The only game in town

“Let me make this as crystal clear as I possibly can: sustainable development is the only intellectually coherent, sufficiently inclusive, potentially mind-changing concept that gets even half-way close to capturing the true nature and urgency of the challenge that now confronts the world. There really is no alternative.” Jonathon Porritt sets out the mother of all communication challenges.

"The Sustainable Development Commission should not try to ‘sell’ the term ‘sustainable development’ to the general public. There is strong consensus among those engaging with the public that the phrase is a turn-off. It should encourage the practice of sustainable development across government, but should take a flexible approach through language and presentation."

Such was the advice given to me as the incoming chairman of the brand new Sustainable Development Commission – which has as one of its key remits a commitment to improve communications about sustainable development!

The context for this advice was some detailed analysis of just how much different sectors are using ‘sustainable development’ in their various stakeholder communications. To which the short answer turned out to be "not a lot".

Business is particularly sniffy about sustainable development in its reporting, with even leading companies such as B&Q, the Co-op Bank and Sainsbury’s coming up with all sorts of preferable alternatives. NGOs aren’t much better, with the traditional conservation groups avoiding it like the plague, and even Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth finding it quite difficult to spit out the words.

By comparison, certain government departments are really rather good at it (particularly the DTI and the old DETR), with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland scoring most highly in terms of regular usage. But there are limits here as well; as soon as government finds itself addressing the general public, sustainable development is eliminated from the lexicon as a meaningless bit of specialist jargon best left to consenting greenies. Neither the celebrity-endorsed ‘Are You Doing Your Bit?’ campaign nor Going for Green locate any of their eminently sensible gobbets of lifestyle advice within the wider context of sustainable development.

This makes pretty grim reading for those organisations and individuals whose central task it is to promote sustainable development – including Forum for the Future. At our heart, it would seem, lies a concept so unsexy, so slippery, so obstinately incommunicable as to necessitate instant decommissioning. ‘Sustainable develop-ment’ is dead; long live ‘quality of life’.

Well, sorry, but no way. Let me make this as crystal clear as I possibly can: sustainable development is the only intellectually coherent, sufficiently inclusive, potentially mind-changing concept that gets even half-way close to capturing the true nature and urgency of the challenge that now confronts the world. There really is no alternative.

Natural limits

For one very good reason: behind sustainable development lies the even more important concept of sustainability. Sustainability means quite simply the capacity for continuance into the long term. On Planet Earth, that capacity is determined by the laws of Nature, by the biophysical constraints and self-regenerating systems that sustain all life. Learn to live within those limits, and our prospects for continuance as a species are fine. Continue to live as ‘outlaws’, as we do now, and our survival prospects are dodgy. The rest of life on Earth will, in time, recover from our devastating impact, but we’ll be stuffed.

There are two more things about sustainability that make it so important. First, those limits and systems can be defined, measured and articulated scientifically. For decision-makers in both the public and the private sector, that’s critical. Secondly, however much this gets up the noses of campaigners for radical social and economic change, learning to live sustainably on Planet Earth just has to be priority Number One. All else depends on getting this right. Not only is biophysical unsustainability a principal driver of injustice, poverty, malnutrition and the suppression of human rights, but no lasting solution to these problems can be achieved in an unsustainable world.

Against that backdrop, sustainable development should best be seen as the journey we must take to arrive at the destination of sustainability; as a dynamic, politically contested, often muddled set of ideas and processes with which we are painfully learning to engage for the very first time.

Think loaf, not flour

Those of you who thought that the advice given me in the first paragraph of this article was dead right will by now have been powerfully reinforced in that belief! But stick with it for a moment more. If sustainability is the source of intellectual and scientific authority that underpins sustainable development, what are the equivalents for those apparently superior, more user-friendly concepts like ‘quality of life’ or ‘social responsibility’?

Not a great deal, I can assure you. Behind them, all you’ll find is a heaving morass of incoherent and often contradictory generalisations, dotted with cornball homilies about ‘golden rules’, ‘liveability’, and ‘doing unto others what you would have done unto you’. And do we really buy the idea that these alternatives are any more intelligible or user-friendly? If sustainable development is ‘an elusive, all-things- to-all-men kind of notion’, how much more should that charge be slapped on today’s trendy favourite of ‘corporate social responsibility’ – which is often used to embrace all things environmental as well as social? Exactly what kind of ‘social’ are we talking about – or, rather, ‘whose society’? Who would you trust to define ‘responsible’ – the chief executive of Monsanto or the spokesperson for Operation Cremate Monsanto, a peasants’ co-operative covering large swathes of India? And as for ‘corporate citizenship’, what a miserable, emaciated understanding of citizenship one must have to favour this particular travesty of the English language...

So I must confess to having little patience with those in the business who are only too happy to communicate about the constituent parts of sustainable development without so much as a passing reference to the whole of which they are a part. Think orchestra rather than instrument, think granary loaf rather than flour, yeast, seeds, and so on.

Easier said than done? Of course. If it was easy, I wouldn’t be writing this article. But far too many good communicators give up because they think it’s too difficult, forgetting that it’s all about a simple process of familiarisation. Keep saying something often enough, and it sticks. Do you suppose the vast majority of people really know what gross domestic product is, even though all politicians are in thrall to it? Or free-market economics, or western liberal democracy? Or even Conservatism? Yet political commentators have no hesitation batting such complex concepts back and forth.

Contrary to all those misery guts who say it can’t be done, I would argue it is being done and it is working. When the Brundtland Report came out in 1987, sustainable development meant sod all to all but a few hundred people. By the Earth Summit in 1992, a few hundred thousand people. By 2002, we’ll be talking a few million. This is the kind of exponential growth we should be celebrating. And if it hasn’t yet reached the readers of The Sun or the regulars down the Dog and Duck in Dagenham, or even the trendy think-tankers that cluster around New Labour – relax. Just keep saying it, slipping it in, cross-referencing it, joining it up; osmosis by oozing, acceptability through ubiquity.

So there’s absolutely no excuse for those communicating via the written word to cop out of their responsibilities in this respect. Press releases, pamphlets, reports, web sites just how hard is it to infiltrate the odd sustainable development connection? I agree, however, that it’s a different story with the broadcast media, where those eight syllables just about equate to the average permissible soundbite!

I have only one reservation about this ‘active promotion’ campaign. It means lots of people using sustainable development in all sorts of different ways, often relying on different definitions or interpretations, creating untold opportunities for confusion and inconsistency. Most people, for instance, make no distinction at all between sustainable development and sustainability as outlined earlier in the article.

But does that really matter at this stage? I’ve come to the conclusion that zealots such as myself have just got to reconcile themselves to this intellectual imprecision; better to have fuzzy sustainable development than no sustainable development at all – let alone the even fuzzier gobbledegook of ‘quality of life’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’...

If sustainable development really is ‘the next big idea’ (and I mean big, as in the only meaningful framework in which contemporary political and economic discourse will come to be set over the next decade or so), then we’d better start shovelling the words out there, whenever and wherever, to help lubricate what could still be a very rough ride indeed.

Jonathon Porritt is chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission and programme director of Forum for the Future.
www.sustainable-development.gov.uk
www.forumforthefuture.org.uk Betty Wallace,
‘Herbs from Heaven’, Borough Market, London – I would have thought that it is development of land and crops and communities and jobs based on foodstuffs that can be profitable without damaging the environment.

Richard Rogers,
architect – Meeting present needs without compromising the stock of natural resources remaining for future generations. In terms of buildings, it implies resource efficiency, minimum energy use, flexibility and long life.

David Griffiths,
cinematographer – Probably a long-term marriage. A good stay in prison because you learn to paint? Development without hanging yourself? I’ve really no idea...

20 September 2001

Jonathon Porritt