4th Edition
Green Development Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World
The concept of sustainability lies at the core of the challenge of environment and development, and the way governments, business and environmental groups respond to it. Green Development provides a clear and coherent analysis of sustainable development in both theory and practice.
Green Development explores the origins and evolution of mainstream thinking about sustainable development and offers a critique of the ideas behind them. It draws a link between theory and practice by discussing the nature of the environmental degradation and the impacts of development. It argues that, ultimately, ‘green’ development has to be about political economy, about the distribution of power, and not about environmental quality. Its focus is strongly on the developing world.
The fourth edition retains the broad structure of previous editions, but has been updated to reflect advances in ideas and changes in international policy. Greater attention has been given to the political ecology of development, market-based and neoliberal environmentalism, and degrowth. This fully revised edition discusses:
- the origins of thinking about sustainability and sustainable development, and its evolution to the present day;
- the ideas that dominate mainstream sustainable development (including natural capital, the green economy, market environmentalism and ecological modernisation);
- critiques of mainstream ideas and of neoliberal framings of sustainability, and alternative ideas about sustainability that challenge ‘business as usual’ thinking, such as arguments about limits to growth and calls for degrowth;
- the dilemmas of sustainability in the context of forests, desertification, food and farming, biodiversity conservation and dam construction;
- the challenge of policy choices about sustainability, particularly between reformist and radical responses to the contemporary global dilemmas.
Green Development offers clear insights into the challenges of environmental sustainability, and social and economic development. It is unique in offering a synthesis of theoretical ideas on sustainability and in its coverage of the extensive literature on environment and development around the world. The book has proved its value to generations of students as an authoritative, thought-provoking and readable guide to the field of sustainable development.
1. The dilemma of sustainability
1.1 Are we all environmentalists now?
1.2 Nature in the Anthropocene
1.3 The idea of development
1.4 Sustainable Development as Babelfish
1.5 What is ‘green’ development?
1.6 Outline of the book
2. The roots of sustainable development
2.1 Environmentalism and the emergence of sustainable development
2.2 Nature as resource
2.2.1 Imperialism and Nature
2.2.2 Fields, Forests and Efficiency
2.2.3 The Wise Use of Nature
2.3 The Protection of Nature
2.3.1 Protected Areas
2.3.2 Conservation and Development
2.4 Ecology and Sustainability
2.4.1 Ecology and Resource Management
2.4.2 Ecology and Colonial Resources
2.4.3 Ecology and Development Planning
2.4.4 The ecological impacts of development
2.5 A Global Environment
2.5.1 Environmentalism’s Challenge
2.5.2 Spaceships and Limits
2.5.3 Global science and sustainable development
2.6 Making Sustainable Development
3. Mainstream sustainable development
3.1 Beyond environmentalism: the Stockholm Conference
3.2 Environment and human needs: The Brundtland Commission
3.3. Environment and Development: Rio 1992
3.4 Forests and Biodiversity
3.5 Climate Change
3.5.1 The IPCC and climate change
3.5.2 The Framework Convention on Climate Change
3.5.3. Kyoto and Paris
3.6 Putting into sustainability
3.6.1 The legacy of Rio
3.6.2. The Millennium Development Goals
3.6.3 Rio +10
3.7 Rebooting Sustainability: Rio +20
3.8 The Sustainable Development Goals
4. Sustainability and Natural Capital
4.1 Economies of nature
4.2 Ecosystem services as natural capital
4.2.1 The idea of ecosystem services
4.4.2 Mainstreaming ecosystem services
4.2.3 Ecosystem services and poverty
4.2.4 Valuing ecosystem services
4.2.5 The awkwardness of ecosystems
4.3 Strong and weak sustainability
4.4 Calculating sustainability
4.5 Trade-offs, equity and complexity
4.6 Sustainability at the project scale
4.7 Sustainable economies?
5. Neoliberalism and the Green Economy
5.1 Neoliberalism and nature
5.1.1. Neoliberal environmentalism
5.1.2 Environmentalism and social thought
5.2 Capitalism and nature
5.3 The Green Economy
5.3.1 Sustainable development and the green economy
5.3.2 Ecological modernization
5.4 Market-based environmentalism
5.5 Markets for nature
5.5.1 Markets for ecosystem services
5.5.2 Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)
5.5.3 Markets for sustainability
6 Corporations and sustainability
6.1 Development’s risks
6.1.1 Manufactured risk
6.1.2 The politics of risk
6.1.3 Regulating hazard
6.2 Greening business
6.2.1 Environmentalism versus the corporation
6.2.2 The ‘green’ corporation
6.3 Greening consumption
6.3.1 Linking production and consumption
6.3.2 Certification schemes
6.3.3 Regulating timber
6.4 Green Mining?
7. Sustainability and Degrowth
7.1 Growth and development
7.2 Green critiques of developmentalism
7.2.1 Ecologism
7.2.2 Deep Ecology
7.2.3 Bioregionalism
7.2.4 Ecofeminism
7.3 Promethean environmentalism and its critics
7.4 Limits to Growth
7.5 Degrowth
8 The political forest
8.1 The end of the forest
8.2 Towards a political ecology
8.3 The politics of knowing
8.4 Narratives of Deforestation
8.5 The political ecology of deforestation
8.6 Forest capitalism
8.7 People and forests
8.8 Forests for carbon
8.9 Future forests
9. Desertification
9.1 Fear of deserts
9.2 Crisis in the Sahel
9.3 Drought and drylands
9.4 Desertification as policy fact
9.5 Desertification myths and policy
9.6 Dryland optimism
10 Famine, Food and Farming
10.1 The ghost of Malthus
10.2 The political ecology of famine
10.3 Crisis and Nexus
10.4 Green Revolutions and their discontents
10.5 The problem of pesticides
10.6 New revolutions
10.7 Indigenous intensification
11. The Political Ecology of Biodiversity
11.1 Conservation as politics
11.2 Conservation power
11.3 Conservation ideas
11.4 Making space for nature
11.4.1 Nature, nation and territory
11.4.2 National parks and other protected areas
11.4.3 Dream parks
11.5 Spaces of exclusion
11.5.1 Imposing wilderness
11.5.2 Conservation displacement
11.5.3 Benefits from parks
11.5.5 Parks for people
11.5.5 Conservation and indigenous people
11.6 Mainstreaming conservation
11.6.1 Conservation and development
11.6.2 Conservation and poverty
11.6.3 Integrating conservation and development
11.7 Neoliberal conservation
11.7.1 Private sector conservation
11.7.2 Biodiversity Offsetting
11.7.3 Conservation’s corporations
12. Engineering Development
12.1 The power of infrastructure
12.2 Modernity’s grip
12.3 Rebuilding the world
12.4 Dreams and schemes
12.5 Dams and resettlement
12.6 Downstream impacts
12.8 Making dams that work
12.8.1 Assessing impacts
12.8.2 The World Commission on Dams
12.8.3 After the Commission
12.9 Dams and Sustainability?
12.9.1 ‘Green’ power and the new dams rush
12.9.2 Why dams still fail
12.9.3 Turning losers into winners
12.9.4 Letting rivers be rivers
13. Green development: reformism or radicalism?
13.1 In search of sustainability
13.2 The political ecology of transition
13.3 Sustainability from below
13.4 Resistance for sustainability
13.5 Social movements and transition
13.6 Green development: reformism or radicalism?
Biography
Professor Bill Adams has worked for over forty years on the problematic interactions between nature and human society, mostly in Africa and the UK. He holds the Moran Chair of Conservation and Development in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded the Busk Medal by the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers in 2004. He blogs at Thinking Like a Human (www.thinkinglikeahuman.com).
