4th Global Conference
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Tuesday 5th July - Thursday 7th
July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 3: The Fixes
Chair: Katherine Royse
Technology, Sustainability and Governance
Mike
Marshall
Economics Programmes, University of the East of London, London,
UK
This proposed paper will provide a critical examination
of ‘technical
fix’ approaches to sustainability. It will provide an analysis
of the role and nature of technological processes and, in the context
of globalization, raise issues regarding the social nature of technologies
and their governance.
Technological optimism has come in several guises,
including flawed cornucopian visions of the endless possibilities for
technological progress and resource substitution (Simon 1981, 1984).
Many environmentalists themselves, however, have come to emphasise the
potential of technology to aid sustainability. Lovins and Hawkins (1999),
for example, have extolled the virtues of a ‘natural capitalism’,
and the new multidisciplinary field of industrial ecology has challenged
the technological pessimism of early environmentalists such as Commoner.
However, there are no simple ‘technical fixes’. Not all
alleged limits to economic growth are either susceptible to such fixes
or even biophysical in nature. Furthermore, it must be remembered that
new technologies always carry with them the potential for ‘surprise’,
and the unintended and unforeseen secondary and tertiary effects of technology
can be profound, long-lived and global in nature. Technology can, potentially,
make a significant contribution to the greening of economic processes.
However, many claims are exaggerated and more than technology is involved
in achieving sustainability. Certainly a simple market-driven process
of technological change will not suffice.
Technological developments
are complex and cumulative processes which are, according to modern analyses
of technology, biased to travel in particular directions and subject
to localized ‘lock in’ effects.
Moving these in desired directions is possible but by no means easy.
Green technologies are by no means inevitable, or, indeed, even likely
outcomes in many instances. Significant enlightened governmental intervention
and considerable institutional change is likely to be required to produce
the necessary paradigm shift.
A global perspective highlights the difficulties
and dilemmas, seeming to take the decision-making regarding technological
systems out of the control not just of citizens, but also of national
governments. The fact that technology makes national boundaries ever
more permeable raises enormous, and some would say intractable, issues
regarding governance and environmental justice: and environmental justice
is inseparably linked to the concept of sustainability.
Agenda for Curriculum Reform: Towards Sustainability
Alex
Lautensach
School of Biological Sciences,
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Current educational practice in the mainstream worldwide is not fulfilling its potentially pivotal role in counteracting the environmental crisis. Higher education has even been accused of contributing more to the problems than to their solutions. In the first part of this essay I will present the case for educational reform by outlining the manifestations of educational shortfall at the tertiary level. The shortfall is caused by the transmission of harmful or counterproductive values, beliefs and attitudes and by the failure to elicit more productive learning outcomes. In the second part I propose a comprehensive curriculum reform to address those problems. This includes three groups of agenda: The transmission of counterproductive beliefs and values has to be stopped; educational shortfall in areas vital for sustainability has to be mitigated; and the learner must be liberated from constraints that prevent him from taking independent action. The general aims of the new curriculum include r e-defining progress as achieving sustainability, replacing anthropocentric values with ecocentric values, remedying skill gaps, re-orienting education towards the future, eliminating parochialism from education systems and empowering the learner to take action.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Is it
the Answer?
Kel
Dummett
Corporate Environmental Responsibility,
Centre for Design at RMIT,
Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia
The history of corporate social responsibility (CSR)
dates back to the 1970s, but it was really in the lead up to the first
World Summit on Sustainable Development (the Earth Summit) in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992, that CSR became formalised. With environmental and social
problems intensifying, the global NGO community called for multi-lateral
agreements at the WSSD to make companies more accountable. The business
communities’ response was ‘CSR’,
a purely voluntary approach, which the business community argued would
make international government action unnecessary.
This discussion draws
on research conducted as part of a PhD study, looking mainly at corporate
environmental responsibility within the CSR framework. I will draw on
material from interviews with corporate business leaders, academics,
corporate analysts and environmentalists, to address the key questions
of what drives some companies to at least say the right things, and what
governments are and should be doing to encourage or force more corporate
responsibility?