Thursday 13th February - Saturday 15th February 2003
Copenhagen, Denmark

Session 1: Consumption, Renewal and Communities

Judith Bush
Quality of Life, Neighbourhood Renewal and Environmental Justice: Examining Community Responses to Environmental Degradation
Senior Research Associate, Epidemiology and Public Health, School of Population and Health Sciences, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom

Issues of quality of life are inextricably linked to those of human equality, social justice and environmental quality. The burden of environmental pollution is concentrated in more deprived areas characterised by high levels of unemployment, poverty, crime and poor health. Yet concerns with health and the environment are often downplayed by people living in such areas in relation to more immediate concerns of daily life, such as unemployment, poverty and housing. The paper will describe a study which aims to examine and evaluate local community responses to environmental degradation and incivility, and factors assisting or hampering local involvement in neighbourhood environmental renewal in two Durham coalfield communities in the UK. A postal survey and focus groups will enable the research to address the aims in terms of depth and representativeness. The study will address gaps in knowledge and understanding of how such communities prioritise, respond to and manage a range of socio-economic and environmental problems, how this impacts on perceptions of quality of life, and opportunities for, and barriers to, community involvement in neighbourhood renewal. The findings will provide important insights for government policies (e.g. Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy, Coalfields Regeneration Plan), the management of environmental health controversies, and debates surrounding social and environmental justice, community action and environmental behaviour.

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Wicaksono Sarosa
Infrastructure-Based Community Development. Participant-Observation of Three Cases in Rural Villages of Java, Indonesia
Urban and Regional development Institute (URDI), Jakarta, Indonesia

Past local development practices in developing countries have relied heavily on government and external assistance, producing projects that are unsustainable locally and creating a cycle of dependence. Financial crises in the developing world have worsened the situation by limiting government’s ability to respond to local needs. Additionally, trends toward liberalization and globalization are shifting many decisions from government to individual market players. In these circumstances local communities -- especially poor communities -- often feel abandoned and hopeless.
This study develops and tests an approach for sustainable local development that increases the capacity of poor communities in dealing with their own problems through community-based infrastructure planning and implementation. The participatory approach deliberately aims at building long-term local capacity while delivering physical improvement. Infrastructure is not merely provided as a support system, as in any conventional "Community-based Infrastructure Development" approach. Instead, in this "Infrastructure-based Community Development" approach, the planning and implementation process is deliberately used as an instrument for social learning and local capacity building.
The approach is tested in three poor rural communities in the Island of Java, Indonesia. Each case involved consultation with interested parties, joint exploration of community problems and potentials, and participatory design, funding, and construction of an infrastructure project. Pre-project interviews and a post-project survey gauge residents’ responses to the process and measure changes in perspectives. The study finds that the Infrastructure-based Community Development approach is an effective means of sustainable local development in a globalizing world. In addition to producing tangible infrastructure, the approach fostered a local sense of ownership of the public facility and produced social learning: residents became more confident of their capacity to develop and maintain their own environment.

Anne Haugestad
Norwegians as Global Neighbours: A Presentation of the Fair Share Approach to Globally Responsible Consumption
Research Fellow, Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Skoleveien 37, N-1458 Fjellstrand, Norway

“The fair share approach” is meant to be a comprehensive, realistic and ambitious approach to responsible consumption, with potentials for overlapping consensus between different comprehensive political doctrines. The paper presents different aspects of the approach. “The fair share narrative” is a condensed version of the approach. Both the approach and the narrative were developed in my master thesis in sociology. In my doctorate project “Norwegians as Global Neighbours” I have used the fair share approach and narrative as a starting point for a qualitative research design for exploring whether such an approach make a difference to Norwegians from the whole range of political parties. The reactions from the interviewees have resulted in some revisions of the approach and increased understanding of some of the mechanisms involved. This increased understanding of mechanisms has been the basis for the formulation of “the fair share theory on responsible consumption”. The fair share theory predicts that consumers will tend to make more resource-friendly consumption choices if such choices are framed as steps towards global distributive justice within ecological limits (the global responsibility mechanism: “It feels good to act globally responsible even if others don’t do it”). The theory also predicts that lack of a comprehensive global framework tends to lead to resource-friendly intentions not being followed up by resource-friendly actions (the convenience mechanism: “No need to make sacrifices when the effort is not part of a common strategy”). However, there are also several other mechanisms involved in people’s consumption choices and the paper deals with how knowledge of such mechanisms can be used to promote changes in norms for responsible consumption – from a narrow household perspective towards global responsiveness.

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