The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week Two - “Human Wellbeing and Sustainability”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Anna Kurtycz, Independent Consultant, Mexico

Moderating team: Anna Kurtycz emphasizes that the concept of sustainable development means different things to different people, and that it is important to develop definitions that are adapted to the needs to different communities. There are good examples of poor communities living in a sustainable ways, reflecting a different values, and approaches to the social and natural environment. Helping develop critical thinking is fundamental to promoting the sustainable living and helping communities fight poverty.

Anna Kurtycaz enfatiza que el concepto de desarrollo sostenible tiene diversas acepciones y que es importante desarrollar definiciones que se adapten a las necesidades de las diferentes comunidades. Existen buenos ejemplos de comunidades pobres que viven de manera sostenibles y que reflejan un acercamiento diferente al ambiente social y natural. El ayudar a desarrollar un pensamiento crítico es fundamental para la promoción de una vida sostenible y para apoyar a las comunidades en su lucha contra la pobreza.

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The statement from Dr. Khosla brings to this discussion interesting issues, such as wellbeing and poverty alleviation, which are fundamental for the debate concerning sustainable development. There are three topics from his statement it that I will like to discuss.

My first comment is about the possibility of dialogue using sustainable development as a departure point. It is a fact that sustainable development has being adopted by a broad variety of actors, some of them with diametrical opposing interests, giving them the opportunity to sit at the same discussion table. The problem is that we forget that even if all are talking about sustainable development, in practice this concept means different things to each other. We are not only talking about different interests but also about different perceptions of concepts, for instance the concept of well being that has being discussed this week. For some actors sustainable development is only adopted at the discourse level and not necessarily in practice, because it has a discursive value in itself (to sell, to have a good image, etc.). This is a fact that is necessary to take into account if we want to go further on the discussion, and it is particularly pertinent considering the North-South differences. Few years ago I developed a training course on sustainable development for play librarians in poor areas of Latin America. The biggest challenge was to adapt the concept of sustainable development to their conditions of poverty, environmental degradation and scarcity of resources. My departing point was to help them to develop their own definition of sustainable development in order to provide them with elements that could be useful for their work and for their communities.

My second comment is about poverty and sustainable development. We can find indeed good examples of poor communities living in a sustainable way, like the example brought by Suresh Kumar about the Indian community or indigenous groups using their resources wisely based on knowledge and spiritual values towards nature (here the documentary by Pierre Beaudouin "Indigenous peoples: humane and environmental sustainability" is particularly interesting), but this sustainability is based not necessarily on the fact that they are poor but on the fact that they have a different approach to the social and natural environment. This different approach is based on the understanding of the links between themselves and their environment, and from the adoption of values and organisation ways according to that understanding. In most of these examples we can find an affective link to nature and society that has being constructed from inside the community and not, as Mr. Kumar says, externally enforced. In this sense we have to find ways to promote that communities make conscious their relationship to the environment and give them the opportunity to decide if they want to modify this relationship.

Following this consideration, I think that education and communication are still fundamental to promote the sustainable management of environment and at the same time to help communities to improve their condition and fight poverty. An education that do not take individuals as "empty vessels" (as Mr. Chris Maas Geesteranus says in his interesting contribution) but that takes into account the existing knowledge and skills. In this sense education (formal and non formal) should give, in the first place, the tools to individuals to promote critical thinking about their own relationship with the environment and to decide if this relationship is sustainable or not (and if they want to change it or not). In the same way communication should be consider not only as an information transfer (information in not enough to change behaviour) but a source of tools that promotes critical thinking and dialogue to organise and act differently.