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16.2: Sustainable Development and Human Security

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    77193
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    The UNDP envisioned “sustainable human development” as the means to achieving human security (UNDP, 1994). Unlike conventional approaches to security, this approach appreciates that security depends on long term conditions for human well-being, realized in various interconnected areas. It is an application of the model of sustainable development stated in the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report ‘Our Common Future’ and reaffirmed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

    Sustainability as a basis for humans’ relationship with the environment is an ancient idea and has a history of successful implementation in public systems according to the ecological conditions of the time (Bosselmann, 2016, pp. 3, 83; Weeramantry, 1997). The turning point in the relationship was the industrial revolution where humans’ perception of nature changed from recognising the intrinsic value and integrity of ecosystems to viewing nature as a machine and as a resource base to be exploited for human gain and prosperity. Importantly, this was also the era of private property and the diffusion of liberal economic free-market enterprise giving rise to “a relationship of individual power over the land” (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 13).

    The first reference to sustainable development occurred in the 1980 World Conservation Report of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Then the World Charter for Nature, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1983, included a model of sustainable development in which the management of natural resources was deemed necessary in order to “achieve and maintain optimum sustainable productivity” (para. 4) but not “in excess of their capacity for regeneration” (para. 10a). This model reflected the sustainability dimension that “every form of life is unique, warranting respect regardless of its worth to man” (preamble). However in the 1987 Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987) sustainable development lost its core ecological meaning due to the development concerns and lobbying efforts of ‘southern’ states in the World Commission on Environment and Development (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 26). The priority of human needs was upheld. Then in 1992 the Rio Declaration was adopted as a non-binding agreement during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which states as its first principle that “human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development” (Principle 1; UNDP, 1992).

    Despite overwhelming scientific evidence of unparalleled anthropogenic environmental degradation, patterns of wasteful production and consumption remain deeply ingrained in human behaviour (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 9). The continuance of these attitudes and behaviours is largely due to the externalization of the costs of environmental change. The negative consequences of current practices are often less likely to affect the human security of those causing the most degradation. They are separated by distance in space because these socio-economic activities take place globally, and they are separated in time because the effects of degradation primarily affect the resource base of future generations rather than their own. Hence, the demands of the current generation exceed the regenerative ability of nature (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 9).

    Sustainable development has been presented as a three pillar model in which environmental, economic and social needs are all balanced (OECD, 2005). Sustainable development moved away from the intrinsic value of nature and became terminologically vague so as to simply maintain the status quo despite the irrefutable knowledge of how this negatively impacts the environment. Ways of protecting the environment were mainly informed by technical solutions and economic models, which resulted in environmental problems being simply co-opted into the current economic world order, without actual cognizance of what is being secured and what endangerments it is being secured against (Dalby, 2002). Thus the model of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report (1987) and its three pillars is an attempt to ‘have it all’—economic prosperity and a healthy environment.

    The vagueness of the UNDP (1994) formulation of sustainable human development means that we cannot even be sure whether concern for the environment actually features as a balance to development in other areas, or whether the environment is viewed purely as a threat. Much depends on how the relationship between environment and security is perceived. The difference between strong and weak sustainable development is that the environment is conceived either as ‘everything’ or as ‘the other’ (Bosselmann, 2006, p. 44). The human security literature, with its many equally weighed threat sources, largely reflects a limited understanding of the environment as a basis for insecurity. As a means of ensuring human security, this weak model of sustainability (as it has been referred to), is insufficient. Sustainable development, as it is now understood, is based on the irrationally held assumption that growth of human populations and economies can be reconciled with environmental preservation (Bosselmann, 2016, pp. 2, 41).

    Sustainable development and indeed the satisfaction of human security are inevitably about human needs. Human security recognises the needs of current and future generations to be free from fear and want, which reflects the notion of sustainable development proffered by the Brundtland Report: “the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43). So, we are left wondering what needs these may be since the effects produced by interconnected threats to human security will surely adjust across time (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 28). Fundamentally though, the ability of future generations to be free from insecurity and to satisfy their material needs will depend on basic environmental services, without which no human life is possible (Bosselmann, 2016, p. 29). Fear and want can only ever be met within ecological boundaries—“there is no alternative to preserving the Earth’s ecological integrity” (Bosselmann, 2016, pp. 2, 28).


    16.2: Sustainable Development and Human Security is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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