A feature of the People-Centered Development Forum, Release Date July 6, 1995
by David C. Korten
In a world of stagnant economies, Asia's record of economic growth has made it the envy of the world. The economies of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and more recently Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia have been pointed to as providing the models of successful economic management others are urged to emulate. Department stores filled with luxuries from around the world, urban skylines defined by modern high rise buildings, streets crowded with late model luxury cars, skies filled with jumbo jets featuring services that are the envy of the industry, and buoyant stock markets all contribute to defining one face of Asia and confirm the thesis that history is moving inexorably eastward to now again favor the region that gave birth to many of the world's earliest civilizations.
Yet Asia also has a second face that projects quite a different image one of deep and massive poverty, social violence, and environmental destruction. Africa is often contrasted with Asia as the basket case of development. Yet 675 million Asians live in absolute poverty, more than twice the 325 million absolute poor in Sub-Saharan Africa. More millions of Asian's live in constant fear of the ethnic and social violence of those who strike out against family and neighbor for the injustices and deprivation of a social system that seems impervious to their needs. Military forces set on containing the violence only succeed in adding to it. The second face of Asia reveals a society poised on the brink of ecological devastation. Its once endless forests are disappearing. Its vast fertile agricultural lands are being eroded, impoverished, and paved over. Its rivers are filling with poisons. Drought prone areas are expanding, even as floods and typhoons take greater tolls due to over crowding and loss of forest cover.
Asia's two faces mirror the pervasive contrasts of a larger world in which the gap between rich and poor is growing at an alarming rate and earth's ecological life support system is being placed in ever greater jeopardy. We are being forced to recognize that the favored face of wealth and luxury is little more than an unsustainable illusion.
The contrasts that define these two faces are a product of the conflux of two dominant contemporary realities: Earth's ecological space has been filled, and the human future is being dictated by unrestrained and humanly unaccountable market forces.
These two realities have produced powerful institutional dynamics that intensify resource competition and accelerate community breakdown. In combination they account in substantial measure for the sharply growing gap between rich and poor, the environmental devastation, and the disintegration of the social fabric being experienced almost everywhere in our world. The commitment of the G-7 governments and the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank, IMF, and GATT) to accelerated economic growth through removal of all remaining restraints on market forces calls into serious question their capacity to provide the kind of leadership that is desperately needed in rethinking the global economy.
Sustainable development will not be achieved by economic fine tuning or by policy changes at the margin. We face the need for a rapid and far reaching transformation of thought and institutions. This transformation will require a commitment to policies that in many instances run directly counter to the wisdom, values and institutional forces of the prevailing Western development model.
An important part of the challenge will be to eliminate the systemic bias of the conventional market system toward: allocating resources to their "highest value use" things people with money are prepared to pay high prices to obtain to the neglect of basic needs; and converting the common heritage of earth's ecological resources into personal financial wealth.
REDISCOVERING SPIRITUAL VALUES
The world now needs a new vision of human progress. Technology must play an important role in the new vision. It cannot, however, resolve the crisis of values that has led human society to grossly and irresponsibly abuse the power of its technology. There is a great need here for the profound wisdom of Eastern culture and religion with regard to spirituality, community, and harmonious living. However, even in Asia these values have been badly debased by a quest for money, fashion, and glittering technical gadgets that will forever remain beyond the reach of all but a favored few.
While economists the world over look for new sources of money to "kick-start" the global economy, growing numbers of more thoughtful people are being pressed by the social and ecological crisis to reach into their own inner being for answers to basic questions about the nature and meaning of life, nature and community. The pursuit of such questions rather quickly reveals the shallowness of a society dedicated to the worship and pursuit of money as the ultimate value. It is bringing many of us back into contact with the deep spiritual mysteries of life in all its diverse yet inter-related forms. Herein we may find the spiritual insight required to re-establish the nurturing bonds of sharing on which human community and life itself depend.
A terrifying realization often comes hand in hand with this spiritual awakening. There is no invisible hand, protective god, or man on a white horse to save us from our compulsive obsession with money. As with any addiction, change comes only through accepting responsibility for our own actions. Perhaps we might think of our current potentially terminal crisis as God's final dramatic effort to get our attention before canceling a failed evolutionary experiment.
As this yet nearly invisible spiritual awakening grows in scope and power, such insights may prepare us, as an act of collective survival, to recreate the political and economic structures of human society in ways that free our world from the grip of greed, waste, and exploitation. So prepared, we might recognize that contrary to our fears, the path to sustainability is also the long sought path to human social and spiritual liberation.
THE SEARCH FOR LIBERATING STRUCTURES
Recreating the institutions of human society around a new values base is no small undertaking. Even as we support one another in our mutual spiritual awakening, we must advance an institutional agenda that seeks:
The required changes have far reaching social and technical implications touching on every aspect of human society. The following presents an illustrative sample of what might readily be characterized as a radical agenda.5 At another level it is nothing more than the application of common sense to a very serious problem a not so radical agenda. The motivating force is not idealism. It is mutual survival.
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
To support projected increases in population, each nation must prepare to optimize the use of its land and water resources to provide a nutritionally adequate diet, fiber, and energy for its people. This challenge is particularly acute for Southern countries that account for most of the world's population growth and must face the need to feed from two to four times their present populations if growth rates are not sharply and immediately curtailed. This must be done using technologies and modes of organization that achieve sustainable high levels of production and contribute to generating livelihoods for a major portion of the national labor force. Predominantly vegetarian diets will be a necessity.
This suggests a need to develop food/agriculture systems oriented to domestic needs based on intensively managed small farms that: 1) rely on natural ecological processes (bio-dynamic agriculture) to maintain natural soil fertility and water retention, and to eliminate use of non-renewable inputs; 2) produce a diverse range of food, fiber, livestock, and energy products to meet basic domestic needs; 3) limit, contain and recycle their own contaminants; and 4) depend primarily on renewable solar generated energy sources including animal power and bio-gas for preparation, production, processing, storage, and transport.6 These should be integrated into a system of small and medium agro-related industries that generate additional employment and local value added.
Movement toward a sustainable agricultural system would be advanced by:
ENERGY CONSERVATION AND SOLAR CONVERSION
Sustainability requires virtually eliminating the modern economy's dependence on burning ever larger quantities of high polluting, nonrenewable fuels; and on large hydropower projects that displace millions of people and flood vast areas of productive land. A sound energy policy gives first priority to conservation, eliminating non-essential uses, increasing efficiency in essential uses, and reorienting living patterns to reduce energy requirements for transportation and such uses as heating/cooling. It simultaneously phases out dependence on high polluting, non-renewable fuels in favor of renewable, predominantly solar, sources.
A comprehensive sustainable energy policy would:
A FRUGAL, RECYCLING ECONOMY
Perhaps one of the best indicators of sustainability is the "garbage index." In a full world, sustainability requires the virtual elimination of waste, i.e., zero garbage (including pollution). This requires that all productive activities be organized as closed systems. All non-biological resources, once taken from the ground, should become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystem, but only in ways that facilitate their natural reprocessing and productive use.
Suggested actions include:
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
An economy divided between the extravagant and the deprived is inherently unstable and unsustainable especially once it becomes evident to one and all that the physical pie is not going to get any larger. Economic justice, combined with the discipline and efficiency of private ownership and the market mechanism, is an essential cornerstone of a sustainable society in a resource scarce world. This can be achieved by democratizing the ownership and control of productive assets, breaking up national and international monopolies, and decentralizing economic activity to create a globally linked system of localized self-reliant, recycling economies.
One model for worker ownership in the industrial sector is that of the Mondragon association of some two hundred cooperative enterprises in Spain (mostly industrial factories manufacturing durable goods, intermediate goods, capital equipment, and electronic and high technology products, schools, and farms owned and managed by over 20,000 owner workers. A promising model for the commercial sector is the 200,000 member Sekatsu consumer cooperative in Japan known for the application of rigorous social and environmental standards to the products it sells.
Several of the measures outlined above, such as agrarian reform and high taxes on luxury goods, would advance this agenda. In addition, the following implementing measures are suggested.
STABILIZING POPULATION: THE JAPANESE EXPERIENCE
Japan built its modern economy on a foundation of radical land reform, massive investments in basic education, and dense networks of rural organization that broke up rural power monopolies, distributed asset control, contributed to increased rural household incomes, and established the basis for a thriving rural economy. Japan continues to recognize its small farmers and businesses as the backbone of local communities and the domestic economy, giving them preferential treatment and protecting them against foreign or domestic competition. Strict enforcement of environmental regulations and the protection of Japanese forests has preserved much of Japan's natural beauty and ecological vitality.
The Japanese government has taken a strong hand in economic management, combining market forces with government direction to assure national ownership of Japan's land, economy, and capital assets and to build a strong base of domestically controlled technology. The salaries of top level managers have been held in check. Japanese workers have enjoyed good wages, benefits and job security. A strong domestic market for domestically produced goods has served as a foundation for export success.
Zero population growth has been achieved and a policy of keeping energy prices high has encouraged energy efficiency. Military expenditures have been confined to maintaining a modest self-defense force that is constitutionally prohibited from foreign adventurism.
Unfortunately, in its overseas aid and business ventures Japan has aggressively advanced a development model for other countries that bears little relation to the policies it favors for itself. Its overseas development projects, both public and private, have built dependence on Japanese technology and capital, driven people off their land, destroyed their forests and fisheries, dumped toxic wastes on their land and in their water, mined their natural resources, and otherwise ravaged their ecology for Japanese corporate profits.
The productive power of earth's ecosystem is the natural heritage of all living creatures. Each individual has a right to no more than his or her equitable share of the renewable surplus created by that system. The most optimistic of current projections forecast that the earth's present population of 5.2 billion will at least double before it stabilizes. Each such doubling cuts in half each person's just share of that surplus. It is unlikely that we can achieve universally the levels of physical consumption consistent with optimal human well-being and preserve essential wild spaces unless the human population of the planet is stabilized substantially below its current level probably somewhere between 2.5 billion (its 1950 level) or 4 billion (its 1975 level).
There are several essential steps toward speeding stabilization.
TRADE, AID, AND FOREIGN INVESTMENT
From the earliest days of colonialism, the international trade and investment system has served as an instrument by which those who control capital, technology, and state power concentrate their control over the earth's ecological resources to satisfy their tastes for conspicuous consumption. In earlier days their favored instruments were armies. In the post-colonial era, the same ends are accomplished through transnational corporations, the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, and GATT), and development assistance. Each works to increase dependence on the international trade system, mortgage national economies to outside interests, and gain unrestrained access to local resources and markets for transnational corporations. Creating a sustainable global economy will require a thorough going reform of the international trade and investment system to shift the balance of economic forces back toward people and community. A continuation of international trade and investment is essential to human progress and well being. However, rather than serving the interests of overconsumption based on the exploitation of other people's ecological resources, the international system must provide incentives and support for economic and ecological self-reliance especially in meeting the basic needs of its people and facilitate the unrestrained sharing of socially and ecologically beneficial technology. The optimal level of international trade and investment are probably substantially below those that currently prevail.
A number of actions are suggested.
None of these are simple or politically expedient proposals. Most fall so far outside of prevailing policy orthodoxy as to justify calling them radical and dismiss them as the idealistic and nostalgic nonsense.
Yet there are strong arguments for each of these proposals as an essential element of a sustainable human future.7 Each is grounded in a common sense understanding of what must be done to reverse our current course toward assured mutual social and ecological destruction.
My own experience in meetings around the world suggests that this common sense understanding is far more widely shared by professionals and lay people from across the political spectrum than is evident in the prevailing media discourse and the studies and policy pronouncements of official agencies. Indeed the analyses and proposals presented here are a product of the lively citizen dialogue taking place all around the world. The world's people are moving out ahead of their institutions in their understanding and commitments relating to the issues of sustainable development.
Perhaps the radical agenda outlined above is less radical than it first appears. Indeed, there is a real and growing prospect that an agenda much like the one outlined above could attract a consequential and growing mainstream political constituency.
This paper was prepared under the Environmental Management Program of the Asian Institute of Management based on a presentation to the Third Pacific Environmental Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, 13-15 February 1992. It is distributed by the People-Centered Development Forum information Service as a public service and may be freely reprinted or otherwise reproduced and distributed with appropriate credits to the author and the PCDForum.
Dr. David C. Korten is president of the People-Centered Development Forum and a visiting professor at the Asian Institute of Management. He holds M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. In his earlier career he served as a Captain in the United States Air Force, helped establish management schools in Africa and Latin America, taught at the Harvard University Graduate Schools of Business and Public Health, and conducted research at the Harvard Institute for International Development. He has served on the staff of the Ford Foundation in Manila and as Asia Regional Advisor on Development Management with the U.S. Agency for International Development. His most recent book is Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda (West Hartford, CT, USA: Kumarian Press, 1990).