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In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy

  • Special Feature: Review Article
  • Socially Sustainable Degrowth as a Social-Ecological Transformation
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Abstract

International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems. This paper traces economic roots of current environmental problems and examines the evolution of sustainability policy since the publication of Club of Rome’s report Limits to growth and the celebration of the first Earth summit in Stockholm in 1972 to the publication of UNEP’s Green economy report and the celebration of the last Earth summit in Rio 2012. Our emphasis is on the evolving framing of the relations between growth and the environment and the role of markets and states in the sustainability policy agenda. We review influential policy documents and Earth summit declarations since the early 1970s. Three major changes are identified in international sustainability discourse: (1) an analytical shift from a notion of growth versus the environment to a notion of growth for the environment, (2) a shift in focus from direct public regulation to market-based instruments, and (3) a shift from a political to a technocratic discourse. We note that attempts in sustainability policy to address the conflict between growth and the environment have pulled back severely since the 1970s and discuss the observed patterns of change in relation to changes in the balance of political and ideological forces. We conclude summarizing main insights from the review and discussing perspectives of the sustainability debate on growth and the environment.

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Notes

  1. According to Ehrlich et al. (2012), more than 100 million websites worldwide feature the word ‘Sustainability’.

  2. According to Moolakkattu (2010: 154) when asked by a journalist after the independence of India if the new country would try to reach the British standards of living, Gandhi replied “It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve this prosperity. How many planets will a country like India require!”. In his remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 R. F. Kennedy pointed to the non-sense of using growth as a measure of progress: “if we judge the USA by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising […] It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl […] it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”. Full speech available at: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx.

  3. The pursuit of perpetual growth as societal goal has no historical precedents in pre-modern thinking. Until the notion of ‘production’ became a central element of economic analysis, the idea of a society in continuous expansion was absent in all major political writings. For example, the utopias described by Plato and Aristotle proposed ideal societies as being stable in population and supplies (see Naredo 2010).

  4. The political commitment becomes most explicit in the final passage of the Declaration: “There is an international power structure that will resist moves in this direction. Its methods are well known: the purposive maintenance of the built-in bias of the existing international market mechanisms, other forms of economic manipulations, withdrawing or withholding credits, embargoes, economic sanctions, subversive use of intelligence agencies, repression including torture, counter-insurgency operations, even full-scale intervention. To those contemplating the use of such methods we say: “hands-off. Leave countries to find their own road to a fuller life of their citizens””.

  5. "For most of the last century, economic growth was fuelled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are gone… Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact" United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon addressing the World Economic Forum, 29 January 2011.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Giorgos Kallis, Roldan Muradian, Iago Otero and two anonymous reviewers for their comments to a previous draft of this manuscript. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Gaustadalléen 21, 0349, Oslo, Norway

    Erik Gómez-Baggethun

  2. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Erik Gómez-Baggethun

  3. Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    José Manuel Naredo

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  1. Erik Gómez-Baggethun
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Correspondence to Erik Gómez-Baggethun.

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Handled by Iago Otero, IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and Research & Degrowth, Spain.

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Gómez-Baggethun, E., Naredo, J.M. In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy. Sustain Sci 10, 385–395 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0308-6

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