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

Session 3: Technocracy, Rights & Sustainable Innovation

Lucy Ford
The Power of Technocracy: A Critical Analysis of the Global Political Economy of Sustainable Development
Lecturer in International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences and Law, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford United Kingdom

This paper is concerned with the overemphasis on technocratic solutions to global environmental problems in the pursuit of sustainable development. In the last three decades multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and soft international environmental law have mushroomed in attempts to enhance sustainable development. While these may contribute more or less to the management of environmental degradation, such a technocratic approach arguably fails to address and consider the deeper structures of the global political economy, which are inherently unsustainable and unjust.

The paper relocates the discourse of sustainable development within a critical global political economy perspective, which has at its heart an analysis of power relations. This it is argued is a more fruitful approach for engaging with some of the concepts that this conference raises, such as ‘fairness’, ‘environmental justice’ and ‘global citizenship.’

The paper illustrates the theoretical claims with an analysis of the Convention for the Control and Management of the Transfer of Toxic Chemicals and Hazardous Waste (the Basel Convention) and in particular its project of building regional centres for the waste management and the transfer of technology. The paper analyses to what extent such a project provides an example of the transfer of sustainable technologies and know-how or whether it contributes rather to the transfer and reproduction of dominant structures of environmental degradation across the globe, in particular between rich and poor countries.

Bob Fowles
Meeting Human and Ecological Rights in Creating the Sustainable Built Environment
Senior Lecturer, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF10 3AP Wales, United Kingdom

The paper will describe the conceptual framework for a forthcoming two-year research project that will address the moral and ethical stance that, in the making of the built environment, human and ecological rights should not be violated.

The research project aims to make an original contribution to humankind’s understanding of the impact of the built environment process on people and the planet through the novel approach of juxtaposing human and ecological rights with the processes of designing, resourcing, constructing and using buildings.

This early work on the framework will creatively explore the relationship between, on the one hand, built environment related human and ecological rights, i.e. those rights that are touched by activities in the design-build-use life-cycle, and on the other hand buildings, i.e. the technology, selected by expert consensus to be leading edge examples of sustainable design. To qualify for selection, the buildings should have grown from a holistic sustainability brief and appear to address a holistic sustainability agenda which comprises human, social, ecological, spiritual, energy, environmental, economic, materials and health issues. The expectation is that for each building the clients, designers and specialists will all be sympathetic to the sustainability paradigm. This should ensure best practice examples of sustainable design, which maximise satisfaction of rights, and lead to the project generating the highest set of principles. This research will be seeking ‘the art of the possible’ in contemporary ethical architecture.

The principal research outcome will be a set of holistic sustainability design principles, and guidelines to help implement them. The outcome will also: promote characteristics of best practice ethical buildings; raise awareness of the ethical responsibilities of the built environment professional; inform governmental and professional bodies, contribute to policy making and prompt extensions to UK construction and planning legislation; and it will provide an outline of expanded approaches for higher education built environment courses which embrace the notion of environmental rights.

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Damian White
A Critical Sociology of Sustainable Technological Innovation
Dept of Sociology, Goldsmith College, University of London, London,
SE14 6NW United Kingdom

There are good reasons to believe that the environmental debate is presently taking a pronounced 'technological turn'. Growing international interest in large scale replication of the Danish successes in renewable energy, the emergence of industrial ecology as a thriving intellectual discourse, an emerging corporate eco-tech sector and the proliferation of 'eco-efficiency' and 'factor four' discourses in governing circles all promise dramatic re-orientations of the technological basis of capitalist accumulation. Beyond the claims of 'grow or die', it is maintained we can see the horizons of a 'natural capitalism' emerging in advanced industrial societies. How credible are these claims?

This paper suggests that it may well be the case that the technological basis for eco-technological and eco-industrial transitions are increasingly in evidence, it is far from clear that the social, cultural and political conditions of possibility for facilitating the diffusion and spread of eco-technological change have been fully though through. What is required is a sociology of sustainable technological innovation.

Drawing from developments in environmental sociology, technology studies and recent currents in spatial political economy, this paper uses the recent work of Lovins, Hawkins and VonWeizacker, as a basis to sketch out some broad theoretical contours for such sociology. It is argued that sociology of sustainable technological innovation should operate as a 'critical-recuperative' discourse. Firstly, such a discourse needs to be sceptical, alert to the dangers of 'greenwash' and hyperbole in the ecotechnology literature and the dangers of technologising environmental problems. Attention needs to be given to the managerialism, reductionism, naturalism and technological determinism underpinning such discourses. More reconstructively such a sociology should also draw attention to the insights that social science can shed on the problem of rebound effects, spatial displacement and on questions of diffusion and implementation. Finally though, it will be argued that what is also needed is a critical sociology of sustainable technological innovation that is informed by the insights of environmental justice and ecological democracy. Such a sociology should flag the potential pathologies of corporate lead eco-technological change and actively explore how social learning processes, forms of democratic innovations and a culture of cosmopolitan citizenship could be developed at local national regional and global levels to circumventing such difficulties.