CHAPTER THREE
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
When I began my extended fieldwork in 1992 the concept of sustainable development had begun to take precedence over a purely environmentalist discourse among sectors of society critical of the environmental, as well as economic and social ills conventional development had permitted. I found that diverse social actors employed a wide array of strategies to implement alternate, and often contending, conceptions of "sustainable development". What soon became most interesting to me were precisely these struggles and strategies of a particular "community" immersed in a context of allies and adversaries along a vertical continuum of differential power. Besides campesinos, which were the subjects of my original research proposal, there emerged other key social actors, such as community organizations and NGOs, who in turn were conditioned and confronted in their work by the State, private enterprise, and international cooperation agencies.
The reality in the field made me shift my research perspective from a horizontal comparison of the environmental discourse and practice between different sets of campesinos, to a more vertical study of the strategies of sustainable development of one community organization in a local and national context of differential power. This, in turn, summoned a more political, practical and theoretically interesting series of questions. It brought to the fore the issue of the hegemony of sustainable development as the dominant development paradigm. It problematized the role of civil society in creating social movements. It suggested the theoretical and practical importance of social and cultural capital as means of empowerment in achieving sustainable development. But in addition, it revealed contending strategies of community disempowerment. Ultimately, this shift in research perspective also permitted me to understand how a local campesino community measured its own version of sustainability and the means they employed in trying to achieve it.
The Hegemony of Development Ideology
Once I settled in Costa Rica in April of 1992 to engage in long-term fieldwork and became a participant observer among a group of "critical environmentalists", I found that the "environmentalist" impulse represented only half of the equation of their critical calculations. There was also an impulse towards "development", which represented the other half. In fact, shortly after my arrival, the concept of "sustainable development" was launched at the "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro as the dominant discourse that purported to reconcile both impulses of conservation and development. Much has since been written about sustainable development, both in favor and against, but the fact is that it has become the established guiding concept of both conservation and development not only in Costa Rica, but in most of the world. Sustainable development as the paradigm of conservation and development that has gained most adherents and has moved more people to action in the last decade, stands clearly on the shoulders of the previously established hegemony of development theory and practice.
After World War II, the desirability of world development, and its achievement through economic growth was born as a full fledged hegemonic ideology. By ideology I mean a perspective or explanation that naturalizes what is actually a human construct, and in so doing legitimizes action to maintain this view (Hamilton 1987; Schull 1992). An ideology becomes hegemonic when one out of many alternative perspectives or explanations of a particular aspect of reality becomes the only accepted, obvious or natural one. After World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant power in the world capitalist system. The need to expand its markets and investments made world development a necessity. Economic development was taken up as a primary goal of rich and poor countries alike. The United Nations was created to promote world development, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were created to finance this impulse. During the 1950s, the industrialized countries viewed their role in world development, essentially as one of "enlightened charity" (Brandt 1980:18). The goal of development aid was to pull "underdeveloped" nations up to the level of "developed" nations by promoting industrialization and urbanization, the penetration of modern technology in agriculture, rapid growth of material production, and the transformation of archaic rural structures by the widespread adoption of modern education and cultural values (Escobar 1995:4).
Contradictions to this ideology and its policies soon emerged. During the decade of the sixties social and political upheavals swept the Western world. Old models of authority, order, and progress were questioned. In 1964 the Non-Aligned countries from Latin America, Africa and Asia, brought together by sentiments of anti-colonialism, formed the Group of 77 to bargain for the interests of "developing" nations. The problems of underdevelopment, they argued, came not from psychological or cultural deficiencies as was commonly suggested (McClelland 1964), but from unequal terms of trade and lack of distributive justice (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). Other critiques of the ideology of development also emerged. Instead of seeing underdevelopment as a prior stage of development, determined by a lack of appropriate values, and a prevalence of traditional structures that impeded modernization, Dependency Theory explained underdevelopment as the necessary structural counterpart of development (Frank 1969). The desirability of development, however, was not questioned in these critiques. In this decade, United States development aid, in part took heed of Third World critiques, but mostly responded to historic events such as the Cuban Revolution. In order to prevent -the "domino effect" of the spread of revolution by a dispossessed peasantry, the United States promoted policies of agrarian reform in the Third World. This included primarily the distribution of land, while maintaining an emphasis on technical assistance and the introduction of modern technologies.
In the early 1970s, various emergent factors affected rural conditions in the Third World. Metropolitanization, the growth of financial markets, and the expansion of a consumer society continued to impoverish the rural family whose sons and daughters were abandoning the family farm. On the other hand, industrialized agricultural production expanded, causing large-scale environmental destruction, creating a rural proletariat, and flagrant rural inequality. Despite the outflow of development aid for large scale economic projects, conditions of underdevelopment prevailed. At the end of the decade, rural poverty was understood as being more than merely economic. Rather, it included social, political, cultural and institutional aspects, as well. The World Bank, under Robert McNamara, adopted a "reformist" approach concerned with unemployment, income distribution, appropriate technology, integrated rural development, and basic needs. Policies of Integrated Rural Development (IRD), which stressed growth with equity, were included in national development policies. The driving impulse was to target the poor with specific projects. These projects, however, were mostly "top-down, site-specific and time-bound", resulting in many cases being irrelevant to local communities, or at best, having a limited area of impact, and offering only short term gains (Lewis 1988:6).
In the 1980s, the foreign debt crisis exploded in Latin America, resulting in a precipitous fall of external financing. Moreover, Reaganomics and "trickle down theory" were on the rise. Under the direction of the IMF, Third World States had to undergo severe processes of Structural Adjustment, downsize State governments, and give economic and financial balances precedence over questions of equity. These aspects contributed to deteriorating social conditions in developing countries. In the South the decade of the eighties was called "the lost decade" for development. During this period all the traditional indicators, economic as well as social, worsened. Per capita incomes fell, unemployment increased, de-industrialization occurred, demand for Third World products fell, the South faced declining terms of trade, and interest rates and debt service payments increased (South Commission 1990).
Besides the worsening of traditional indicators, many other shortcomings of conventional development became evident. "Top-down" development gave way to "bottom-up" approaches (Chambers 1983; Hirschman 1984; Morss and Morss 1986; Uphoff 1988). A mostly male-focused development practice began to turn toward the participation of women in development (Buvinic and Lycette 1988, Deere and Leon 1987). The destruction of native cultures, the evident degradation of the environment, and depletion of natural resources around the world, provoked theories of "Ethnodevelopment" (Bonfil et al 1982), "Ecodevelopment" (Sánchez and Sejenovich 1983), and brought forth the concept of "Sustainable Development" (UICN 1980; WCED 1987).
Sustainable Development: Erasing Contradictions
During the last half century, the ideology of development took hold of practically the entire world. The critiques that resulted from the emergent contradictions, were directed not against development as such, but against the short reach of development, its lack of coverage, its excessively slow arrival, or even its apparent retreat. Even those critiques that exposed the cultural and environmentally destructive aspects of development, went not against development, but against its reduced scope and unsophisticated methods. Undoubtedly, there were radical critiques against development, per se, appearing mostly in the industrialized First World, as was evidenced by the Hippie movement, and later on by such groups as Earth First! But the most significant critiques attempted to refine the rougher edges of conventional development theory and practice.
In the 1960s, along with other critiques of the status quo, there emerged a new environmental awareness. By mid-decade, such words as "ecology" began entering the public discourse. Recognition of the scarcity of natural resources began making inroads in the very sectors that were co-participants of the ideology of development exclusively as economic growth. The United States, still the world's major industrial power at the time, celebrated its first Earth Day in May of 1970. In 1972, two events marked the beginning of a generalized concern for the environment: the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, and the publication of the report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth. The Stockholm Conference emitted an international call concerning the mismanagement of natural resources, and placed the environment within the sphere of the development debate. The U.N. General Assembly recognized the need for a "permanent institutional arrangement within the United Nations system for the protection and improvement of the environment" (United Nations 1973).
Despite the contributions of the U.N. Conference in Stockholm, it was the publication of The Limits to Growth by The Club of Rome (Meadows et al 1972) and its subsequent translation into 30 languages within four years (Mires 1990:16), that unleashed the environment-development "debate" into the midst of an international public. This report presented the problems of overpopulation and the growing scarcity of natural resources, and called for these issues to be discussed in the major centers of political debate. To some analysts, this report was the "official and authorized declaration of the bankruptcy of the ideology of progress and of its most divulged version, the `economy of growth'" (Mires 1990:149). The reactions to the report were not unanimously favorable. In the South, where an emerging ideology of opposition to the North expressed itself in terms of "neocolonialism", "dependency", and "economic imperialism", reflecting a reaction to continued poverty despite twenty years of post-war development aid, the response to The Limits to Growth was definitively critical. The Modelo Bariloche (Herrera and Scolnik 1977) elaborated in Argentina, proposed that the limits to growth were not determined by the finite nature of natural resources, nor to the demographic explosion, as stated in the report by The Club of Rome, but rather that they were determined exclusively by political and sociological factors.
The South, and Latin America in particular, maintained a yearning for "development" Northern-style. They viewed the call to hold back on exploiting their natural resources as an attempt against their hopes for development, and an expression of the North's continued attempt to undermine national sovereignty in the South. In the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the Latin American delegates insisted on the possibility that their countries follow the model of the industrialized nations, and, indeed, on the existence of all the necessary resources to do so (Mansilla 1987:118). Ultimately, the result of this position was that if development could no longer disregard the environment, the "right" to development also had to be taken into consideration when discussing issues of environmental protection.
To begin the new decade, the Union International pour la Conservation de la Nature (UICN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), two of the largest First World NGOs concerned with environmental issues, along with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), coined the term "sustainable development" in their document World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development (UICN 1980). By identifying sustainable development as the basic goal of society, this document made reconciling the demands of development with the need to conserve the environment, the only obvious and natural solution to the previous contradictions between the two impulses. The World Conservation Strategy, however, focused primarily on living resources and ecological processes, leaving out issues regarding the international economic and political order (Lélé 1991). Essentially, what was meant by sustainable development in its first rendition was economic development that did not undermine the living resources that sustained it.
In 1983 the United Nations set up an independent World Commission on Environment and Development, with the assignment to reexamine the planet's critical environmental and developmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond. Finally, in 1987, one year after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, the Commission issued its landmark report, Our Common Future (WCED 1987), also known as the Brundtland Report, for its coordinator, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway. This report rapidly became the most important document in shaping the concept of sustainable development. A single sentence of the Brundtland Report subsequently became the central, all-encompassing definition of sustainable development, hailed by everyone, and upon which further embellishments or refinements, or even critiques, were simply attached.
"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (WCED 1987:43)
The Brundtland Report not only reconciled environment and development, but also reconciled development and participation. The needs of present and future generations had to be met, regardless of culture, gender, class or age. Our Common Future recognized the importance of new social actors as participants in the processes of development and conservation. The report's open call on NGOs to participate in a transition to sustainable development acknowledged the potential of these emergent social actors.
"In many countries, governments need to recognize and extend NGOs' right to know and have access to information on the environment and natural resources; their right to be consulted and to participate in decision making on activities likely to have a significant effect on their environment....
"NGOs and private and community groups can often provide an efficient alternative to public agencies in the delivery of programmes and projects. Moreover, they can sometimes reach target groups that public agencies cannot. Bilateral and multilateral development assistance agencies, especially UNDP and the World Bank, should draw upon NGOs in executing programmes and projects." (WCED 1987:328).
Although Our Common Future was presented as a major challenge to conventional thinking on development, and regarded as a breakthrough in integrating environmental concerns with the social and economic needs of development, many of the report's conclusions reaffirmed the fundamental premises of the conventional perspectives on development, especially those stressing the importance of economic growth, above all else.
"If large parts of the developing world are to avert economic, social, and environmental catastrophes, it is essential that global economic growth be revitalized. In practical terms, this means more rapid economic growth in both industrial and developing countries, freer market access for the products of developing countries, lower interest rates, greater technology transfer, and significantly larger capital flows, both concessionary and commercial." (WCED 1987:89)
In 1989, in response to the Brundtland Report, the United Nations set up a Preparatory Commission to organize a United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the "Earth Summit", to be held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. The Commission began its work immediately, incorporating perspectives from hearings held on five continents, that would hopefully bring on significant changes in the global patterns of development and in the protection of the planet's ecological integrity. After three years of testimony, the Commission presented one central conclusion:
"We came to see that a new development path was required, one that sustained human progress not just in a few places for a few years, but for the entire planet into the distant future. Sustainable development becomes a goal not just for the `developing' nations, but for industrial ones as well." (UN Chronicle 1992:42).
The Earth Summit gathered some 120 heads of State and other official representatives from 172 national governments, 8000 representatives of the media from around the globe, as well as 1400 NGO representatives (Guimarâes 1992:86). International agreements were signed by most, if not all the nations represented at the Summit. These included the "Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development", the "Agreement on Biological Diversity", the "United Nations Agreement on Climate Change", and the "Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of the World's Forests". But foremost of all the documents was the "Agenda 21", agreed on by consensus of the 172 participating nations. The Agenda 21 represented a global action plan extending into the twenty-first century, that provided a blueprint for integrating economic growth, environmental protection, and the participation of civil society. This document became the point of reference of virtually all subsequent efforts, plans and projects of sustainable development.
The ideology of sustainable development, backed by the Bible-sized international agreement of Agenda 21, reconciled all previous contradictions. Economic growth went hand in hand with the protection of the environmental, "top-down" development led by the State went hand in hand with "bottom-up" development promoted by NGOs and community organizations. Feminist critiques of male-biased development were reconciled with the incorporation of the "perspective of gender". Science and technology was reconciled with traditional knowledge in a marriage of mutual benefit. The present was reconciled with the future generations. If there were critiques against the global affirmation of sustainable development, these were against the financial commitments and institutional mechanisms available for the operationalization of this type of development (PAE 1993; Redclift 1993). For the most part, however, as Escobar (1995:210) accurately pointed out, "Development", in general, "continue[d] to reverberate in the social imaginary of states, institutions, and communities, perhaps more so after the inclusion of women, peasants, and nature into its repertoire and imaginative geographies." In this way, sustainable development became the unopposable ideology, spreading its hegemony of reconciliation across the globe.
Cracks in the Hegemony of Reconciliation
Most greeted sustainable development as "an idea whose time has come" (Murdoch 1993:225), as "a window of opportunity" (Singh 1992:164), as "a concept with the potential to build a bridge between environmentalism and development" (Murdoch 1993:226), and as a model "that mediates between the models [of] traditional local ethnoecology, environmentalism, and developmentalism" (Costa et al 1995:79). Few could be against an ideology that reconciled virtually all previous contradictions. However, despite this appeal, it was precisely the absence of antagonisms, this threat of "an end of history", that also generated apprehension that sustainable development could serve as a cover allowing business as usual to continue unhindered (Guimarâes 1992; O'Connor 1993; Pierce 1992). More recently, Escobar (1995:197) warned that the "epistemological and political reconciliation of economy and ecology proposed by sustainable development is intended to create the impression that only minor adjustments to the market system are needed", where, in fact "the economic framework itself cannot hope to accommodate environmental considerations without substantial reform."
However desirable sustainable development has been presented to be, there have been critical reactions to it from the start, stemming from a diversity of concerns.
"Brundtland seeks a co-optation of the very groups that are creating a new dance of politics, where democracy is not merely order and discipline, where earth is a magic cosmos, where life is still a mystery to be celebrated.... It is this that we seek to resist by creating an explosion of imaginations.... The world of official science and the nation-state is not only destroying soils and silting up lakes, it is freezing the imagination..." (Visvanathan 1991:384).
However widespread its acceptance and seductive its appeal, the growing hegemony of sustainable development has from the start had its detractors. As some critical scholars have pointed out (Mouffe 1988:91), however appealing an ideology, "hegemony is never established conclusively."
Mainstream-Critical Divide in Costa Rica
In Costa Rica, as elsewhere, the ideology of sustainable development has sought to erase contradictions and antagonisms between social actors. Indeed, the goals of sustainable development appear to have been embraced in Costa Rica by mainstream and critical sectors, alike. Nonetheless, the hegemony of a monolithic perspective has not been "established conclusively". The generic notion of sustainable development considers the "needs" of present and future generations in terms of economic, environmental and social sustainability. These three areas, however, can still be said to constitute conceptual battlefields of continuously disputed meaning. Economist Herman Daly (1996:7) proposed a distinction between contending perspectives based on views favoring "quantitative growth", versus those favoring "qualitative development". In Costa Rica, the differences between contending camps fall less on a quantity-quality divide, than on what I have termed as mainstream and critical perspectives.
Putting aside temporarily, for the sake of argument, the fact that there occurs a continuous production, appropriation and co-optation of the discourses around the concept of sustainable development, we can roughly distinguish the two perspectives in the following way. The mainstream view, from the "Brundtland Report" (WCED 1987), to the Agenda 21 (UNCED 1992), sees sustainable development as a desired refinement and improvement of current development practices. This perspective equates economic sustainability with economic growth, environmental sustainability with the rational management of natural resources, and social sustainability with the "participation of civil society", placing economic growth at the top of