We should better recognise not everyone wins in environmental policy
As former French Prime Minister Mendès argued: ‘to govern is to choose’.
We constantly make choices between natural, physical and financial resources and between ideas, cultural norms, values or technologies. In the real world, choices always generate relative winners and losers. Yet, our processes for decision making often seek to maximise the winners and minimise the losers – striving for win-win rather than zero-sum outcomes.
This is the idea underpinning utilitarianism. And it has become one of the most powerful ideas in contemporary governance, not least because minimising the numbers of losers makes for happier and more harmonious societies.
But even within inclusive and utilitarian societies we must contend with the fall-out of decisions. The dry language of ‘trade-offs’, ‘balance’, ‘coherence’ or ‘integration’ never captures the human and emotional aspects or consequences of being on the losing side, whether the ‘loss’ is real, repeated, or imagined. The utilitarian ideas of trade-offs, balancing, and integrating have become self-fulfilling, mistakenly ‘neutral’ forces within governance and decision making, where ‘technical’ criteria or processes of balancing and integration exhibit ‘the triumph of technique’ (Rayner 2007) and seek to hide the values that go into what gets traded off against what, how balancing or integration happens, who does this, and in whose interest.
These phenomena of seeking (but inevitably failing) to depoliticise and promote value-free decision making are problematic in a democratic society, where leaders are wary of alienating potential future voters by bringing attention to the reality that they are on the losing side of a decision. For those cowering behind technocracy and avoiding the hard gaze of values, it makes better electoral sense to perpetuate a myth of ubiquitous win-wins and imagined ‘balanced’ decisions.
We need better ways of articulating, within our democracy, how sustainability transformations will not always mean win-win outcomes for everyone in every instance.
Relative winners and losers
Surviving the challenges of the Anthropocene will mean change and will lead to winners and losers relative to the world that was. People, societies, and those with incumbent interests will be perturbed. Some groups’ values will dominate, and others’ will be accommodated (at best) or ‘quashed’ (at worse). They may even be simply hidden within technocratic decision processes.
For example, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2022) found that, of the dozens of different forms of human-nature relations (such as Ubuntu, the African relational value system that is often translated as “I am because you are”), our current systems are dominated by just a handful, of which utilitarian cost-benefit analysis is by far the most dominant.
This shouts loudly of the scope and depth of work to be done in bringing to bear a fuller range of values within inevitably political decision processes. This will likely entail creating and maintaining strong institutions that can champion and withstand the glare of transparency and openness required to bring these hidden values into the light and support those on the losing side of sustainable transitions.
The message that action on the nature-climate-pollution crises can only be framed as win-win outcomes without losers – often enabled through misleadingly labelled ‘neutral’ technology – gets increasingly hard to hold onto in the Anthropocene. This means that the value underpinning sustainable development of ‘leaving no one behind’ becomes harder to hold onto.
Rather than suggest that the necessary changes will mean leaving some worse off, the dominant culture of governing tends to dismiss the losers of sustainability transformations, sweeps them under the carpet, or worse, enters into victim-blaming. Where these people and communities are dismissed, ignored or gas-lit, they fall prey to mis and dis-information, populism and demagoguery, which undermines the delicate and fragile project of democracy itself.
As an example, we can already see the realities of socially divisive climate adaptation and implementation of mitigation options beginning to hit home: from large-scale renewable energy developments (a long-running issue) to the ‘managed realignment’ of coastal communities at risk of sea-level rise or agricultural land use changes. Here, affected communities can feel ‘done to’ and there have been reactions to being simply financially ‘compensated’ for the loss they experience.
Dealing openly with loss and losing
We need to get better at empathising and sympathising with, and accommodating for, those losing out.
We need better ways of articulating, within our democracy, how sustainability transformations will not always mean win-win outcomes for everyone in every instance. We need greater honesty and a better language of loss to communicate ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht 2005) within democratic governance. And we need ways of dealing openly with loss and losing (in a communal sense), avoiding hiding behind technocratic forms of integration or making ‘balanced’ decisions (which are, in reality, highly political). However, we also need to continue to promote fair outcomes and forms of justice for present and future generations for people and the rest of nature.
We need a more honest and open dialogue about the inherently political nature of decision making for sustainable futures. These processes need to be equitable, accessible and responsible if we are to alleviate and address grievances and a sense of loss, prestige or respect.
If ‘to govern is to choose’, then governance in the Anthropocene needs a language of loss, to design and deliver institutions that openly and honestly address a fuller range of values in play, and deliver the outcomes of fairness, justice, and accountability that maintain democratic governance by consent.
So, we need to think about sustainability transformations first and foremost as being about the political decisions of who gets what, when and why in a rapidly changing world, creating both winners and losers. Currently, dominant decision making processes have their roots in 18th century enlightenment thought.
We need a radical rethink of how modern climate and nature governance and institutions should be designed and presented. The necessary changes in environmental governance challenge the dominant narratives of win-win, seeking balance, coherence, synergy and integration.
References
- Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: a New Concept in Health and Identity. Philosophy, Nature, Activism: 3.
- IPBES (2022). Methodological assessment regarding the diverse conceptualization of multiple values of nature and its benefits, including biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services.
- Rayner S (2007). The rise of risk and the decline of politics. Environmental Hazards: 7(2) 165-172.
Header image credit: © Rawf8 | Adobe Stock
