Reimagining development for sustainability in the low income countries

This week's readings highlight various entry points for sustainability. These points, although mostly discussed in the context of high income countries, also make sense to low income countries. Rethinking development beyond unregulated capitalism is quite relevant for countries which are either rapidly growing or are aspiring to grow. In those developing countries, mainstream idea of development centers on how to attract big multinational companies for large-scale foreign investment, how to build huge infrastructures, how to extract natural wealths, and how to orient economic policies toward capitalism and consumerism. However, the ground reality is otherwise. There are weaker institutions, unchecked environmental degradation, increasing trend of disasters, growing inequality and grievances and existing social and political tensions. Such mismatch between development imagination and existing soco-political and environmental realities actually demands idea of sustainability.

As Wapner and Willoughby have argued, environmentally conscious personal act should be linked with larger social movement which demands redistribution in high income countries and asks for bringing poor communities out of poverty without harming environment. According to them it can be done by increasing state's role on health and education and enhancing people's livelihoods. The irony is that developing countries imagine development in terms of big dams, high rise buildings, expressways, international airports, industrial farming rather than air, water, soil, trees, insects, birds, local groups and farmer's market in their development planning. Such mainstream thinking of development is neither economically secure, nor ecologically stable, nor socially just. As Moore and Rees argue, combined evidence of widening income gaps and accelerating ecological change proves that the policy is only paying lip-service to sustainability ideas by dressing growth economy in green. Therefore de-growing economic development is necessary not only to developed countries, as Assadourian has argued, but also to low income countries, in which possibility for degrow is higher than their high income counterparts. There are several successful examples in which local communities have collectively resisted the destructive paths and provided sustainable alternatives. We need more such examples, based on which we can build a sustained political movement for localized, environmentally sensible and less consumptive development pathway not only to avoid the destructive paths taken by the west, but also to protect them from environmental, political and economic crisis. Current structure of culture such as education and media play both supporting and opposing role to such movement.