4th Global Conference
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Tuesday 5th July - Thursday 7th
July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 1: Conceptualising Sustainability, Environmental Justice and
Participation
Chair: Ram Vemuri
Is Sustainability Possible in a World of
Poverty and Conflict?
Peggy
Lobb
Environmental and Social Justice, Antioch University,
Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA
A discourse on sustainability involves factors having
considerable
social and environmental impact. Drawing on the theories of Gro Harlem
Brundtland, Koos Neefjes, William Shutkin, and Peter Wenz, this paper
will examine two central themes vital to sustainability: alleviating
the suffering of the poor and eliminating conflict. I argue that it is
necessary for there to be a global consensus that social and
environmental issues cannot be addressed apart from each other.
Violence, poverty and turbulence create conflicts that can change the
strong sustainable environment of a country into a weak, compromised
one, leaving immense prospects for exploitive opportunistic factions.
The global
economy has increased within the last decade and this has
allowed for major advancements in health care, educational
opportunities and social services. However, not everyone has benefited from
these improvements. The increased global economy has also widened the
gap between the rich and the poor and caused the deforestation of
thousands of acres of land, the destruction of the ozone, an increase
in greenhouse gases and the depletion of fish stocks due to
over-harvesting and pollution.
It is my belief that in a society
ravaged with environmental
degradation due to natural disaster, trauma, or war, sustainable
efforts are thwarted due to a lack of community cohesion and political
instability. When survival is the only objective, ecological stability
and restrictive resource use is implausible.
I argue that the objective
of sustainable development is to facilitate
a change or modificaion in social behavior so that physical effort is
primarily directed towards providing the basic needs of food, clothing,
housing, employment, medical care, education, and personal security
along with a fundamental quality of life to all people within the
limitations of the natural environment and resources available.
Environmental Justice? Is it Another Facet of Societal
Inequity? Case study in Phoenix, Arizona
Shankara
Babu
ESH Program,
Department of Industrial Technology,
CCSN Henderson Campus,
Henderson, USA
Thirty years of research into the question of
environmental justice (EJ) concludes that exposure to
environmental hazards is greater in minority communities
than in majority communities. The research demonstrated
that low-income minority communities are
disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards.
However most EJ studies that suggest disproportionate
environmental hazards exposure in predominantly minority
communities are based upon United States Environmental
Protection Agency?s Toxic Release Inventory (USEPA TRI)
Data.
This study illustrates the fundamental flaws in using TRI
data as a measure of exposure and suggests alternates to
the TRI data as a basis for quantifying environmental
exposure within a community. Additionally, its explores
the possibility that environmental justice is another
facet of societal inequity. The significance of this is in
the fact that our current methods of addressing
environmental justice issues which is mostly attempting to
mitigate exposure both real and perceived independent of
other societal inequities is inadequate. What is required
is a holistic approach to address the issues of societal
inequities, which includes environmental justice.
This research paper
is important in two fundamental ways,
one, it places emphasis on the problem of environmental
justice in the context of society of today. Second, it
quantifies exposure within communities to a set standard,
which could be used to quantify exposure in other
settings, and in other communities as well. The case study
is conducted in metro Phoenix area, which is one of the
fastest growing cities in the United States. The
significance of this is in the fact that this study could
provide a benchmark for communities, towns, and cities
that are attempting to make their communities sustainable
not only in the context of economics but also in the
societal well being.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Sustainability Challenges
Jerome
Rajnauth
Trinidad
The energy sector continues to be the mainstay of
the economy of Trinidad
and Tobago. Recently a lot of focus has been placed on gas. The future
upstream development of the gas industry is dependent on large-scale
downstream projects. Further more exploration work in our deep and
ultra
deep waters will continue for the next decade.
It must be remembered that
energy affects practically all aspects of social
and economical development, including livelihoods, water, agriculture,
population, health, education, job creation and gender-related issues.
Therefore energy is related to the most pressing social, environmental,
economical and political issues that affect sustainable development.
The
government of Trinidad and Tobago has embarked on a 20/20 vision i.e
to
become a developed nation by the year 2020. Trinidad and Tobago faces
numerous challenges in its trust towards sustainable development. These
challenges are social, political, economical and environmental in nature
and
demands special attention.
There are environmental concerns such as oil
pollution to beaches,
destruction of beaches due to laying of pipeline, tampering of nature
sensitive areas, air pollution from industrial waste and water pollution.
Some of the social problems include: unemployment, poverty, crimes and
AIDS.
This paper will focus on some of the major hurdles that need to
be addressed
in order to reach sustainable development status in the light of the
nation’s trust of the 20/20 vision. Some of these problems include
poverty,
environmental risk, energy efficiency and energy security. Most of the
country’s challenges are energy related and also the nation’s
energy sector
is of up most important to its socio-economical development. It must
be
noted that many of these challenges are also faced by many developing
countries in the Western Hemisphere and these are very dependent on the
energy sector.
Conceptualizing the Effectiveness of Corporate
Civil Society Relationship
Mark
Starmanns
Department of Geography, University of Bamberg, Germany
Civil
society plays an increasingly important role in setting social and
environmental standards of production in developing countries. This is
because national regulation in such countries is often ineffective and
networks of civil society can exert strong pressure on corporations in
the global economy. In accordance, present corporate social responsibility
thinking proposes that social and environmental standards should be set
within dialogues between corporations and their stakeholders. Indeed,
it has recently been shown that dialogues between corporations and civil
society are an effective instrument for regulating environmental and
social standards in certain production processes. However, I argue that
corporations only initiate a dialogue if they perceive a civil society
group to be influential. Hence, stakeholder dialogues cannot effectively
regulate environmental issues in every kind of global production processes.
The paper examines the conditions under which corporations involved in
global production processes regard groups of civil society as influential – and
therefore initiate a stakeholder dialogue with them. The intention is
to help to explain why certain corporate-stakeholder dialogues regulate
social and environmental standards, whereas others do not. The framework
shall provide a conceptual background to empirical studies which examine
the effectiveness of private to private environmental governance mechanisms
between firms and their stakeholders in dialogues.
This paper outlines
a conceptual framework that combines demographical factors which relate
to the firm or the stakeholder, respectively, and relational factors
which describe the relationship between the firm and its single societal
stakeholders. The framework uses network and commodity chains literature
to explain at which nodes in global production chains civil society groups
can most effectively influence corporations. Network approaches also
help to explain that ties between civil society groups increase the pressure
single civil society groups exerts on corporations. Resource dependence
theory, stakeholder approaches and institutional theory is used to suggest
how relationships between the firm and the single societal stakeholders
can be measured.