Abstract
The normative aims of sustainability seen in terms of matching
environmental integrity, equality and social justice are clear. Yet, questioning
how to get there is centrally about politics. This article presents two
examples that illustrate the tensions and synergies across state, market and
society alliances in accelerating sustainability. The first example addresses
the question of financialization of nature by exploring the alliances created
around offsets in international carbon markets under REDD+. The second
example presents alliances for green transformation in Africa through
Kenya's pro-poor renewable energy experience. Both cases explore the
importance of the political economy of the tripartite relationship between
states, markets and society in tackling inequality. They also show the
importance of inclusive transformation and the relevance of context in
diverse sustainability pathways.
Keywords: sustainability, green transformation, financialization, alliances, pathways.
1 Introduction
Looking back over the last quarter of a century since the Brundtland
Commission report Our Common Future (WCED 1987) and the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in
1992, 'sustainable development' and 'environmental sustainability'
have gained momentum in development circles globally. The recently
adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 have further
elaborated on these notions, emphasising the integration of social,
economic and environmental dimensions. Yet, the mainstreaming of
these terms has given rise to some confusion and fuzziness regarding
'sustainability', leading to 'inappropriately managerial and bureaucratic
attempts to solve problems which are actually far more complex and
political' (Leach, Scoones and Stirling 2010).
To some extent, contemporary environmental problems reflect 'success
resulting from the reduction of poverty and increasing prosperity
of ever more people' (Schmitz and Scoones 2015: 2). This starting
point was emphasised during the Institute of Development Studies
(IDS) 50th Anniversary Conference. Prominent scholars such as
Frances Stewart and Sunita Narain (see this IDS Bulletin) highlighted
that environmental sustainability is one of the most overriding
issues relevant to today's global development priorities, whereby the
challenge of unsustainable growth results in increased inequality
and marginalisation, thus leading to an insecure future. Sustainable
development is therefore a fundamental challenge of our age, requiring
'green transformations' (Scoones, Leach and Newell 2015), and
moreover, needs to be linked with equity and social justice. Yet seeking
'just sustainabilities' (Agyeman, Bullard and Evans 2003; Swilling
and Annecke 2012; Newell and Mulvaney 2013), in dynamic and
differentiated socioecological contexts, is not straightforward (Schmitz
and Scoones 2015). The meaning of 'green', and so sustainability, is
inevitably highly contested, framed by different people in different ways
(Leach 2015). The ideal of a green or 'sustainable' economy and society
may therefore look very different if you are poor and marginalised, from
an ethnic minority, or as a man, woman, or younger or older person
(Schmitz and Scoones 2015), or even from the private sector with a dire
need to justify certain corporate agendas and practices.
This article offers some reflections on the challenges of embracing equity
and diversity in accelerating sustainability, and the roles of state–market–society alliances. It draws on the 'pathways approach' developed by the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Social, Technological
and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS) Centre.
This approach pays special attention to the 'framing' of problems
and solutions, as well as the politics of knowledge in opening up and
broadening out pathways to sustainability (Leach et al. 2010). It starts
with the assumption that different people, depending on their standpoint,
position and interests, perceive sustainability in different ways, thus
generating competing framings in a complex and diverse world.
Exposing these framings and generating a debate about them is therefore
an essential first step (Scoones 2015). From these framings, pathways to
action emerge, whereby all perspectives are inevitably wrapped up in
politics, and the interests that govern them (ibid.).
Given this background, the article presents two different examples
that illustrate the alliances of state, market and society in accelerating
sustainability. The examples showcase how context-specific parameters
and dynamics often dictate different alliances, whereby sustainability
transformations may take different shapes and forms and are loaded
by politics and power dynamics across geographical, political and
socioeconomic scales. The first example addresses the question of
'financialization of nature' by exploring the alliances created around
offsets in international carbon markets under the Reducing Emissions
from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism. The second example presents alliances for green transformation in Africa
through Kenya's pro-poor renewable energy experience. Both cases
explore how coalitions form, highlighting the tensions and synergies
with tackling inequality, the importance of inclusive transformation, and
the relevance of context. They also show that there is no one-size-fits all
in the development of diverse sustainability pathways.
2 Financialization of nature: new alliances and REDD+ offsets in
international carbon markets
Voluntary offsets in international carbon markets provide an interesting
illustration of the alliances between the state, market and society in
sustainability transformations, specifically relevant to the financialization
of nature. Financialization here refers to 'how the financial system itself
has become a centre of redistributive activity, drawing into financial
circulation aspects of life that previously lay outside it' (Fairhead, Leach
and Scoones 2012). In other words, financialization or commodification
reflect how nature is being linked to a tradeable commodity in a
financialized world, for instance, as a critical precondition for the
emergence and operation of green offset markets (ibid.). A good example
in this respect is the development of the mechanism prompted by
deforestation and forest degradation known as REDD+ under the 1992
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The purpose of REDD+ is to provide developing countries with a
financial incentive to reduce their level of deforestation and forest
degradation, and to increase their forest carbon stocks (International
Climate Initiative 2012; REDD+ 2015). REDD+ is based on 'results-based
finance' (RBF) principles, whereby finance is an 'ex-post reward'
conditional upon a reduction of forest-based emissions as to incentivise
recipient countries to take the necessary actions towards transition to
a low-deforestation pathway (KfW 2015). As such, there are different
possibilities for establishing REDD+ systems, which vary particularly
in terms of their scale and financing. In 'national' approaches it is
expected that governments will receive payments linked to emissions
reductions across the whole forest estate, whereby finance could either
come from selling emissions reductions into global carbon markets or
from public international funds. On the other hand, in 'project-based'
approaches it is expected that those implementing the projects will
receive payments linked to emissions reductions in the project area,
through selling carbon credits into global carbon markets (Peskett and
Brodnig 2011). It should be noted, however, that the REDD+ RBF
programmes under the UNFCCC have been agreed relatively recently,
and do not provide operational levels of detail.
Accordingly, these RBF programmes open the door for a wide range
of state–market–society alliances under the umbrella of accelerating
sustainability and climate change mitigation. Examples of these
alliances include the climate-related memorandums of understanding
(MoUs) signed by the California governor's office with Acre (Brazil)
and Chiapas (Mexico), as well as the carbon deals and alliances in Hurungwe in Zimbabwe through the Kariba REDD+ project
(Dzingirai and Mangwanya 2015). Although in most of these cases the
implementation of REDD+ is integrated into national biodiversity
action plans, green economy strategies, and the global fight against
climate change, the 'alliances' created behind them are open to
question. In these alliances, the state is often viewed as creating a
government-facilitated territory, yielding rights for polluting companies
to grow in a weak regulatory environment on the one hand, while
capital plays a key role in favouring corporate actors at the expense
of the participating countries of the global South on the other. In this
respect, the alliances created in international carbon markets between
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), brokers, conservation
entrepreneurs, big private banks, transnational firms, greenhouse gas
(GHG) credit traders, and the state, are often described as 'forcing
polluters to buy more credit to make more pollution' (McAfee 2016).
Luttrell et al. (2013) further indicate that 'REDD+ is heavily loaded
with a wide range of expectations on outcomes beyond carbon
emission reductions, and expectations that lie behind the diversity
of rationales concerning who should benefit from REDD+'. As a
result, one of the key questions that has arisen in the context of this
debate surrounds which actors have the right to exploit the benefits
of GHG emissions reductions in REDD+, and the associated rights
to international payments. As carbon is stored in trees and land, in
many cases the answer will entail an understanding of rights over the
resources and services they provide, often included in the widely used
but normally poorly defined term 'carbon rights' (Peskett and Brodnig
2011). These rights can also vary based on a range of benefit-sharing
rationales including legal rights, emissions reductions, stewardship,
cost-compensation, facilitation and pro-poor rationales (Lutrell et
al. 2013). Who decides what value to be attributed to these carbon
rights, however, often remains unclear within the architecture of this
financialization process.
Amidst all the existing ambiguity, emissions reductions from REDD+ projects are already created and traded within voluntary carbon markets. Most offsets are undertaken on a voluntary basis by corporations for PR purposes, or by conservation charities, and in some cases for speculation. Offset buyers include various corporate actors such as eBay, Walt Disney, Credit Agricole and Microsoft, amongst others. With the participation of corporate actors from industrialised nations, the REDD+ mechanism is viewed as one that allows corporate emitters to buy more credit by paying rent to the state for the use of atmospheric carbon sinks to make more pollution in the global South. In this respect, a key critique of market-based mechanisms is that it allows emitters to pollute more if they pay for activities elsewhere that store carbon or prevent GHGs, hence resulting in a legitimised 'right to pollute'. Another critique of the REDD+ mechanism is that in these voluntary markets, there is an oversupply of projects vis-à-vis offset buyers, thus resulting in low prices of forest offsets in the 'global carbon market' based on the simple economic rule of demand and supply. Accordingly, prices of forest offsets on global carbon markets remain too low to pay for the desired conservation efforts. As such, as long as there is no global 'cap', the supply of offsets will exceed demand and prices will stay too low to pay for much conservation.
Consequently, in a financialized modern economy, it is important to
critically examine these state–market–society alliances in accelerating
sustainability under REDD+. Doing so is essential in order to ensure
that those implicated in the accumulation of value are not also those
implicated in the attribution of value itself, whereby value of the
commodity is constructed and co-produced within the architecture of its
financialization (Fairhead et al. 2012). Otherwise, these alliances created
under the RBF programmes may not necessarily positively contribute to
a pathway of 'just sustainabilities'.
3 Green transformations and African renewable energy initiatives
In terms of state, market and society alliances for green transformations,
debate often arises between the priorities of environmental sustainability
on the one hand, and equality, social justice and inclusion on the other.
Green transformations in this sense do not just imply a shift towards green
or sustainable technology that can deliver on environmental objectives;
rather the politics shaping transformations such as towards renewable
energy also implicate issues of access, use and equity in these processes
(Scoones, Leach, and Newell 2015). In African countries for instance,
questions of renewable energy require consideration of pro-poor access
to electricity, as well as inequalities, and affordability in energy supply.
In this respect, there are two dominant paradigms overtaking the issue
of green transformations and electricity access in Africa. The first is a
traditional paradigm that claims that Africa cannot afford the luxury
of providing renewable energy due to its high cost. This view is well
expressed by an African official as follows: 'We don't have the luxury of
saying that electrification should only be done with green electricity. Our
villages are desperate for electricity, they don't care whether the electrons
are green, purple, or black' (Tenenbaum et al. 2014 in Pueyo 2016). Based
on this view, governments tend to move towards fossil fuel for electricity
generation, thus abandoning green transformation opportunities. An
alternative, optimistic paradigm on the other hand claims that access to
renewable energy is possible in Africa despite the many challenges related
to high initial investment cost. Multiple challenges also remain, which
require functioning states, including regulation, domestic finance, regional
cooperation and credible off-takers, as well as coherent planning of
centralised and decentralised power.
But even when adopting the optimists' views about green transformation,
trade-offs exist between 'greening' and 'accessing' electricity in Africa
(Pueyo 2016). There is still an ongoing struggle between large-scale
infrastructure schemes – even those providing renewable energy –
which often exclude the poor, vis-à-vis decentralised pro-poor solutions facilitating access to affordable clean energy sources. Kenya is a good
example to illustrate the tensions between these two approaches to green
transformation in the energy sector. Electricity generation in Kenya
comes from both renewable and non-renewable sources: the former
accounts for about 72 per cent of the total electricity, most of which is
hydro and geothermal, while thermal energy from fossil-fuel sources
accounts for most of the rest of the country's energy supply (Spratt et al.
2016). It is worth noting, however, that solar power in Kenya is mainly
from off-grid, so it is not included in these estimates. As such, given the
traditional approach based on the government's conception of energy
production as dependent on large-scale infrastructure, only 30 per cent
of households have access to grid electricity. In this sense, despite the
government's efforts towards green transformation manifested in a
larger share of renewable energy supplies, the question of access for the
country's poor and marginalised communities remains problematic.
By contrast, pro-poor solutions provided by civil society, and external funding to promote 'off-grid' access to solar energy, have achieved quite different results, reaching around 60 per cent of electricity access across the country. At present, access to electricity in Kenya is driven by five solar segments: solar home systems, standalone institutional photovoltaic (PV) systems, telecoms and tourism, mini-grid and large-scale grid-connected PV systems. This green transformation in Kenya's solar PV market has evolved through different phases, involving diverse alliances between state, business and citizens. Such alliances have formed through financing (albeit from external sources) and technological innovation, which in turn have supported policy and market innovations leading to enhanced access to renewable energy by a larger base of the country's poor.
As such, the diverse solar PV segments in Kenya can be considered
to add up to the most transformational of the country's low-carbon
energy developments, not because they are the most widely used but
because of the way they have transformed access to energy by the poor.
In this respect, this transformative alliance has entailed 'sequential'
evolution of technologies, markets and policies. Alliances in accelerating
sustainability have thus challenged traditional political, economic and
social structures, while creating a more just and sustainable pathway
towards green transformation.
4 Conclusion
State–market–society dynamics unfold differently in different contexts,
through specific forms of alliance. The REDD+ example reflects how
alliances associated with accelerating sustainability may establish new
green markets, thus installing a model of financialization of nature,
whereby 'those exerting power over the markets play them with loaded
dice' (Fairhead et al. 2012). On the other hand, the Kenya example
shows us how low-carbon transformation in Africa is subject to the political economy of the tripartite relationship between state, markets
and society. Variation in progress in both examples often depends on
the technical, institutional, financial, and above all, political will to achieve the desired progress. The social and political negotiation of
sustainability transformations will therefore always be complex and
contested, compounded by uncertainties, ambiguities and forms of
ignorance (Stirling 2008) around patterns and trends in environmental
change. Attention to how alliances form, and the specific ways they
emerge in different contexts, nevertheless generates the possibilities of
lesson-learning across issues and places, towards building pathways to
sustainability that also work for social justice.
References
Agyeman, J.; Bullard, R.D. and Evans, B. (eds) (2003) Just Sustainabilities:
Development in an Unequal World, Cambridge MA: MIT Press
Dzingirai, V. and Mangwanya, L. (2015) 'Struggles Over Carbon in
the Zambezi Valley: The Case of Kariba REDD in Hurungwe,
Zimbabwe', in M. Leach and I. Scoones (eds), Carbon Conflicts and
Forest Landscapes in Africa, London: Routledge
Fairhead, J.; Leach, M. and Scoones, I. (2012) 'Green Grabbing: A New
Appropriation of Nature?', Journal of Peasant Studies 39.2: 237–61
International Climate Initiative (2012) REDD+ and Forest Carbon Rights in
Papua New Guinea: Background Legal Analysis, Regional Project: Climate
Protection through Forest Conservation in Pacific Island Countries,
(accessed 17 September 2016)
KfW (2015) Results-based Finance for REDD+: Emerging Approaches,
(accessed 12 September 2016)
Leach, M. (2015) 'What is Green: Transformation Imperatives and
Knowledge Politics', in I. Scoones, M. Leach and P. Newell (eds), The Politics of Green Transformations, London: Routledge
Leach, M.; Scoones, I. and Stirling, A. (2010) Dynamic Sustainabilities:
Technology, Environment, Social Justice, Abingdon: Earthscan
Luttrell, C.; Loft, L.; Gebara, M.F.; Kweka, D.; Brockhaus, M.;
Angelsen, A. and Sunderlin, W.D. (2013) 'Who Should Benefit from
REDD+? Rationales and Realities', Ecology and Society 18.4: 52,
(accessed 11 October
2016)
McAfee (2016) 'Green Economy and REDD+ Offsets in International
Carbon "Markets": The Strange Alliance of Big Energy and Big
Conservation in the Case of California', presentation, IDS 50th
Anniversary Conference, 'States, Markets and Society', University of
Sussex, Brighton, 5–6 July 2016
Newell, P. and Mulvaney, D. (2013) 'The Political Economy of the "Just Transition"', The Geographical Journal 179.2: 132–40
Peskett, L. and Brodnig, G. (2011) Carbon Rights in REDD+: Exploring the
Implications for Poor and Vulnerable People, Washington DC: World Bank
and REDD-net
Pueyo (2016) 'Trade-offs between "Greening" and "Accessing" Energy in Africa', presentation, IDS 50th Anniversary Conference, 'States, Markets and Society', University of Sussex, Brighton, 5–6 July 2016
REDD+ (2015) Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
(REDD+) in Developing Countries, (accessed
19 August 2016)
Schmitz, H. and Scoones, I. (2015) Accelerating Sustainability: Why Political Economy Matters, IDS Evidence Report 152, Brighton: IDS
Scoones, I. (2015) 'Transforming Soils: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
and Pathways to Sustainability', Current Opinion in Environmental
Sustainability 15: 20–4
Scoones, I.; Leach, M. and Newell, P. (eds) (2015) The Politics of Green
Transformations, London: Routledge
Spratt, S.; Pueyo, A.; Bawakyillenuo, S. and Osiolo, H.H. (2016)
From Growth to Green Investment Diagnostics, IDS Working Paper 472,
Brighton: IDS
Stirling, A. (2008) '"Opening Up" and "Closing Down": Power,
Participation, and Pluralism in the Social Appraisal of Technology',
Science, Technology and Human Values 33.2: 262–94
Swilling, M. and Annecke, E. (2012) Just Transitions: Explorations of
Sustainability in an Unfair World, South Africa: UCT Press
Tenenbaum, B.; Greacen, C.; Siyambalapitiya, T. and Knuckles, J.
(2014) From the Bottom Up: How Small Power Producers and Mini-Grids can Deliver Electrification and Renewable Energy in Africa, Washington DC:
World Bank Publications
WCED (1987) Our Common Future, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, New York NY: United Nations
© 2016 The Author. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2016.186
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0
International licence, which permits downloading and sharing provided the original authors and source are credited – but
the work is not used for commercial purposes. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 2A November 2016: 'States, Markets and Society – New Relationships for a New Development Era'; the Introduction is also recommended reading.