Arturo Escobar, 1995

It will be appropriate to start this with a parody of Shiv Visvanathan 1991 review of Gro-Harlem Bruntland's report on 'Environment and Development.' Shall we all rise to say a minute's silence for the trees that supply the paper on which the World Development Report 2003 was printed.

In 1987, the United Nations convened a World Commission on Environment and Development under the Chairmanship of former Norwegian prime minister, Gro-Harlem Bruntland. In its report 'our common future', the commission emphasised the need to reconcile humanity with the environment through careful managing.

In 1991, a Harvard economist, Theodor Panyatou told the World Bank conference on development economics that environmental degradation and the question of sustainability has nothing to do with 'growth'. Rather, it is a direct consequence of failure in both market and policy. "Show me a depleted resource or a degraded environment and I will show you a subsidy or a failure to establish basic conditions that would enable the market to function efficiently...If I had to present the solution in one sentence, it would be this: All resources should have titles, and all people should have entitlements," Panyatou declared.

In 1996, Barber Conable of the World Bank followed in the same tenor. Sound ecology he said is all about good economics. With a carefully "planned" environment, most can be made of "nature's resources so that human resourcefulness can make the most of the future."

In 2003, the World Development Report, while not as extreme as Panyatou, or as bureaucratic as Conable, continues essentially in the same tradition which holds that environmental misbehaviour can be disciplined by managerial economics and humanity can be reconciled with the environment at the market place.

In another 50 years, world population will increase by 3 billion. Of course, all of this increase will be in developing countries, where already 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. "Sustainable development," WDR 2003 says, is directed at ensuring better life for these poor people, while ensuring well-being for "everyone." This is also the central concern of the Report: To improve well-being and protect "what people value and want to pass on to their children [read, 'sustainable development']." To improve well being, the report says, people must have "assets" and to ensure that 'development' is sustainable, these assets must be managed "responsibly." How do we achieve these?

One is by building "institutions" that have the capacity to create assets and make market operate efficiently. This include right to own property [efficient titles] and the rule of law [legal guarantees that such rights to property will be protected]. However, not all assets can be provided by the market. Therefore additional institutions have to be constructed to respond to the need for clean water, clean air, fisheries and forests; to build trust and increase people's capacity to network [social capital] and provide security of persons and property. Institutions are also needed for accountable formulation and execution of policies and for ensuring equitable distribution of assets. "Groups that lack assets tend also to lack voice, security, and a stake in the larger society, hampering the ability of institutions to perform their necessary coordination function."

In one stroke of World Bank rationality therefore, the problems of poverty, environmental degradation and 'sustainability', conflicts and so on, are all challenges of institutions building. Once the 'appropriate' institutions are in place, the goals of improving well-being and 'sustainable development' will be attained, and 'our world' will gallantly march into a future of universal prosperity, while at the same time, fully prepared for the pressures this unprecedented glory will bring on the environment.

Compared with the classical neo-liberal dogma of the Bank, the WDR 2003 demonstrates a lot more willingness to acknowledge that not all problems of development can be settled at the market square. However, its interpretation of what causes what and what options are available is still rooted in the same tradition. While very strong and positive in its description, the Report's prescription is still far removed from the realities that speak to the daily struggles and challenges of the people in whose interests it purports to argue. In fact, it is difficult to read through the Report and not ask whom exactly was it meant for. For those who complain about the danger inherent in the discourse of a 'internationalised' environment as a procedure for masking specific realities, especially those realities encountered by poor countries, WDR 2003 presents another evidence.

The Report emphasises environmental degradation, population, poverty and food security, industrialisation, social exclusion and other 'development' concerns. It shows that poverty and environmental degradation are organically connected in a way that the two serve as a cause and consequence upon each other, and therefore, lend themselves to one simple solution: sustainable development. And this can be achieved through 'planning', 'management', 'appropriate policies' and building 'efficient institutions.' While submitting these clinical prescriptions, the Report fails to pay adequate attention to how 'growth' itself becomes a problem and how some of these concerns, especially of poverty and environmental degradation are, in fact, negative consequences of market expansion and growth, which ironically is being pushed forward as the solution to poverty. Relatedly, it also fails to adequately acknowledge the complex challenges that most countries, especially in Africa face, which often defy managerial logic.

Most countries of Africa ravaged by poverty, hunger and disease, ethnic conflicts, illegitimate government, prostrate economy, crushing debt burden and so on, which have their roots deep in the cultural and historical experiences of these countries. Embedded in the question of 'who owns the land' in Africa, are historical parameters for social arrangements and for setting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusions. The struggle for 'space' therefore, the erosion of social capital that result from this struggle, the problems of exclusion as expressed in lack of voice or access, insecurity and even poverty, therefore, often touch on the very nature of the State itself. Rwanda, Burundi, Congo DR and even Uganda are a few examples.

According to the WDR 2003, it is the "rules for property ownership [that] determine the character of state and society." And when "appropriate policies" are not made, it is because "institutions are weak." It fails therefore, to acknowledge that even the process of defining which policies are appropriate is often determined by the complex realities that a state is confronted with, and not always by the logic of efficiency. Policies that make sound economic sense, can be politically stupid. These are realities that can hardly be disciplined by the logic of managerialism.

Arturo Escobar makes this point much more clearly: "The concepts of planning and management," he says, "embody the belief that social change can be engineered and directed, produced at will...Development experts have always entertained the idea that poor countries can more or less smoothly move along the path of progress through planning...The result is that as they are being incorporated into the world capitalist economy, even the most remote communities in the third world are torn apart from their local context and redefined as "resources."

The internationalisation of the environment also serves another purpose. It constructs a world, where responsibilities for the degradation of the environment is shared equally among the rich and the poor countries alike, while masking the wanton inequity in the distribution of global wealth. Thus, problems are globalised, but prosperity is not. In projecting the major challenges to be overcomed in the next 50 years, the Report asks rhetorically: "Will poor countries be able to accelerate their growth without creating destabilising social and environmental stresses? Will the prospective world GDP of $100 trillion at midcentury generate fewer environmental and social stresses than today's much smaller global economy?"

The growth of countries is hereby signaled as associated with environmental and social stresses. And while the "world" prospective GDP might generate "fewer" of such presses, the present scandalous growth being recorded in the developed countries, the so-called "much smaller economy" is clearly absolved. The reality is that there is nothing like world GDP. There is the GDP of the rich countries, and those of the poor countries. The rain of globalisation has not begin to fall equally. While the Report acknowledges that the average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times that in the poorest 20, it adds however, that this ratio has doubled in the last forty years, simply because of "lack of growth in the poor countries." Presented this way, the poor countries are the ones that have simply failed to grow, and this has nothing to do with the way the global economic and financial architecture is constructed and governed. It adds that in the 1990s, 46 countries were involved mainly in civil conflict and most of them are poor countries, but it fail to touch on the root causes of these wars. Escobar argues: the vast majority of the more than 150 wars that have been waged in the world since 1945 have taken place in the Third World, as reflections of superpower confrontations. Even those taking place since the end of the cold war continue to be a reflection of the effects of the struggle for power among industrialised nations."

He submitted further: the industrialised countries, with 26 percent of the population, account for 78 percent of world production of goods and services, 81 percent of energy consumption, 70 percent of chemical fertilisers, and 87 percent of world armaments. One US resident spends as much energy as 7 Mexicans, 55 Indians, 168 Tanzanians, and 900 Nepalis...47 percent of world's grain production is used for animal feed. The same amount of grain could feed more than 2 billion people...The world's six larger grain merchants control 90 percent of the global trade of grain." It is therefore, important to ask, whose purpose does this sustainable development business serve? In whose interest are the change in values and institutions being advocated? What process of knowing informs the baggage of prescriptions that are being put forward? Whose reality defines what institutions are presented as "right" or "appropriate"?

The discourse of sustainable development gained currency in the 80s as environmentalists became strident in their criticisms of Bank activities. Bank's Senior Vice-President David Hopper in 1988 declared that the Bank would be addressing "the full range of environmental needs of its partner nations." Since then, as Wolfgang Sachs observes, " 'survival of the planet'[has become] the wholesale justification for a new wave of state intervention in people's lives all over the world." Sachs in fact, provides an interesting insight that will be useful to cite more extensively:

"While the environmentalists have put the spotlight on the numerous vulnerabilities of nature, governments as a result discover a new conflict-ridden area in need of political governance and regulation. This time, not peace between persons is at stake, but the orderly relations between man and nature. The state of nature and the effects of man, of enacting norms and laws to direct behaviour, and enforcing compliance with the new rules. On the one hand, the continuance of nature's capacity to render services, e.g. clean air and water or a reliable climate, has to be closely watched. On the other hand, society's innumerable actions have to be kept under sufficient control in order to direct the exploitation of nature into tolerable channels. To carry out these objectives, the state has to install the necessary institutions like monitoring systems, required to perform the task, while ecoscience is supposed to provide the epistemology of intervention. In short, the experts who used to look after economic growth now claim to be presiding over survival itself."

Among all the institutions that have been created since then, perhaps, the most potent is the ideological institution that invented the discourse of sustainable development. And as Escobar argued, "sustainable development is the last attempt to articulate modernity and capitalism before the advent of cyber-culture: the resignification of nature as environment; the reinterpretation of poverty as effect of destroyed environments, and the new lease of management and planning as arbiters between people and nature, all of these are parts of the discursive construction of sustainable development."

The invasion of rural peasantry by the concerns of industrial capitalism is perhaps the most pernicious of 'development' ubiquitousness. The governing of the environment as "nature" requires a different set of strategies from that which governs the environment when it is seen as "resources." Those who see land, water, the habitat, the forest as part of nature know and respect the boundaries imposed by nature and they understand its capacity for self-regeneration. They do not need "experts" to teach them "sustainable agriculture." Appropriation of the environment as resources however requires a different kind of relationship with nature. Vandana Shiva observes: "Natural processes of the renewal of plant and fertility of the land were...considered a hurdle by the modern western man, a constraint which has to be removed. Industrially produced fertiliser, and scientifically engineered seed strains were considered superior substitutes for nature's fertility and seeds. Yet, these inventions rapidly transformed renewable soil fertility and plant life into a non-renewable resource. Soil and seeds were used as raw materials and imputes for the green revolution and industrial agriculture. The result was to create water-logged or salinised wastelands, and pest and diseased infested crops." The height of 'environment as resource' mentality Vandana observes is the conversion of seeds into 'genetic resource.' "a commodity to be genetically engineered, patented, and owned for a corporate profit. Nature's ways of renewing plants are now viewed as primitive and slow. Limits put by nature on the reproduction of life by species barriers are now to be crossed by the engineering of transgenic life-forms whose impacts on the biosphere and life cannot be known or imagined." It is important to bear in mind that the debate over how much control or rights should 'indigenous people' have over 'genetic resources' obtained is still an unsettled controversy in development.

Yet, environmental degradation is actively signalled as consequence of poverty, especially in the rural areas, which makes the peasant to over-exploit the land, the fishing rivers and the forest. No mention is made of pollution of agricultural farms and rivers by multinational industrial complexes. No mention is made of how this degradation limits available land and rivers for agricultural activities, how this scarcity puts pressures on the limited resources, how this sets the stage for conflicts as a result of intense competition for scarce resources. Rural poverty is not a cause of environmental degradation, it is rather a consequence. As Vandana argues, "since (this) natural wealth is the basis of nature's economy and the people's survival economy, its scarcity is impoverishing people in an unprecedented manner. The new impoverishment lies in the fact that nature, which always did support their survival, is being exploited by the market economy from which the people are themselves excluded and displaced as control of man-made capital over nature's and people's life expand through the process of development."

The World Development Report 2003 raised four critical questions: when is consumption over consumption? What is the future of agriculture and of genetically modified organisms? How can interests be balanced to avoid the race for property rights and the intellectual frontier? What are the prospects for international migration? These are very relevant questions. And seeking and supplying honest answers to these four questions would have served the credibility of the Bank much more than the entire report. What makes 2000/2001 more successful for the WDR, despite its limitations, was because the Report was based on a broad representation of voices across the world. The versions of environmental narratives, the interpretations of the challenges it poses, the discourse of sustainable development on which the WDR 2003 rests, are certainly not universally valid, neither are they even the dominant perspective. The Bank will push it through to policy planners in client countries because it has the muscle to do. In the process, the Bank would have helped itself and its patrons, but not the world.