Development and Sustainability: The Challenge of Social Change (International Studies in Poverty Research) - Softcover

Alberto Cimadamore; Maurice Mittelmark; Gro Therese Lie; Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783606231 ISBN 13: 9781783606238

Publisher: Zed Books, 2016

Synopsis

While the need for effective action toward a greener and socially inclusive economy has long been evident, health promotion in the context of sustainable development has faltered. Arguing that human health is the key factor to sustainable development, Development and Sustainability promotes a fresh, transdisciplinary approach to the eradication of extreme poverty.

This ground-breaking book calls for new forms of cooperation which cross the traditional boundaries between social activism and science, and which are capable of harnessing the complex knowledge that such radical change requires. The contributions bridge the gap between those working for health and those working for sustainability science and the green economy, through developing the methodological and scientific means to deal with some of the most critical issues faced by humanity in the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Alberto D. Cimadamore is scientific director of CROP. He is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina (currently on leave). His research and publications are focused on the political economy of poverty, the international relations of poverty and development, and regional integration in Latin America.

Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller is associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Development at UiB. She has done research on common mental disorders and on HIV prevention with primary school children (in Zimbabwe), and child participation in schools (in Scotland). Fungisai teaches in the master’s programme in health promotion and health psychology. Her current research interests are immigrant children and families’ experiences of the Norwegian child welfare system, child participation and early intervention.

Maurice B. Mittelmark is professor of health promotion at the Department of Health Promotion and Development at UiB. His research and publications are focused on philosophy and methods of health promotion research, salutogenesis and resources for health, transdisciplinary collaboration for health promotion, and child health in former colonial regions.

Gro Therese Lie is a professor at UiB’s Department of Health Promotion and Development and former director of UiB Global, as well as a social, community and cross-cultural psychologist. She has worked on health promotion challenges in sub-Saharan Africa for twenty-seven years: prevention of and coping with HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, gender and generation, orphans and vulnerable children, and grassroots movements. She has also worked for UNDP as a consultant and research leader of multidisciplinary research groups. Her interests include participatory action research and movements for social change.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Development and Sustainability

The Challenge of Social Change

By Alberto D. Cimadamore, Maurice B. Mittelmark, Gro Therese Lie, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2016 CROP
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78360-623-8

Contents

Figures and tables Acknowledgements, 
Foreword by Dag Rune Olsen, 
1 Development and sustainability science: transdisciplinary knowledge for positive social change Alberto D. Cimadamore, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller, Gro Therese Lie and Maurice B. Mittelmark, 
2 Seeking wisdom: a transdisciplinary perspective on Australian Indigenous practices and planetary management Mark G. Edwards, 
3 Policies for poverty reduction in a Transformative Green Economy Enrique Delamonica, 
4 Health promotion and sustainable development in Kazakhstan Altyn Aringazina, 
5 Children's literacy in health and sustainability Neil Chadborn and Jane Springett, 
6 Participatory research as a tool for change in ecosystem approaches to health and social equity Jane Springett, 
7 Connecting development and sustainability: empowering people to effective international cooperation Cristine Koehler Zanella, 
8 Sustainability and transdisciplinary knowledge: experience gained and challenges ahead Gro Therese Lie, Alberto D. Cimadamore, Maurice B. Mittelmark and Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller, 
Notes on contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE: TRANSDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE FOR POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE

Alberto D. Cimadamore, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller, Gro Therese Lie and Maurice B. Mittelmark

Introduction

This book interlinks four concepts: development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity, all in the quest for positive social change. The editors have been working for years, mostly separately, with different notions of development. Our exposure to sustainability science and transdisciplinarity is of more recent vintage. Some of us approach development with a focus on poverty and international relations in order to understand the way in which development changes lives and societies; others have been more focused on health promotion in the global South.

We are all attracted by the addition of 'sustainable' to development, because the needs of present and future generations force us to have a long-term systemic view of the interactions between nature and society and the implications for the global system. Still, we appreciate the quandaries of perceived views on development, and the appeal of post-development alternative approaches and the critique of Western-initiated programmes aiming for sustainable development and poverty eradication (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Escobar 2012; Rist 2014; Pogge et al. 2013; Cimadamore et al. 2013). The mainstream approach to sustainable development seems rightfully characterized as being more 'about sustaining [economic] development ... than developing sustainability in the ecological sense' (Castro 2004: 220). Yet what approach to development will satisfy the critics, and the counter-critics, and still deliver on people's urgent need for schools, healthcare, sanitation and other essential components of a decent life?

It is no wonder that tensions and conflicts are components of any kind of development discussion. Our journey as social scientists is influenced by diverse theoretical and methodological experiences, and we feel the need to take others' perspectives as a strategy for our individual and collective scientific growth. We are keenly aware of the limitations to our understanding resulting from the disciplinary perspectives of our respective educational paths. We do our modest best within our disciplinary territories, and strive to experience the richness of transdisciplinarity. In our understanding, transdisciplinarity is qualitatively different from multidisciplinarity (and interdisciplinarity). It denotes research conducted by investigators from different disciplines working jointly with relevant society actors to create conceptual, methodological and practical innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to confront vital social problems. This is why we embraced a transdisciplinary ethic in developing the project leading to this book. Indeed, we could hardly have chosen otherwise, as transdisciplinarity seems so interlinked to sustainability science that it is almost impossible to contemplate the latter without referring to the former.

This chapter provides readers with the roadmap we use to move from our disciplinary and interdisciplinary activities towards transdisciplinarity and sustainability science. It introduces readers to the work of colleagues who participated in the journey, which started with a call for papers on 'Development and Sustainability Science – the Challenge of Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Social Change' and continues with this book project. The book closes with the following question: How do the contributions in the foregoing chapters fit into the project as represented in the call for papers and how do they deal with development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity?

Further setting the stage for the main set of chapters, we will continue to discuss how we have defined and understood development, sustainability science and transdisciplinarity. The material on development includes a description of development scholarship at the University of Bergen. This provides an important context, since all the editors are at the University of Bergen. This introductory chapter is logically linked to the concluding chapter, where we discuss how the following chapters address the original intention set in the call for papers. The book concludes by considering some of the challenges ahead, and how this book will add to our foundation for future progress in Bergen.

Development and the search for sustainability

This book has its genesis in a workshop conceived as a practical step to forge a new international collaboration on sustainable development between the University of Bergen (UiB) and other national and international institutions. Poverty and health were at the core of our preoccupations, whereby the goal was to work towards connecting social and environmental sciences for a definite purpose in an emerging collaborative effort: enhancing the well-being of people and their environments where it is most needed, namely the places where severe poverty stubbornly continues to hamper sustainable human development.

The concept 'development' is controversial and disputed. Development has been defined in different ways in different disciplines and has varied over time. We do not want to concentrate here on a theoretical discussion about this, but we are conscious of how certain interpretations of development have had hegemony in academic communities as well as in international agencies. Depending on how we understand development, different possibilities arise for integrating disciplinary views into transdisciplinary collaboration.

Historically, theories on development have roots in sociology, anthropology, economics and political science, but are not limited to these disciplines. Before the Second World War and in the years following the war, the so-called modernization theory dominated and created the intellectual roots of the field. Modernization theory looked at which aspects of countries were beneficial and which constituted obstacles for economic development with a distinct idea of progress. One of the main ideas that emerged from this was that development assistance targeted to overcome obstacles for economic growth could lead to the modernization of 'traditional' or 'backward' societies in the sense marked by the evolution of developed Western societies. The modernization and other mainstream approaches to development have been heavily criticized by scholars of diverse theoretical orientations (Peet and Hartwick 2009) and geopolitical contexts (Villareal 1979), ranging from structuralism (e.g. Raul Prebisch – see Love 1980; Furtado 1990), neo-Marxism (Amin 1978), dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto 1979) to feminist approaches (Boserup 1970; Saunders 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, post-development theory arose and questioned the idea of national economic development altogether. According to post-development scholars, the goal of improving living standards leans on arbitrary claims as to the desirability and possibility of that goal. Wolfgang Sachs claims that development thinking has been dominated by the West in an ethnocentric (contra an eco-centric) fashion, and he and other authors argue that 'the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape' (Sachs 1992: 1). The Western lifestyle may be neither a realistic nor a desirable goal for many (we can even say the majority) of the world's population. Given the current global challenges (social, environmental, ethical) faced by humankind, alternative conceptions of development that go beyond modernization need to be considered by an emerging transdisciplinary field such as sustainable science.

Sustainable development is being seen by post-development scholars as a rubric for Western-style development, with loss of a country's own culture, people's perception of themselves and modes of life.

Without buying the entire post-development package, it seems reasonable to internalize the call for a broader cultural involvement in development thinking that accepts (or even promotes) diversity as part of a new global contract to 'ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns' (United Nations 2014a: Proposed Goal 12). Post-development thought holds a vision of society removed from the ideas which are currently dominant, and resisted not only in the South but also by critical academic communities in the North. Post-development argues for structural changes based on solidarity, reciprocity and a larger involvement of traditional and local knowledge. We can see clear points of contact between this line of thought and those sustained by contributors to this volume (Edwards and Delamonica). In any case, and despite criticisms, '"development" continues to survive even if, within the international institutions, its original aims have been whittled down to the struggle against poverty or the achievement of the Millennium Goals' (Rist 2014: 273). This might be changing given that the proposed SDGs consider that 'poverty eradication, changing unsustainable and promoting sustainable patterns of consumption and production and protecting and managing the natural resource base of economic and social development are the overarching objectives of and essential requirements for sustainable development' (United Nations 2014a: 3). However, the mainstream international debate is still far from questioning the basis of the capitalist mode of production and consumption (as discussed in Boltvinik and Damian 2016) and the underlying power relations that support the unsustainability faced by our planetary society.

Human development is one of the labels we attached to the original call for papers. It is a more recent theoretical orientation that draws on ideas from different origins, such as sustainable development, feminism and welfare economics. It focuses on how social capital and instructional capital can be deployed to optimize the overall value of human capital in an economy. Amartya Sen's contributions have influenced contemporary notions of development focused on human capabilities. His ideas underlie the Human Development Index, a measure of development pioneered by the UNDP in its Human Development Reports. The economic side of Sen's work can best be categorized under welfare economics, which evaluates the effects of economic policies on the well-being of peoples. Sen's influential work highlights an important ethical side to development economics which centres on the human being. As important as this approach has been, we need to see the question of human development within a larger context. The post-humanist critique of international relations draws on the reworking of the concept of system in complexity theory as a way to overcome the 'enlightenment anthropocentric focus of most social and political theory' by fully incorporating the 'natural world' into the scope of its study (Cudworth and Hobden 2011: 3,1).

There is ongoing debate on how desirable change in society is best achieved, in academic communities and in the international community. Development theories in recent years have not been limited to social science disciplines and approaches, but include health sciences, climate research, ecology and natural resource studies, to mention but a few of the more recent influences. Thus the concept 'development' will be defined differently in some traditions and even rejected as a concept in other traditions.

Development research at the University of Bergen

The notion of development was born in and influenced by historical and social context. We therefore wish to share with readers some background information about development at the University of Bergen, where the idea for this book was initiated and developed. At the University of Bergen, global and development-related research and competence-building have been a strategic priority area since the Brundtland Commission's report, Our Common Future (Brundtland Commission 1987).

The link between the understanding of development and the understanding of sustainability has been explicit at the university ever since. The emphasis on working across disciplines and faculties was also evident when development research was given inter-faculty strategic priority in the 1980s. Four cross-faculty centres were established: the Centre for Development Studies, the Centre for Health Promotion and Lifestyle Research, the Centre for International Health and the Centre for Environmental and Resource Studies. Since then, research has been supported more or less continuously by dedicated core funding and a strategic committee for global and development-related research.

While some consider development-related research to be focused in the South, at the University of Bergen it goes beyond the study of developing countries as a geographical category, and covers research on global challenges related to poverty, human rights, health, climate, consumption, sustainable development and ethics. The view is that all countries have room for development, and the preferred expression is 'development-related research', in contrast to the narrower and often disputed 'development research'. This is meant to bridge diverse interpretations and include the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences. The long-standing collaboration between the university and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) has contributed to the internationalization of this area of studies (the ISSC's globe-spanning Comparative Research Programme on Poverty is located at the University of Bergen).

The developments described above provide fruitful soil for transcending disciplinary silos in favour of collaboration across disciplines. This is perhaps best illustrated by the activities of the Bergen Summer Research School (BSRS), which was initiated in 2008 with clear reference to the strategic priority of global and development-related research at the university. The summer school is an integral part of the university's doctoral training. It is organized as an annual summer school with parallel PhD-level courses and joint lectures, and attracts doctoral students and junior researchers from all over the world (www.uib.no/en/rs/bsrs). The overarching main annual themes say much about the BSRS's development character:

Under these themes, BSRS has offered a total of thirty-nine two-week PhD courses to 580 PhD students from more than seventy countries. Its activities have stimulated the creation of several new research networks across continents, bridging climate researchers, social scientists and humanities scholars.

Sustainability science and global challenges

Sustainability science is 'an emerging field of research dealing with the interactions between natural and social systems, and with how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability: meeting the needs of present and future generations while substantially reducing poverty and conserving the planet's life support systems' (National Academy of Sciences 2015).

When we started planning the workshop that led to this book, none of us was connected to any recognized community of sustainability science, nor were we even fully conscious of the kind of science sustainability science represents. However, we were enthusiastic, feeling that this field had the potential to synthesize, catalyse and potentiate cross-disciplinary research on development and global challenges that would span the social and the natural sciences. Many of the university's researchers working on development and global challenges (such as social and environmental sustainability, climate change, etc.) were doing research that seemed close to sustainability science, even if the essential condition of interaction between natural and social sciences was mostly at the non-science level (committee work and other activities concerned with managing the university). A major and very happy exception was the Bergen Summer Research School.

Thus, when it came to sustainability science, the editors were 'subconscious thinkers' because we had not mastered the theories, methods and collaborations that could have transformed us into conscious sustainability science thinkers. Yet we were (and still are) quite convinced about the need for integrated knowledge that goes beyond the traditionally established social science/natural science boundaries that reign in our universities. For us social scientists, sustainability science seems to fit well, even if the social sciences and the humanities do not yet have prominent places around the sustainability science table. Our understanding of sustainability science, the reader will realize, is the outsider's understanding. Sustainability science is a door we wish to open to ourselves.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Development and Sustainability by Alberto D. Cimadamore, Maurice B. Mittelmark, Gro Therese Lie, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller. Copyright © 2016 CROP. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783606231
• ISBN 13: 9781783606238
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Alberto Cimadamore, Maurice Mittelmark, Gro Therese Lie, Fungisai P. Gwanzura Ottemöller