The world is by its very nature material. Everything which exists (including everything mental or spiritual) comes into being on the basis of material causes and arises and develops in accordance with the laws of science (materialism). The world and its laws are knowable, and while much in the material world may not yet be known, there is no unknowable sphere of reality which lies outside the material world. Through the rational discovery and application of knowledge about this world people can make progress and realise higher states of development. The current challenge is to develop forms of knowledge and rationality that can guide us towards sustainable development.

The world should be understood, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted sequence of coming into being, changing and passing away. The analysis of processes, flows, and relations should take priority over that of things, events, and structures for the latter do not exist outside or prior to the former. Processes, flows and relations of matter create, sustain and undermine things, events and structures (including people and societies). These cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection (dialectical materialism). Change is part of what things are and EfS should therefore become an informed speculation on how changed processes, flows and relations in the social world can sustain those changing ecological processes, flows and relations in the bio-physical world which contribute to the welfare of both human and non-human nature.

Society is constituted and sustained by relations of power which allow people to work with human and non-human nature to produce the goods and services they need and to reproduce those things which make this production possible (such conditions of production as natural resources and services, human health and education, and urban and rural space). These relations contain seven sites of power (the body, welfare, culture, civic associations, the economy, coercive relations and organized violence, and regulatory and legal relations) and their overlapping networks shape people’s physical and psychological well being, opportunities to become active members of the community, security or cultural identity, ability to join civic associations, capacity to influence the economic agenda, ability to act without fear of physical force and violence, and ability to participate in political debate and electoral politics. They determine how economic production and social reproduction take place, the kinds of technology and discourse that mediate people's relations with the rest of nature, people’s rights and duties, and their status as citizens. Democratic relations within all these networks of power are conducive to ensuring that a society develops in ways which meet people’s common interest in human well-being and long term survival (sustainability).

Different societies regulate power relations through different modes of regulation which provide people with different forms of citizenship. Rights and duties related to their welfare and quality of life constitute social citizenship. This contributes to social stability and reproduction via such mechanisms as labour contracts, welfare legislation, land use planning, education, and consumerism, allowing a set of compromises over how production is organised and the distribution of social goods takes place. Conflicting interests accept a form of citizenship, or division of rights and duties, legitimated and enforced by the institutions of the state, and the resulting stability underpins a regime of capital accumulation. Such regimes are temporary for modes of regulation are threatened when there are problems of maintaining economic output (eg. market saturation, falling productivity, trade deficits, new technology); and/or reproducing the conditions of production (eg. rising costs of waste disposal, deteriorating environmental quality, rising costs of crime and social services); and/or maintaining political support for the prevailing form of citizenship. It is inner contradictions within the material processes and relations of advanced capitalism which are currently prompting calls for sustainable development.

Much current advocacy of sustainable development and EfS can be explained by reference to capital's attempts to solve a 'supply side' crisis that emerged at the end of the 'post-war boom'. The shift from organised (Fordist) to disorganised (Post Fordist) regimes of accumulation in the past twenty years has involved the privatisation of state owned industry and utilities, the deregulation of labour and the environment, the intensification of globalisation, related developments in international political institutions, and the restructuring of welfare and social citizenship.  The growth of global networks of power has undermined the welfare (nation) state and has brought demands for social rights to be extended into new post-national formations of which the European Union is the leading example. At the same time the emergence of local groups, nationalisms, and movements from below has brought new demands for the devolution of power and more direct democracy. Ideological challenges from the New Right have sought to deny social rights or displace them by emphasising social duties and extending these into previously uncolonized private and public spheres such as the family and community. New social movements also seek to redefine social citizenship with radical environmentalists urging the extension of duties to encompass the welfare of future generations and that of rest of nature.

The shift to disorganised capitalism has intensified problems of environmental degradation and social exclusion and resulted in greater advocacy of sustainable development. In its weak mode such development represents an emerging mode of regulation involving a form of techno-managerialism via which capital seeks to ensure a continued supply of the conditions of production on its own terms and the state seeks to maintain the support of the majority of voters. Weak sustainability fails to incorporate a commitment to social inclusion and social citizenship through redistribution, democratisation, and empowerment. It stresses ecological and economic sustainability, rather than social and personal sustainability, and is likely to be of a limited and largely 'imagined' nature. It is designed to function mainly at the ideological level with the media and education used to support it, but in seeking to establish and maintain this mode of regulation the corporate sector and the state do offer various forms of public consultation and participation (eg. Local Agenda 21) which can be used to advance the case for stronger forms of sustainability.

Much advocacy of sustainability is linked to Post – Keynesian communitarianism which maintains that macroeconomics is dead: the nation state has very little role in economic management; the welfare state is not sustainable in its familiar form; and many of its functions must be taken over by the voluntary sector or privatised. The social policy of New Labour offers more power and resources for civic associations and NGOs as service provision and decision making is devolved to community based organisations. By seeking to rekindle mutual aid and social capital, transform local government, and empower people as consumers of services and active citizens, communitarianism brings the values and instruments of strong sustainability onto the agenda. It is however compatible with weak sustainability to the extent that civic associations remain undemocratic and unregulated; become private profit making organisations; become bureaucratised puppets rather than partners of the state; serve only a section of the population who expect a ‘return’ on the social capital they invest; remain dependent on charity and/or inadequate state funds; are unable to provide the range, level and quality of services which citizens in a sustainable society should expect; or fail to encourage critical citizenship.

Weak sustainability's attempt to 'internalize nature' (to ideologically redefine 'nature' and subsume it within capital as a productive asset henceforth subject to 'rational' management as in much environmental economics and green consumerism) is compromised by the need for capitalists and nation states to compete internationally. It meets opposition from those workers and new social movement activists who seek stronger forms of sustainability in both the sphere of production and in the public sphere of consumption where the social conditions of production are reproduced (civil society or community). The green left proposes a new form of cosmopolitan democracy or global governance based on the principle of autonomy. This suggests that all the world’s people should enjoy equal rights and accordingly equal obligations, in the specification of the political framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them. Enacting this principle requires an expanding framework of legal principles, institutions and procedures to extend and deepen democratic accountability across all relations of power, at all levels from the local to the global. Laws would delimit the form and scope of individual and collective action within the organisations and associations of the state, economy, and civil society, creating minimum standards for the treatment of all (social citizenship), and ensuring the effective co-ordination of social development in the common interest (sustainable development).

Cosmopolitan democracy would combine the intensive and participatory democracy of workplaces, communities and neighbourhoods, with the extensive and representative democracy of elected assemblies at higher levels. More enabling forms of governance and citizenship would require and encourage appropriate technologies, socially useful production, satisfying work, guaranteed income, popular planning, time for self managed activity, mutual aid, and environmental protection and reconstruction. They would emancipate both human and non-human nature in ways that allow their continued progressive evolution.

Debates and struggles over different forms of EfS are an integral part of current struggles between social forces seeking weak or stronger interpretations of sustainability. Social movement activists on the new Left, including green socialists, have pioneered approaches to community development and education which involve critical or participative action research. These encourage people to create and apply their own socially useful knowledge by sharing their lay and tacit knowledge and combining it with scrutinised theoretical knowledge. This involves a form of socially critical pedagogy which re-connects people with outer and inner nature; values knowledge from the margins or borders of society; and challenges those kinds of positivist and instrumental knowledge associated with technocracy. It exposes the interests supporting weak sustainability, supports a democratic public sphere and more associative forms of democracy, and encourages people to recognize the possibilities that lie within and beyond current social and environmental relations. Community economic action, popular planning, community visioning, sustainability indicators, constitutional reform, and notions of ‘best value’, are some of the contexts within which critical community education can currently advance cosmopolitan democracy and strong sustainability. In doing this it should acknowledge that some partners may be more helpful than others.

Such socially critical pedagogy is vital at the present time when there is an urgent need to reduce people’s alienation by re-connecting them to the bio-physical and social worlds in which they live. Disorganised capitalism has resulted in the further differentiation of social and spatial structures, resulting in the weakening of communal regulation, the individualisation of lifestyles, and a more complex distancing of individuals from the environments and people that supply their needs and wants. Social structures such as class and gender continue to be major determinants of life chances and environmental well being, but these structures tend to become increasingly obscure as collectivist traditions weaken, individualist values intensify, globalisation accelerates, and consumer and popular cultures bring new forms of ideological mystification. Consequently there is a growing disjuncture between the objective and subjective dimensions of people’s lives. Objectively they are forced to negotiate a new set of risks which impinge on all aspects of their lives (eg job insecurity, food safety, family breakdown). Meanwhile subjectively, they increasingly regard setbacks and crises as individual shortcomings that they must solve themselves, rather than the outcomes of structures and processes that are largely outside their control.

John Huckle
January 1998