Reuse.

I want to begin by mentioning that in my last posting I specifically avoided any mention of efficiency. I find that in North America the concept of "reducing" has come to mean using things more efficiently, not to actually reduce the things we do.
In other words, when your electric utility sends out a pamphlet on reducing electricity by using CFL bulbs or turning off power bars they are saying, Please use electricity more efficiently. I'm guessing no one has ever received a brochure with the headline, "Please don't buy any more electronics", or "Do you really need that PS3, you already have a Wii!". That kind of talk is completely taboo in our culture, maybe for the same reasons that environmentalism doesn't come up in development talks.

The truth is, increases in efficiencies often lead to increases in consumption. This is called the Jevons Paradox after William Stanley Jevons who "observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries" (1). (Vaclav Smil also refers to this trend in his, "Energy: A Beginner's Guide"

But moving on, having reduced what we do and use as much as possible, then the next step is to use those items (or energy) as efficiently as possible. And this is where I will get anecdotal.
In North America we have a strong culture of preparedness. We like to have a flashlight by the bed, in the car, for camping, for the kids and a couple for random use. We have a bike for on the road, on the trails, going to work in summer, going to work in winter, cruising with the kids. I could go on and one and on.
This kind of mentality simply does not exist in much of the world. I remember realizing that the hospital across the road from us had one spare tire for multiple vehicles and that one person had a jack that was used all around town. (Sadly, when I tried to use it once I learned that it didn't really work.) Obviously when any of these items were needed it may not have been convenient (think of an ambulance having a flat while picking up a patient and the spare is 10km away) but in terms of efficiency (ie how often an item is used over it's lifetime), it's very impressive. These conditions exist for a number of reasons but most significantly because of economic reasons; people in the developing world simply do not have the economic means or buffer to afford to have resources that are rarely used.
By bringing these countries to our level of economics (I won't say whether it is bringing them up or down) we are simply enabling them to be less efficient with other resources. Cash went farther, much farther, in Tanzania than it does in North America or Europe. Taking this as an indicator of efficiency and assuming that everyone wants to use money efficiently indicates that we should be trying to emulate some of their economics. As the unsustainable nature of our developed world lifestyle becomes more and more evident we will be forced to reduce because we will not have the economic means to support the over head of resources that we are used to in our culture of preparedness.

I believe that the environment provides the foundation for our complex economic, social and political and as it crumbles away so will our systems that were built upon it. And, debt limits and Euro-zone troubles aside, I think our economic system will be the next system to drastically change (fall?), in face of fact that the earth is a zero-sum equation and things have to balance out. (For more on this read, "Energy Autonomy" by Hermann Scheer who actually takes it a step further and says that we need to start living sustainably as a means to protect our political system.)

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

Apologies for the long hiatus in postings - summer vacation was upon us! efficiency

Do More with More

As part of my dissertation research I had a look at the Monterrey Consensus, one of the documents that came out of the UN-sponsored International Conference on Financing for Development held in Mexico in 2002. This is the opening statement of the document:

"We the heads of State and Government, gathered in Monterrey, Mexico, on 21 and 22 March 2002, have resolved to address the challenges of financing for development around the world, particularly in developing
countries. Our goal is to eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system"(UN 2002:5).

The term "sustainable development", rising to international prominence at the UN conference in Rio de Jenairo in 1992 has now become part of the standard language.  I believe it has been embedded and co-opted by the development establishment and has become all things to all development policy-makers.

In the Monterrey consensus, a number of issues come to a head. First, the basic impetus for the conference was the Millenium Declaration (the precursor to the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of 8 broad quantitative development goals which the international community has signed on to and is attempting to realise by 2015). Essentially, the world had signed up for a huge project and they needed to make a plan to fund that project.  There was, what David Hulme has called, the 'millennium moment', a brief window of time in which there appeared to be an upswing in global goodwill and general agreement around taking economic, social and environmental development seriously. No doubt this was a good thing, an opportunity to grab hold of and the Monterrey conference was one of the early signs of action. The MDGs raise all kinds of other questions in and of themselves, but what the Monterrey consensus and indeed much mainstream development literature ignores is questions of global environmental sustainability.

I've also just finished reading Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart's 2008 book: "Fixing Failed States". What is striking from an environmental perspective is the complete silence on the sustainability of our lifestyle in rich countries, the ultimate goal of state-fixing (in theory), and the silence on whether everyone else joining us in our consumer lifestyle is a good thing.

The focus is simply on the vast amounts of wealth that our global financial system is generating and the need to hook failed states up to this flow and the flows of information criss-crossing the globe.  Implicit is the assumption: what's going on among rich countries is good and failed states need it too. So let's hook them up (not that we can, of course, but that's for another post, perhaps).

Maybe I'm just repeating things I've said and things Kurt has said.  But from the development studies perspective, there's an eerie silence on the viability of the lifestyle we hold up to other countries as both virtuous and as the only alternative. Reducing is the last thing on anyone's mind in development studies and among development policy makers.  What is needed, they say, is not less, but more - Do more with more.

Jordan (Manchester)