Robert Paehlke

Environmental Politics, Sustainability and Social Science

This article puts forward a mildly outrageous proposition, namely that an emerging social science inquiry could make a significant practical difference to the future of human society. As well, I argue that contemporary political discourse is already not only indirectly affected by social science, but ideologically dominated by a selective interpretation of the claims of academic economics. This latter perspective, which might be called economism, presumes economic growth to be an at least approximate measure of human well-being, as well as the primary objective of public policy. The emerging area of inquiry that may pose a serious intellectual challenge to economism is the evolving concept of sustainability and the three-dimensional model of human activity and human–nature interaction comprising society, economy and ecology (or social well-being, prosperity and metabolism). The full potential of sustainability theory, and its rapidly developing language and literature, has not yet been fully appreciated. In broad view, the emerging literature of sustainability provides an overarching conceptual rationale for a more complex and balanced (noneconomistic) assessment of societal performance, emphasising the independent selection, measurement, analysis and communication of noneconomic values. Potentially, sustainability analysis could thereby help to establish alternative conceptions of efficiency, productivity and even competitiveness. It is the measurement of these values (including wellbeing, sustainability and ecological health) and the incorporation of these measures into everyday professional and public discourse, and even personal judgments and decisions, that could help to alter political and policy outcomes. Particularly important is the work on time series indicators of well-being, including health outcomes, housing, access to education, and sense of social and political efficacy – especially comparatively between nations and per dollar of GDP per capita. Much of the necessary work in both theory and empirical study has been done – what is especially lacking is effective communication of this work as the rich alternative world view that it potentially could be.

Environmental values for a sustainable society: the democratic challenge

The first Earth Day — 20 April 1970 — was a more seminal political event than was realized at the time. Since that time, environmental issues have gradually, though sometimes haltingly, become first-order political concerns. By the mid-1980s environmental protection was viewed by many as being as important to our collective well-being as national security, economic prosperity, social justice and — for some — even democracy itself. Some, at that time, would even have argued that if and when trade-offs between first-order values must be made, protecting the environment should be ‘first among equals’, a transcendent priority. The real challenge is to know what values must and should be traded off, when and to what extent.

Backcasting as a policy tool: the role of values

Backcasting, in contrast to forecasting, is a technique of policy analysis that was developed with respect to energy policy in the 1970s and that, since then, has been expanded in the scope of its application. This expansion has especially been to areas – such as sustainability and environmental issues – where future trends are themselves deemed to be part of the problem. In the past decade, a more participatory, ‘second generation’ approach to backcasting has also emerged. This essay reviews these developments, particularly examines the application of backcasting to water policy, and indicates a potential for backcasting to be developed more generally as a policy tool. A central point is that backcasting, by making explicit the role of values, is especially relevant to the development of critical policy studies.