Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Lesley Pories, World Bank

Chellaney makes the case that water will likely become one of Asia’s greatest concerns in the future, bringing to the reader’s attention the increasing political and security issues that surround Asia’s limited water supplies.

Water: Asia’s New Battleground by Brahma Chellaney, Georgetown University Press, 2011,
309 pp.

Throughout the history of mankind, water (and a lack thereof) has been at the root of the rise and decline of numerous civilizations. Today, the risk of history repeating itself is clear: Brahma Chellaney’s overview of the geopolitical dynamics regarding control of increasingly scarce water resources in Asia gives a comprehensive, if incomplete and occasionally biased, examination of how the need for and manipulation of this all-important resource influences Asian politics and will continue to do so.

“Water scarcity is set to become Asia’s defining crisis by midcentury,” he opens. Throughout, water serves as a common thread connecting economic growth and development, societal pressure and geopolitical posturing. Chellaney does an admirable job of weaving these components together, providing valuable insights for international relations (IR) aficionados and laypeople alike.

In my view, Chellaney tries to cover too much territory. Taking the broadest possible definition of Asia, his treatment of the Israel-Palestine-Jordan water dispute is elementary, his review of Chinese disagreements with Russia and Kazakhstan contains some errors, and his depiction of water conflicts on the Korean peninsula is cursory. As might be expected given his position within a premiere Indian think-tank, his knowledge is most extensive when he is addressing issues of immediate concern to India. He glorifies India’s behavior towards Pakistan and vilifies China. There is no mistaking Chellaney for an objective observer. On the other hand, faced with these foreboding challenges, who can be objective?

Review by Matto Mildenberger, Yale University

Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability by Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister, MIT Press, 2013, 208pp.

The last decade has seen global brands, including Walmart, General Electric, and Coca-Cola, proliferate corporate sustainability initiatives. But can these initiatives deliver global sustainability? In a compact volume, Dauvergne and Lister elaborate the theoretical reasons for being skeptical of this approach. Unlike earlier multinational corporate environmental programs, described as little more than greenwashing, the authors argue that recent corporate actions reflect a major, strategic shift in business operations. However, these efforts are motivated more by profit imperatives than by environmental or social goals. The authors argue that sustainability initiatives help moderate the risks associated with complex, global supply-chains, increase global competitiveness and enhance brand loyalty. They assert these initiatives herald a shift in governance power away from the state towards private retail and manufacturing interests. While big-brand sustainability programs can produce some concrete environmental change, they also facilitate consumer growth and stabilize current economic structures. This leaves them unlikely to trigger the transformative change necessary for a sustainability transition.

Eco-Business is brimming with more thought-provoking ideas than many texts twice its length, raising critical questions about corporate sustainability efforts that it does not always give itself time to answer. For example, the reader is left wanting further elaboration of the conditions under which big business sustainability efforts can still generate meaningful environmental change. Nonetheless, Dauvergne and Lister have outlined a fascinating new research agenda that should spark needed debate about business’ ability to drive positive environmental change.

Reviewed by Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Technology, Globalization And Sustainable Development: Transforming the Industrial State by Nicholas A. Ashford and Ralph P. Hall, Yale University Press, 752pp

Ashford and Hall have produced a mammoth volume explaining why technology change and globalization are the keys to addressing the three most important dimensions of sustainability – the economy, work, and the environment. At the heart of their analysis is a belief that national and international governments can produce industrial policies that will “encourage or require environmentally sustainable production, products and energy-related activities through the tools of environmental policy and regulation.” They describe ways that the industrial state might be transformed, covering everything from advancing worker health and safety to techniques for restructuring international trade and finance. In the final analysis, though, their prescriptions only make sense if they are right about co-optimization, that is, the notion that economic development, environmental protection, and more worker-oriented employment can be achieved simultaneously, and need not be traded off or balanced against each other.

More than others writing about sustainable development, Ashford and Hall focus on industrial and trade policies that can stimulate “revolutionary technology innovation.” Their list of ways of overcoming the obstacles to sustainability run the gamut from education and human resource development to more extensive stakeholder involvement, to new approaches to underwriting the costs of sustainable development. In the end, though, everything comes back to government’s willingness to intervene. They analyze the “opportunity and capacity” of the government to act, making a case that crises create opportunities and social innovation can enhance capacity. What they are less clear about, though, is why there might be a sudden willingness on the part of national governments, locked in as they are to laissez faire strategies, to move in the activist and social welfare-oriented direction needed to achieve sustainable development.

Reviewed by Kian Goh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu, by Anne Rademacher, Duke University Press, 264pp

Exploring the conflicts surrounding plans for the ecological restoration of the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers in Kathmandu, Anne Rademacher deftly weaves a complex story of Nepal’s monarchical and religious history, development as a nation state and contemporary political fractiousness. Looking at the rivers as “biophysical” sites, Rademacher unpacks the competing agendas and stakes around them – between state and development experts, cultural heritage activists and housing advocates for migrants settled along riverbanks.

Rademacher focuses on links between ecology and polity, the ways that “urban nature was experienced […] through claims about cultural meaning, history, and territorial belonging” (13). She unravels multiple intertwined histories, from the ecological degradation of the river and loss of national history and identity (19), to the formation of Nepalese middle-class anxiety. Her sensitivity to the temporal shaping of both the physical and social brings her to the “competing definitions of degradation” (57) of the river. “Facts” themselves were controversial. “What was the problem?” she asks (57), beyond what was known, scientifically, in reports issued by development consultants. Scientific knowledge here becomes simply another political facet.

Political incongruities abound. Rademacher traces the irony when, rather than expressing disapproval at heavy-handed state-run beautification projects during a period of state emergency, NGO groups working for river restoration expressed relief (127). When environmental degradation is equated with democratic dysfunction, such beautification provoked a suspension of disbelief, hopes of a more perfect democracy, a more perfect river. She illuminates the persistent denigration of the landless migrants, considered not simply illegal, but obstacles in the path of river restoration, people and places of “ecological illegitimacy” (144).

Reviewed by Alexis Schulman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

America the Possible:  A Manifesto for a New Economy, by James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 272pp

In the opening of his new book, America the Possible: A Manifesto for a New Economy, James Gustave (Gus) Speth—once called the “consummate environmental insider”—makes a startling claim. After nearly four decades moving seamlessly between the worlds of nonprofits, academia, and government, Speth has concluded that working “inside the system” has failed. Solving the slew of environmental and social ills facing the United States, he argues, requires nothing less than profoundly altering their driving force: our political economy.

For those who doubt that America is struggling, Speth kicks off his manifesto with a disturbing summary of America’s “firsts.” Among all OECD nations, he notes, the United States ranks number one in inequality of incomes, homicide rate, poverty rate, prison population, and international arm sales. And these are just a handful of many other undesirables. However, Speth aims less to sway skeptics than to rally the believers—those desirous of a more just, fair, and sustainable future. With remarkable comprehensiveness and clarity, America the Possible lays out the problems with our system, a vision for the future, as well as the required economic and political reforms. At the core of his vision, is a reigning in of the economic growth imperative. Drawing on the work of economist Herman Daly, Speth envisions a steady state economy, where resource consumption and population growth are reduced within ecological limits; and where economic policies seek to maximize quality of life, not quantity of output.

Speth rightly aligns his arguments with similar narratives emerging from the coalescing new economy movement. Indeed, America the Possible often reads as a Who’s Who of the movement’s rising stars (of which Speth is one), and is replete with their theories and projects, such as the democratization of wealth through stakeholder-owned companies, proposals for 100 percent reserve requirements, and reductions in work hours. Speth’s book provides one of the best new economic primers out there. The only drawback is that Speth’s own insights and cultivated wisdom are frequently lost in the mix. His voice is most original when discussing how to build the political movement to see these reforms forward. This is an important and frequently under-articulated issue, and it is clear that here Speth is drawing on his own lessons learned. But ultimately, one wishes for more of these moments.