Amartya Sen and Sustainable Development
I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s marvelous book “Development at Freedom,” and I’ve found it revelatory, not for its novelty, but its clarity. Properly understood, Sen’s definition of “development” is functionally the same as the environmental community’s sacred goal, “sustainable development.” Basically, Sen argues that true development is the increase in the capability, or freedom, to live the way one would wish to live. He categorizes five instrumental freedoms: Political freedom, the ability to participate in the exercise of political power (Cicero’s definition); Adequate economic facilities to allow people to achieve their monetary goals; Social opportunities, arrangements that society makes for education, health care, and other essentials; Transparency guarantees, “the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity”; Protective security, such as minimal unemployment benefits.
If you stop to think about it, this is the world that “sustainable development” is supposed to create. We environmentalists have simply added three constraints to Sen’s freedom: there must be inter-generational equity, so that future generations have similar levels of freedom as today’s generation; there must be social justice, so that within a society the least free person has adequate freedom; and there must be trans-frontier justice, so that there is adequate freedom in all societies. I believe all three of these qualifiers are implicit in Sen’s writing, and in Rawls’ writing for that matter.
Despite the simplicity and beauty of this argument, I am well aware that it will make many of my fellow environmental scientists cringe. There is a fear that all this talk is too vague, and far too difficult to quantify. More and more though I think this can be overcome: look at the effectiveness of the UN’s Human Development Index, for example. I suspect many environmentalists also cringe because Sen’s definition of “development” explicitly has a political component. If the environmental mainstream really adopted it, it would be much harder for environmentalists to hid behind the vagueness of the term “sustainable development”, and work in authoritarian regimes like the Congo (Kishasha).
