ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON TO CAFOD MANCHESTER, 17 APRIL 1994
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON TO CAFOD MANCHESTER, 17 APRIL 1994
Sustainable Development - But for Whom?
I am very honoured to have been invited by CAFOD to give this year's Pope Paul VI Memorial Lecture.
Your work, and the encouragement it brings to communities to tackle their problems from within their own strengths, lies behind the theme which I should like to consider with you today. I do this not as an expert or professional in the field, but as someone privileged to listen. Listening has made me aware of the gaps in understanding between different perspectives, different viewpoints, on this whole issue.
I should begin by making my own terms and arguments as clear as possible. The fact that I feel the need to do so is, I think, an indication of how complex this subject is, how fraught with ambiguous ideas and worn language. And being conscious of that, I am even hesitant to use the term sustainable development here, although for most of us in this room it remains the working model for an important idea.
And yet, let us face it, the working model itself is not as useful as it should be. One of the problems is that, in critiquing our circumstances - which we constantly need to do if we are to serve the constituencies which deserve our best efforts - we need to include a critique of the language we use to describe them.
The more serious these issues are - and I think we all know by now how serious they really are - the more we talk about them. The more we talk about them the more we have fallen, perhaps understandably, into a self-made jargon. Yet there was never such a need for clear thinking and plain words. Somehow we have to look behind those words, disassemble those terms, so as to reach and alert people to the exact nature of the situation we now face. I am aware every day in this Office of how easy it is to shut people out through language, rather than allow them in to share the meaning of the words. But allowing for that - and allowing for the flawed nature of the concept - let me at least begin here with those words "sustainable development" and do just that: look behind them.
On the one hand, I can provide for you a definition which I think all of us would recognise: the theory of sustainable development requires that the needs of present generations be satisfied without placing an intolerable burden on future generations when they come to meet their own needs. This concept was, as you know, at the heart of the Earth Summit in Rio and it is embodied in the two Conventions which emerged from that Conference - the Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity.
But even as I provide that definition, I am keenly aware that there are, at the moment, powerful revisions and perspectives flowing around that concept, pressing against it, refusing to allow it to set into a Western platitude, vehemently demanding that the life-and-death resonances be looked at in the most unswerving way, even if that leads us to a far less comfortable view of the subject. And I may as well be frank with you at this stage and say that my belief is that we need a far less comfortable view.
Maybe the most useful thing I could do is to frame a fairly blunt question in the way I think it might be framed by someone from the South. Someone in other words at the sharp end of the language we use and the definitions we hold onto. And the question would be this: to what extent, in providing development aid, have we overlooked the cultural balances and norms of those we assist? To what extent, in other words, have we damaged a cultural ecology as fragile and important to all our futures, as the other ecology we have at last become aware of? Cultural ecology is a dimension which has not been factored in to the language, or concept of sustainable development. Yet I know it is one near to the hearts of many committed and sensitive development workers.
And this brings up another point. If we fail to ensure that the concept of sustainable development operates as a complex and attentive response on our part, we will open a gap between the views of those on the ground and the conceptual framework of those at the centre where decisions are made. And such gaps, between the reality of change and the rhetoric of good intentions, as we know, can have disastrous consequences. And yet we are not the ones who bear those consequences.
Those consequences - I should say - will not simply happen because of a failure of concept. Concepts are linked to policies. And policies can have serious practical flaws. Take for instance the idea - and its practical dimension - of living within the renewable processes of the natural world. We have had, for more than a century, sophisticated debates on fiscal budgeting. For some reason, it has come to us very late that we need to budget with the earth's resources in the same way. And for the same simple reason: that resources run out. This involves taking into consideration some simple sums and some important subtractions. We learned in school that if a plus sign is used instead of a minus the results can cause havoc. Yet we are using pluses instead of minuses in our attempt to make the earth absorb more and more human pollution. Human wastes ought not to be discharged at a faster rate than they can be processed by nature. And so we are right back with the word sustainable.
And understood in this way, sustainable development has profound implications for our present energy consumption. At the moment fossil fuel pricing - the way we get out and fill the tank of our cars without even consulting the dial as we do so - is an actual financial incentive to waste. It is certainly not an incentive to the thoughtful approach every citizen needs to hand on to their children. And here we return to the effect of language and the nuances of concepts. Who is to blame the ordinary citizen if accounting practices themselves, as they now stand, are not responsive to the profound connections between short-term convenience and long-term waste? If they do not show in their pricing - as they do not - the crucial relation between a simple price at a petrol pump and the priceless and non- renewable assets their children will have every right to call to account.
Having come so far with my challenges to this term, I am thoroughly aware that, at least obliquely, I promised a more detailed critique of it. And I do have one.
We need to be vigilant about using the term "sustainable development" because the very words themselves are deceptive. For some of the poorest developing countries - another term I think we need to investigate - a great deal of their reality and their future is not literally sustainable development: quite the contrary. Instead of sustenance and development, they are actually being subjected to an ordeal of survival through a depletion of their assets. I suppose the historic parallel would be Irish tenant farmers in the 1840s, who, in order to make their way through a terrible famine, had to pay their rent with the very crops which might have kept them alive. Rain forests, topsoil, animal habitats, plant diversity - these are the priceless and irreplaceable fuel for the fires of so-called development. Many millions are not beneficiaries of development - let us be honest - they are victims of it. But what do we do about it?
We can start by re-defining the terms. Obviously not here, nor now. But one of the tasks we need to undertake is a rigorous examination of the words we use, and the way we lock realities into those words, and influence approaches to the problem through relatively poor definitions of it. Until our definitions are made in a collaborative way by those who have a day to day knowledge of the reality and suffering, those definitions will be wanting. Until we make a coherent picture which includes crippling debt as well as international assistance, cultural dignity as well as political need, and embark on a genuine process of structural change in the ordering of our world, we will not have respected the profound moral implications of the concept of sustainable development.
And in connection with this, I was particularly struck with the words of the historian Paul Kennedy of Yale University, who said recently: "We have to put at the centre of our definition individual human beings and individual human dignity and say everything else flows from these. We have to create what Hans Kung called a `global ethic'. We have to admit that while we follow different belief systems and cultural systems, there's something that transcends all of that, which are human beings. And we need a global ethic to begin this. We need to bring in the theologians rather than exclude them".
Perhaps it is a true measure of our sense of the gravity of the crisis that we wish to call in the theologians at this stage! Certainly I have become increasingly aware of the depth of concern of those who know the situation first hand. Whenever I can, I listen to those, like you, with practical experience. This may occur in a conference setting or sometimes a more informal one. On 5 December last year, International Development Day, I gave a party for aid workers - which indeed is an annual event - for those who had returned to Ireland during that year. As they filed past, and they mingled, teasing each other about wearing new or borrowed jackets, and exchanging warm greetings, I also heard their expressions of anger and frustration. And when they told me of their personal difficulty in adjusting back to our consumer-led, wasteful society, I acutely remembered my own return to the hotel in Nairobi after only a very few days in the camps of Somalia. Days, I should say, watching people who could take nothing at all for granted - not health, nor their children's health. Not food or survival or dignity. And then to walk from that back into the world which we have made, and are responsible for, a world where demands can be met by simply lifting a phone for room service. Even after so brief a time, I saw that contrast as not simply shocking, but also profoundly revealing of the contrasts, illogicality’s, and finally deep hypocrisies we will be guilty of in this generation if we do not respond to these challenges, define these terms, and narrow the gap.
Let me move now from the particular to the general. How can we countenance that over 800m people go hungry every day, many of them children? Primary health care is not available for over 1,500m people. Diseases, many of them easily avoidable, threaten millions. And given the rapid population increases, meeting the basic needs of all the inhabitants of the world is becoming an ever greater challenge.
But even as I use those statistics I can see how utterly hard it is to hold in our heads - let alone to put into any others - the sheer abstraction of a number like 800m. And for this very reason there is, I believe, a need for a global ethic: to keep firmly in our mind the global dimension of the decisions we take rather than the effect on the sovereign states in which we are grouped as people on this earth. And to see the core of that ethic not in abstract statistics or maps or conference decisions, but in the warmest, most exact sense of that human individual Paul Kennedy spoke of.
One of the best effects of the global ethic would be the invitation it holds out to us to see the world as a single whole; to relate the destiny of the human race to that of the natural world. To put back together, in other words, in some visionary and instinctive way all those perceptions and understandings we have been protecting ourselves from with statistics and reports and jargon. And through that ethic we would also have a good chance - an old-fashioned and essential chance - to see the meanings and responsibilities of our ideas. And to look at the moral consequences in some of the old and simple ethical language, for instance the fact that if we are to preserve the world's resources we have to share them: a commonsense and downright ethical notion, but one which has been greatly resisted.
The consumer societies in which we live are rapidly becoming ethics-resistant. They are more prosperous and more wasteful than any in human history. They have put considerable amounts of their resources behind glittering opportunities such as modern technology, which could arguably also be - to use another old ethical word -deeply selfish ones. Many developing countries now stand, like the child at the bakery window, at the periphery of these opportunities, conscious that unless the transfer of such technological knowledge to them happens on concessionary and preferential terms it will be impossible for them to build up a satisfactory level of scientific and technological capacity. I want to stress this point here today. This is not something that has happened. It is in the process of happening. We still have time to intervene. With a sufficient sense of international responsibility, we could ensure the widest possible participation in the new information world which technology is rapidly creating. We should apply ourselves to helping developing countries to avoid some of the wasteful and environmentally damaging stages which industrialised countries went through in their own development.
But we need to bear in mind also the lure of technology and its often damaging consequences. The tools for change are sometimes more effective the simpler they are. The sophisticated precision instrument may appear the desired tool for the job but often the simple hoe would be cheaper, more effective, easier to maintain and already available. When the appropriate technology is to hand it is not necessary to do things for or to people but to help people to do things for themselves.
People must feel and believe that it is their own efforts that are driving the development process. They must become self reliant, not be made self-reliant. I know from my own experience how important aid workers feel it is that they should listen to those with whom they are working, otherwise they cannot act as the agent of change. By listening to each other we may draw strength from the diversity of human cultures and human historical experience. We need to acknowledge that Western industrialised societies do not offer a blueprint for development but rather have much to learn in addressing the historic capacity of Africa and other regions to sustain their peoples, and much to offer in assessing the most effective and environmentally sustainable technology to serve the common needs of the planet.
In an address which I gave at Harvard University in March this year I suggested four ideas which seem to me to be fundamental to the way we should now organise and structure our relations in this changing world. I summarised them as connectedness, listening, sharing and participation; and, without wishing to repeat what I said then, I would invoke them as necessary to a balanced, agreed, overall sense of sustainable development. To achieve that we need to see this world as a single whole, to understand the connectedness of its fate and our actions. We must find the ability to listen to the narrative of each other's diversities, so that we can draw strength and not weakness from our differences. This seems to me to be crucial to deepening our respect for human dignity and that cultural ecology which I mentioned at the beginning. We need a concept of sharing which moves beyond the old model of development aid to radical re-thinking leading to fundamental structural change. And the fourth idea, that of participation - not necessarily on a western model of democracy, but involving people in the system of government under which they live - is an important component of sustainable development at local level. To the greatest extent possible it should be `bottom up' development, involving effective participation by both men and women in responsive, public decision-making systems.
I bring up women here not as a special case, but as a revealing instance of the absences and erasures out of which - and rather dangerously - we make both conclusions and policies. The decision-making processes in this whole debate have often followed an odd and predictable curve - from male decision-making in the North to male recipients of it in the South. And yet women have in many ways - by their silences and their suffering, by the images they burn into our memories both from personal experience and on our television - told the true story of sustainable development in their countries. They show the cost of the gap between rhetoric and reality. They are at the cutting edge of all the injustices we speak of and forget in the comfortable societies in which we live.
The Ugandan poet, Okot p'Bitak, brings these images closer to us in this poem:
Woman of Africa
Sweeper
Smearing floors and walls
With cow dung and black soil
Cook, ayah, the baby on your back
Washer of dishes,
Planting, weeding, harvesting
Storekeeper, builder
Runner of errands,
Cart, lorry, donkey.
Woman of Africa
What are you not?
Change. That of course is the magic word which hangs over this whole debate. A change in society. A change of heart. A change in the numbers, the diseases, the deaths. Could any global ethic achieve this? Not all at once, of course. And not on its own. But one of the human capacities which our consumer societies have devalued is that of imagination - not just as an agency of individual expression, but as a source of human empathy. The images of suffering, want and injustice which come to our screens and newspapers will be of no use as a source of information and change if we do not have the capacity to imagine ourselves into those camps, famines, hardships which those images tell us about. If we have that capacity, we will not quickly patronise or simplify the suffering we see in front of us. We will not easily talk in a paternalistic or dismissive way about other people's sufferings.
But if we use our imagination then I think we will recognise that setting out a list of goals and solutions may not necessarily take into account some of the fragile components of dignity and self-respect which need to be part of the solution. As long as we tell ourselves that development assistance to under-developed countries is what this whole debate is about, then we are seeking to salve our consciences while shedding our responsibilities.
But even if we use our imagination we are still left with the gap between principle and practice.
What makes the imaginative faculty so valuable - and what gives it such a part to play in shaping a global ethic -is that it can unite apparently disparate events and occasions and make sense of them. If we use our imaginations we can see that the suffering of individual peoples, the complex balances of power and supply, and the survival and strengthening of democracy in our world and theirs are all a single equation. They are not separate parts of separate problems. We need to consider them together. And there are always temptations, as we live in the midst of progress and plenty, to consider them apart.
It is also imagination which will draw us from the pride and achievement and wealth of a Western society to consider the immense vulnerability of those who, if we ignore them, will become one of the accusations and shames of that very society. I want to quote to you the words of the French writer Albert Camus because they relate the commitments of imagination to the purposes of compassion, as I think we also should do: "I have not written day after day", he said, "because I desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and masterpieces. I have written so much because I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life, towards those, whoever they may be, who are humiliated. They need to hope, and if all keep silent, they will be forever deprived of hope and we with them".
We need not be deprived of hope. There are things we can do at this stage and in this generation. First and foremost we need to work to make these complex problems both visible and connected. We also need to think about - to really think imaginatively - about how small our world is now. We cannot afford to be silent. We cannot afford to break the silence with careless words and unexamined concepts. If there is to be a future meeting, of an emblematic kind, between a child of the North and a child of the South, grown into adults, if they are to be able to meet without bitterness and shame and as true partners, we need to prepare that meeting now - by our words, our actions and our commitments.