able production and consumption patternsrequires long-term major changes in our indivi-dual and collective behaviour and lifestyles. Toadd to the buzzwords of the day, we need not only‘green economy’, but also ‘green governance’ thatsynergizes local governance and macro-levelpolicy.As the United Nations Climate Change Confer-ence, Durban 2011, COP 17 has shown, the origi-nal vision of sustainable development has beenreduced to politically acceptable compromisesbetween economic growth and environmentalsustainability. Climate change has become a proxyfor the implementation of the sustainable develop-ment agenda and the negotiated frameworks offera very narrow space for the needed strategic dis-cussions. Sustainable development cannot be leftto governments and policymakers. It is about allof us as consumers, changing our lifestyle expec-tations of what is ‘good’ living and what is fair andequitable.In this context, the journal heavily scrutinizesthe term ‘green economics’, which is emerging asone of the main policy proposals emerging fromthe Rio!20 processes. The articles point out thatthere is a danger in turning to ‘green economics’when it is based on a vision of the world as a mar-ket that can ‘manage’ the environment throughinternational policies such as Payments forEcosystem Services, REDD (United Nations Colla-borative Programme on Reducing Emissions fromDeforestation and Forest Degradation in Develop-ing Countries) and carbon-offset trading thataddress global warming and promote ‘greendevelopment’.As the leading articles by Jessop and McAfeepoint out the proposed process of greeningeconomics, social goals are submerged in system-wide global ‘eco-economic’ management. Suchgreen economy strategies are based on a commo-dification of nature, reinforcing existing inequal-ities North and South and deepening the globalelite’s control of property and resources.Many of the articles looking at specific policiesin Asia, Latin America and Africa suggest thatpeoples’ livelihoods and the ecosystems they de-pend upon will continue in this green economyscenario to be plundered and excluded from anypolicymaking arena or vision.What Bullard and Muº ller propose in their cri-tique of the eco-governmental approach to climatechange is that the way through the current crisis-ridden impasse is to recognize that economiesare shaped by peoples’abilities to understand andsecure the ecologies and societies within whichlivelihoods and our futures are secured.The journal raises some important concerns forRio!20 if the world governments try to applybureaucratically a green print of the economywithout ways to differentiate, respect and nurturethe myriad of the world’s cultures and peoples’diverse needs, ways of living and enjoyingwell-being.The question is what kind of process can weagree to collectively that will take into accountdifferent ecological, gendered social contexts andcorrect the hugely uneven social consequencesof market-based policies (Harcourt, 2012). Thegreen economy debates now dominating ‘climate’Harcourt: Editorial3and environment policymaking assume thatplaces and ecosystems are somehow universallyequivalent and thereforemeasurable.The concernraised in the journal is that proposals to ‘green’economics and financialize the environmentthrough monetary pricing and market-basedallocation of environmental resources willcontinue to give the richest people and places thepower to gain environmental benefits and avoidenvironmental harm. In the ‘greening’ economynarrative, the citizen is no longer the focus ofgovernment services, rather it is the businessinvestors in the land and resources. If there areonly highly technical and economistic discus-sions around how to measure nature, put finan-cial value to forests and water and make carbontrade-offs, other types of knowledge will not becalled on to shape better policy and create possibi-lities for better lives.The articles offer various suggestions about thestrategies, questions to be asked and ideas to beshaped, all with a sense of dismay at the mistakesof the past, but hope in the increasing voices ofdiscord, as befits the times inwhichwe write.Notes1 Consequently, please note that the four themes of DevelopmentVolume 55 are Greening the Economy, Citizenshipfor Change, Gender and Economic Justice and AfricanTransformations.2 See summary of the Conference outcomes and papers on http://www.unrisd.org/events/greeneconomy.ReferencesApfel-Marglin, Frederique and Stephen Marglin (1990) Dominating Knowledge: Development, culture resistance,NewYork: Clarendon Press.Harcourt,Wendy (ed.) (2012) Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods: Spaces lost, spaces gained, London: PalgraveMacmillan.Development 55(1): Upfront4

English

Editorial: the times they are a-changin'

EUR Research Information PortalEditorial: the times they are a-changin'Published in:DevelopmentPublication status and date:Published: 13/01/2012DOI (link to publisher):10.1057/dev.2011.119Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordDocument License/Available under:Article 25fa Dutch Copyright ActCitation for the published version (APA):Harcourt, W. (2012). Editorial: the times they are a-changin'. Development, 55(1), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.119Link to publication on the EUR Research Information PortalTerms and Conditions of UseExcept as permitted by the applicable copyright law, you may not reproduce or make this material available to any third partywithout the prior written permission from the copyright holder(s). Copyright law allows the following uses of this materialwithout prior permission:            • you may download, save and print a copy of this material for your personal use only;            • you may share the EUR portal link to this material.In case the material is published with an open access license (e.g. a Creative Commons (CC) license), other uses may beallowed. Please check the terms and conditions of the specific license.Take-down policyIf you believe that this material infringes your copyright and/or any other intellectual property rights, you may request itsremoval by contacting us at the following email address: openaccess.library@eur.nl. Please provide us with all the relevantinformation, including the reasons why you believe any of your rights have been infringed. In case of a legitimate complaint,we will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website.UpfrontEditorial: The Times They Are A-Changin’WENDY HARCOURTThe famous1963 song by Bob Dylan The Times TheyAre A-Changin’rings true in the year2011. As in the1960s, there are young and old people on the streets demanding changeto the economic system, an end of war, climate justice, women’s rights, gender equityand true democracy. The year has seen Arab revolutions, European governments top-pling, faltering banking systems, and the occupation movement full of young and oldspreading themessage of the 99 percent fromWall Street to 900 cities around theworld.All through history, there are major moments of change, bringing fear for the futurefor some but also tremendous hope for new generations. Now with social networkinginformation, complete with images, digital posters, commentary from journalists andany one who cares to and can tweet, spreads so quickly that just by receiving messagesor blogging you feel you are participating in history. New images, new voices, new waysof organizing seem to be spilling into conversations on all levels as people from TahrirSquare to Zuccotti Park demand economic justice and want to hold the financial systemaccountable for the deep inequalities that rip through societies everywhere.For those of usworking in development, this need for change, and the search for socialand economic justice, is not new, not at all; for years we have been saying that we needsystemic change to politics, economic, military, gender hierarchies and social systems.But with the years the intersecting interests, the proliferation of different powers, thecomplexities of negotiations have led to many development activists becoming moreintertwined with the dominant economic logic. As such, we have moved well offthe mark as we became glossier and cleverer in our messaging, more adept at makingthe funding stretch, but somehow not so able to bring about the systemic changes thatperpetuate inequality and injustice.The excitement and determination around theArab revolutions, around the occupa-tion movement and the voice of hope from Latin American cosmovisions takes me backto my student days in the1980s. In Australia, I was one of the1million people who pro-tested in Tasmania to save the wild Franklin River; among the protestors who helpedban Uranium mining, one of the women marched into the US military base in PineGap in solidarity withGreenhamCommon in the UKand Comiso in Italy. It was the daysof the early global sustainable development movement. But we did not know that itwas truly global until thousands of representative civil society members met up in1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development.We mingled in huge sideDevelopment, 2012, 55(1), (1–4)r 2012 Society for International Development 1011-6370/12www.sidint.net/development/Development (2012) 55(1), 1–4. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.119; published online 13 January 2012events held at the Hotel Gloria and in FlamengoPark or in the pressrooms of the Earth Summit inRio di Janeiro. In those pre-Internet, pre-socialnetworking days, it was only in that throng ofpeople that we could see for ourselves that therewas a ‘global civil society’ that could cometogether from different organizations and move-ments (whether peace, environment, women,youth, worker’s rights, human rights, sexualrights, religious rights, farmers rights). Back inthe early1990s, with the fall of the BerlinWall, in1989 and the end of the Cold War and the begin-nings of something called globalization, thereseemed to be a strong possibility that the worldcould become a fairer, more equal, better place.It was in the discussions stirred by Rio that Ifirst heard about greening the economy.The occa-sion was a meeting organized by the Harvardeconomist Stephen Marglin whom I met via TariqBanuri (interviewed in this issue), whom I firstmet in the Women’s Tent in Rio. Banuri was, as Irecall, one of the few men watching the proceed-ings where many famous women environmental-ists were speaking including Wangari Matthai,remembered in this Development issue’s ‘LastWord’. The Marglin conference held in Bellagio,Italy based on a book by Marglin and his partner(Apfel-Marglin and Marglin,1990) was just one ofthe many places where ‘dominant’ knowledgeswere being challenged with the expectation thatpolicymakers would be engaged and listening.Sadly, it turned out not to be the case. Or ratherthose ideas and words and plans about equality,participation, environment and gender wereswept into the dominant neoliberal discourse andthose of us talking about social justice, politicalecology, economic fair play, women’s rights, peacewere labelled idealists, and placed deftly ‘on themargins’.Looking back over the last 20 years, you seehow the ‘social’ ‘ecological’ ‘gender equality’‘cultural diversity’ issues were set as incidental tothe ‘hard’development issues of trade, finance andeconomic policy. Development in these last dec-ades has been about progress through economicgrowth and trade with some democracy and goodgovernance, and perhaps participation of different‘sectors’ and development aid. What very fewpeople dared to question was the assumption onwhich we all lived our lives: that developmentwas to deliver the ‘modern’ market-led consumerdream through high finance, global trade, scienti-fic expertise and technologies.But now, those who created the dream andgreatly benefitted from it acknowledge that it iscollapsing. The ‘dominant knowledge’ has takenus rapidly to a point of no return in terms of unli-vable climate, poorly functioning governability,uncertain provision of basic needs, security andwell-being. The myth that we all can live the mar-ket-led consumer dream is turning sour. Though,on the flip side, with the help of social networkingwe realize that the moment is ripe for change.While there is a sense of hope in the activeengagement of civil to bring about change to thecurrent economic order and power hierarchies,there is also a concern that violence marconstructive change towards a fairer world.DevelopmentVolume no 55 is devoted to lookingat economic justice as central to the developmentproject from four different angles. In the volume,we aim to bring the knowledges ‘on the margins’to the centre of how tomove beyond today’s confu-sions. The first issue will look (again) at what itmeans to talk about greening the economy, enga-ging in the debates around the Rio!20 review.The second issue will explore the implications ofthe on-going process of the occupation move-ment, and the importance of social networkingfor development change. The third will continuethe journal’s engagement on gender publishingconversations from the Association Women’sRights for Development 2012 Forum, a key bien-nial global event for young and not so youngglobal women’s rights activists. The fourth will beto take a serious look at African self-led strategieswith the occasion of Juma Mwapachu, fromTanzania as the incoming SID President, givingthe Society an even stronger African presenceand lens fromwhich to understand change.1We beginVolume 55 with this issue on green-ing economics in partnership with the UNResearch Institute for Social Development(UNRISD). As the introduction by SarahCook and Kiah Smith explain, many of thearticles were first presented and discussed at aDevelopment 55(1): Upfront2Conference held in UNRISD in October 2011 on‘Green Economy and Sustainable Development:Bringing Back the Social Dimension’.2The articles from that meeting explored waysin which often-neglected social dimensions canbe integrated within a green economy, in orderto move towards sustainable development andpoverty reduction. The topics range from globalcrises to grassroots conservation projects in LainAmerica and indigenous landowners in order toput the social back into sustainable development.In this issue of Development, the UNRISD confer-ence articles are complemented by the interviewsand contributions from development economists,feminists and ecologists looking anew at develop-ment aid, economic growth, climate change andthe function of money, continuing the journal’sin-depth examination of development going‘beyond economics’.The journal is timed to contribute to the discus-sion and debates around Rio!20 review. One ofthe strong messages of the journal is that we canno longer afford the compromises that we havemade working within the current inequitable,gender-blind, northern-dominated economicsystem. That being said, a complete overhaul ofan economic system producing such unsustain-able production and consumption patternsrequires long-term major changes in our indivi-dual and collective behaviour and lifestyles. Toadd to the buzzwords of the day, we need not only‘green economy’, but also ‘green governance’ thatsynergizes local governance and macro-levelpolicy.As the United Nations Climate Change Confer-ence, Durban 2011, COP 17 has shown, the origi-nal vision of sustainable development has beenreduced to politically acceptable compromisesbetween economic growth and environmentalsustainability. Climate change has become a proxyfor the implementation of the sustainable develop-ment agenda and the negotiated frameworks offera very narrow space for the needed strategic dis-cussions. Sustainable development cannot be leftto governments and policymakers. It is about allof us as consumers, changing our lifestyle expec-tations of what is ‘good’ living and what is fair andequitable.In this context, the journal heavily scrutinizesthe term ‘green economics’, which is emerging asone of the main policy proposals emerging fromthe Rio!20 processes. The articles point out thatthere is a danger in turning to ‘green economics’when it is based on a vision of the world as a mar-ket that can ‘manage’ the environment throughinternational policies such as Payments forEcosystem Services, REDD (United Nations Colla-borative Programme on Reducing Emissions fromDeforestation and Forest Degradation in Develop-ing Countries) and carbon-offset trading thataddress global warming and promote ‘greendevelopment’.As the leading articles by Jessop and McAfeepoint out the proposed process of greeningeconomics, social goals are submerged in system-wide global ‘eco-economic’ management. Suchgreen economy strategies are based on a commo-dification of nature, reinforcing existing inequal-ities North and South and deepening the globalelite’s control of property and resources.Many of the articles looking at specific policiesin Asia, Latin America and Africa suggest thatpeoples’ livelihoods and the ecosystems they de-pend upon will continue in this green economyscenario to be plundered and excluded from anypolicymaking arena or vision.What Bullard and Muº ller propose in their cri-tique of the eco-governmental approach to climatechange is that the way through the current crisis-ridden impasse is to recognize that economiesare shaped by peoples’abilities to understand andsecure the ecologies and societies within whichlivelihoods and our futures are secured.The journal raises some important concerns forRio!20 if the world governments try to applybureaucratically a green print of the economywithout ways to differentiate, respect and nurturethe myriad of the world’s cultures and peoples’diverse needs, ways of living and enjoyingwell-being.The question is what kind of process can weagree to collectively that will take into accountdifferent ecological, gendered social contexts andcorrect the hugely uneven social consequencesof market-based policies (Harcourt, 2012). Thegreen economy debates now dominating ‘climate’Harcourt: Editorial3and environment policymaking assume thatplaces and ecosystems are somehow universallyequivalent and thereforemeasurable.The concernraised in the journal is that proposals to ‘green’economics and financialize the environmentthrough monetary pricing and market-basedallocation of environmental resources willcontinue to give the richest people and places thepower to gain environmental benefits and avoidenvironmental harm. In the ‘greening’ economynarrative, the citizen is no longer the focus ofgovernment services, rather it is the businessinvestors in the land and resources. If there areonly highly technical and economistic discus-sions around how to measure nature, put finan-cial value to forests and water and make carbontrade-offs, other types of knowledge will not becalled on to shape better policy and create possibi-lities for better lives.The articles offer various suggestions about thestrategies, questions to be asked and ideas to beshaped, all with a sense of dismay at the mistakesof the past, but hope in the increasing voices ofdiscord, as befits the times inwhichwe write.Notes1 Consequently, please note that the four themes of DevelopmentVolume 55 are Greening the Economy, Citizenshipfor Change, Gender and Economic Justice and AfricanTransformations.2 See summary of the Conference outcomes and papers on http://www.unrisd.org/events/greeneconomy.ReferencesApfel-Marglin, Frederique and Stephen Marglin (1990) Dominating Knowledge: Development, culture resistance,NewYork: Clarendon Press.Harcourt,Wendy (ed.) (2012) Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods: Spaces lost, spaces gained, London: PalgraveMacmillan.Development 55(1): Upfront4

Crossref

Development

Editorial: The Times They Are A-Changin’

https://pure.eur.nl/ws/files/47430085/Metis_179513.pdf

Editorial: The times they are A-Changin

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Erasmus University Digital Repository

EUR Research Repository

EUR Research Repository

EUR Research Repository

Crossref