A recent study estimates that “no country meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. The universal achievement of more qualitative goals (e.g., high life satisfaction) would require resource consumption of 2 to 6 times sustainable levels, based on current relationships” (O`Neill et al. 2018, p. 88). In 2017, the Global Compact for the Environment initiative sought to introduce more ambitious principles for international environmental law, as in dubio pro natura (Kotzé and French 2018). Villalba, Unai. 2013. Buen vivir vs. development: a paradigm shift in the Andes? Third World Quarterly 34 (8): 1427–1442. doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.831594.
Adelman, Sam and Abdul Paliwala. 2021. Introduction. In The limits of law and development: neoliberalism, governance and social justice, edited by Sam Adelman and Abdul Paliwala, 1-12. London: Routledge. The second part of this article describes the important principle of sustainable development in modern international environmental law. It examines how the principle of sustainable development has evolved from its first appearance in the Brundtland Commission report in 1987 to its central position at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. These formulations of the principle accepted that two opposing objectives – environmental protection and economic development – were combined to define sustainable development. At the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, the question of the meaning of sustainable development was addressed and a definition was accepted that enriched the paradoxical nature of the principle. This international understanding of sustainable development downplays its value as a principle of international law because much of government policy can be defended by reference to it. The problem of centrist thinking, and in particular the extent to which this thought privileges the interests of certain people, leads Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2011, p.
5) to call for a “radical theoretical reconfiguration of environmental law” (emphasis in original); leads to a critical environmental law that “makes a radical critique of traditional legal and environmental foundations, proposing in its place a new, mobile, material and accentric approach to environmental law” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015, p. 57). Such a reconfiguration leads to an open ecology in which humans are de-centered from “problem spaces” where it is possible to discover the role and location of human-non-human connections while creating space for the implementation of new ontological categories (DePuy et al. 2022). This is necessary to guide our “worldviews”; ideas about people and how they interact; ethical frameworks and values; assumptions about what exists and what does not exist; and the paths of knowledge and objectivity” (Villalba 2013, p. 1430). Some proponents of development recognize the limits of growth and GDP, yet seem unable to abandon these neoliberal measures of progress, prosperity and well-being. For example, an assessment commissioned by the UK Treasury entitled The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review acknowledges that “economic progress should be interpreted as inclusive prosperity growth, not GDP growth or growth in any of the other ad hoc measures proposed in recent years, such as the United Nations Human Development Index” (Dasgupta 2021, p.
121). In the same breath, however, the review perpetuates the contradiction that “GDP growth is fundamentally compatible with sustainable development. [and] is not in itself an obstacle to sustainable development” (Dasgupta 2021, pp. 335-336). The report defines sustainable development as a balance between humanity`s overall impact on the biosphere and the rate of biosphere recovery (Dasgupta 2021, p. 33) and accepts that nature has intrinsic value, but seems unable to free itself from the neoliberal mentality that sees nature as a reservoir of capital and services. that must be assessed to be valued and protected. The review`s insistence that “ecosystems are capital goods” (Dasgupta 2021, p. 52) suggests that it is simply a more sophisticated method of tasting the land and its “resources.” Kotzé, Louis J., and Paola Villavicencio Calzadilla. 2017. Somewhere Between Rhetoric and Reality: Environmental Constitutionalism and the Rights of Nature in Ecuador. Transnational Environmental Law 6 (3): 401-433.
doi.org/10.1017/S2047102517000061. UNDP. N/A Human Development Index (HDI). hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi. Retrieved 15 October 2021. It seems that the classic Western idea of growth-oriented extractive development has been regularly declared dead, but persists in zombie form (Gudynas 2011). The reality is that the root of the socio-ecological crisis, as Nebbia (2012, p. 97) puts it, lies in the “myth of economic `growth` and the endless increase in its only measure”: gross domestic product (GDP).
GDP remains the dominant measure of development, growth and national power, despite persistent and growing criticism (Daly, 2013; Higgs, 2014). It is primarily a measure of market transactions and production that ignores social costs, inequality and environmental degradation (Hickel 2020). It has long been clear that “GDP . a poor approximation of society`s well-being, something it should never measure” (Ward et al., 2016, pp. 11-12). This leads to the paradox that fetishizing economic growth is counterproductive, as an increasing share of GDP consists of defensive or negative spending, such as adaptation and pollution costs (Stiglitz et al. 2020). In developed countries, growth has become virtually unprofitable because its benefits no longer exceed its costs (Kallis 2018). As a result, there is a growing demand to “resist the often unconscious temptation to accept gross domestic product as an objective measure of social well-being and economic progress” (England 1998, pp. 102); and instead use alternative approaches such as Bhutan`s “Gross National Happiness Index” as a measure of progress (Brooks 2013). Carvalho, Georgia O. 2001.
Sustainable development: is it feasible in the current context of international political economy? Sustainable development 9 (2): 61–73. doi.org/10.1002/sd.159. Buen vivir is not only relevant or applicable in an Indigenous context. Villalba (2013, p. 1433) says that while Buen Vivir`s rejection of modernity could lead to the idea that Buen Vivir is only possible in indigenous contexts, “a wide range of alternative Western thinking critical of development could also be understood as a search for Buen Vivir.” Lang, Winfried. 1995. Sustainable Development and International Law. London: Graham and Trotman Ltd. The Brundtland Report was facilitated by the link between sustainable development and environmental protection provisionally established at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 – a link that has become increasingly clear at successive international environmental conferences. The Stockholm Conference provided the anthropocentric, utilitarian and gender context (footnote 4) for subsequent environmental negotiations and the creation of international environmental standards that prioritize the needs of some people over those of other threatened species and the biosphere.
For example, the preamble to the Stockholm Declaration states: “Both aspects of man`s environment, natural and man-made, are essential to his well-being and to the enjoyment of fundamental human rights.” In this article, we argue that sustainable development is not a socio-ecological principle. This principle, deeply rooted in environmental law, policy and governance, fosters environmentally destructive neoliberal economic growth that exploits and degrades the vulnerable order of life. Despite the seemingly well-intentioned intentions behind the emergence of sustainable development, it almost invariably facilitates exploitative economic development activities that exacerbate systemic inequalities and injustices without substantially protecting all life forms in the Anthropocene. We conclude the article by examining an attempt to build alternatives to sustainable development through the indigenous onto-epistemology of Buen Vivir. While buen vivir is not a panacea, it is a worldview that offers the potential to critically rethink how environmental law might shift from its “centered”, gendered, and anthropocentric neoliberal methodology for sustainable development to a radically different ontology that encompasses ecologically sustainable ways of thinking. to be, to know and to care. Buen vivir already exerts a growing influence on Latin American jurisprudence by being included in national development plans as well as in constitutional and legal provisions in Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia (Kotzé and Villavicencio Calzadilla 2017; Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018) and the growing trend to give rights to nature (Gellers 2021; O`Donnell, 2018). There are also encouraging developments that show that buen vivir is beginning to confront traditional development models in practice.