After the Green Revolution Sustainable and equitable agricultural development

Despite impressive results, the Green Revolution has encountered major problems of equity, stability and sustainability, calling for a ‘new phase’ of agricultural research and development. In this article four indicators of agricultural performance—productivity, stability, sustainability and equitability —are defined. Agro-ecosystems are described as a hierarchy ascending from the level of the individual plant or animal all the way to national systems linked by international trade, and it is argued that development cannot be based on any one level. This is demonstrated with a discussion of international constraints on sustainable and equitable development, the necessary national policies, and the needs of rural households. In conclusion, the article summarizes the research and development priorities for the new phase of development.     

Meanings of the term ‘sustainable development’ in Finnish corporate disclosures

There is an on-going discursive struggle over how the social and environmental problems related to modern societies should be understood and resolved. Sustainable development has become a pre-eminent concept in these discussions and businesses are increasingly employing the term in their communications. However, sustainable development means “different things to different people in different contexts” [Bebbington, J. (2001). Sustainable development: A review of the international development, business and accounting literature. Accounting Forum, 25(2), 128–157; see p. 129]. Thus, there have been recent calls in the literature to analyse what the companies are actually saying in their disclosures [Thomson, I., & Bebbington, J. (2005). Social and environmental reporting in the UK: A pedagogic evaluation. Critical Perspectives on Accounting; Kolk, A. (1999). Evaluating corporate environmental reporting. Business Strategy and the Environment, 8, 225–237]. Subscribing to the social construction of reality, this study critically assesses how the term ‘sustainable development’ is constructed in the disclosures of Finnish listed companies.

Overall, in the disclosures, sustainable development is constructed as a win-win concept, which allows society to enjoy economic growth, environmental protection and social improvements with no trade-offs or radical restructurings in the social order. However, behind the usual business rhetoric, there is very little evidence of anyone actually walking this talk. Accordingly, this research calls for further discussion on companies’ role in achieving sustainable development and on the business interpretation of sustainable development in general.     

Fundamentals of a new economic paradigm in the information age

Mechatronic technology is becoming dominant, and the capitalist market economy is becoming replaced by an economic framework of self-management and information sharing. As services and information become major traded goods at the global level, new economic structures based on globally networking eco-share regions are emerging. This article posits the development of a ‘MuRatopian’ economy—the new social design of the information age. Five actors-prosumer, co-worker, self-financer, inhabitant and villager—are replacing the nation-state in eco-share regions, with full employment, fair income distribution, economic efficiency and incentive, freedom and participatory democracy, all facets of a superior global economy of the information age.     

Domestic futures and sustainable residential development

Domestic ‘futures’ have been a long time coming. This paper questions the extent to which futuristic ‘vision’ linked to the rhetoric and sentiment of ‘sustainable development’ and the ‘livable city’ inform town and regional planning in England and Canada. Despite official commitment to ‘environmental’ objectives and media interest in ‘ecotech’ residential development, markets institutions and behaviour lag behind what is technically possible. Planning guidance encourages homes with less environmental impact. But this message has not reached most residential consumers. Is lack of mass markets in low impact housing a flaw in Government regulation, evidence of the cynical nature of official rhetoric, or proof of gradual product development as society redefines what is expected of living spaces? Or is it unwise to expect too much change in attitudes to property, or for innovation to come soon?     

Can India meet the increasing food demand by 2020?

India's Green Revolution has evolved at an environmental cost, which is perhaps irreversible. The economic growth has become increasingly dependant upon the use of non-renewable resources such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, oil and coal. India now follows a rapid development path, which is similar to the past growth patterns of most western nations. Whether or not such a growth blueprint would be environmentally sustainable under Indian conditions is questionable since rapid economic growth tends to positively influence environmental degradation. India is a land of villages with 700 million people living in over 600,000 villages, many in the enormous drylands. As the Tata Visiting Chair, I had the opportunity to study the rural development projects implemented by a non-profit agency (Sadguru Foundation) that harvests rainwater to improve irrigation and livelihood of rural people using check dams and lift irrigation systems in western India. This paper has examined how India's remote drylands can be transformed to achieve a ‘Sustainable Green Revolution’ to meet India's future food demands without creating serious negative consequences to natural environment. If the model highlighted in this paper is adopted all across the vast drylands of India and other parts of Asia, Africa and South America, it would certainly increase agricultural output, guarantee future food security, protect natural resources, and above all exterminate the greatest insult to human dignity—poverty!     

Making rights from what’s left of Darwinism

The legal, political, and social meaning of the work of Charles Darwin has been claimed as resident to conservative and liberal homes alike. Peter Singer's unique admixture of personal liberal politics and what may look to be an extremely conservative philosophy of nature expose some over-simplicity in traditional ‘right’ and ‘left’ categories. In “Recovering the Left from Darwin in the 21st Century”, Steve Fuller provides us with insightful historical and sociological contexts for Singer's challenges. In this article, Kirk Junker takes one aspect of the trajectory ‘the notion of natural rights’ and examines their social construction, linguistic maintenance, and legal ramifications.     

Total environmental management An approach to the dilemmas of the affluent society

Many people are currently advocating a ‘no growth’ economy. By way of introduction, the author explains why and how this is so, and then points out that the objectives of conservation and economic growth can and should be seen as complementary. He advocates the application of the systems approach to the total fabric of our natural and social environments.     

The future of happiness

Following definitions of ‘happiness’ and ‘social development’, crossnational and temporal happiness trends are analysed to reveal whether reported happiness reflects changes in broader social conditions. The authors question whether an effective measurement of happiness can serve as an indicator of social development. In addition, the role of information in contributing to or maximizing happiness is analysed.     

Sustainable development and the market : A framework for analysis

The environment has been confined to the margins of most research in the social sciences, particularly theoretical work on development. One consequence is that the environment has lacked an historical focus, which would allow us a broader, more comparative view of how nature is transformed under the impact of capitalist development. The object of this article is to sketch out such a framework, beginning with ‘autochtonous’ societies, in which sustainability, rather than development, is the key characteristic. The role of the market in transforming such societies is explored through a typology of social and environmental systems. In the light of the transformation of environmental goods, made necessary by market accumulation, the role of ‘environmental management’ is considered, and found to be inadequate. Sustainability, as a concept, needs to be related to the role of the market within the process of development itself.     

A post-nationalist South Asia

The ideas of ‘nation’, ‘national security’ and ‘development’ have played havoc with South Asian cultures. The notion of ‘nation state’ has tended to reproduce aspirations of the majority people who are often reconstructed by alien categories and leads to the alienation of minority communities. Virtually all ethnic conflicts in South Asia have their roots in this idea. A more viable and desirable future for South Asia lies in rethinking the model of development and reinventing the notions of state and security.     

Forecasting our environmental future

This series now comes to an appropriate end with the most menacing set of question marks ever raised about the future of the human race. During the past two decades—from the inauguration of the Club of Rome in 1967 to Margaret Thatcher's famous ‘green’ speech to the Royal Society in 1988—an ever growing volume of research has erased the old-time notion that we live out our lives in a steady-state world. As the bad news has spread—environmental pollution, acid rain, the warming of the oceans—a consensus of anxieties has found expression in a global fear for the future. Is there anyone who would gainsay the possibility that, as Mrs Thatcher put it, ‘with all these enormous changes—population, agriculture, use of fossil fuels—concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself’? The scale of these changes and the measure of the dangers they bring—these provide the range of cause and effect in Dr Woodell's reflections on the great harm we have done to the human environment. This is the one occasion when an editor can truly say: Read on for the survival of our species.     

New markets and new commons : Opportunities in the global casino

The United Nations is well positioned for the global changes of the information age now engulfing nation-states. The UN role and tasks—as global norm setter, broker, networker, convenor, and peacekeeper—are ideally suited to today's world of linked ‘infostructures’ and distributed power, influence and knowledge typified by the emerging global civil society. The UN can serve all these emerging infostructures—and be compensated by fostering debates and convening parties to design the needed agreements for operating the emerging ‘electronic commons’, including today's global financial casino. Technological, social and economic contexts for this new global agenda are described together with some market opportunities in new public/private partnerships to serve the global commons.     

European equity markets volatility spillover: Destabilizing energy risk is the new normal

While energy risk is increasingly recognized as a systemic risk, there is limited comprehensive analysis of the risk propagation in regional contexts. In this study, we examine oil and natural gas price changes and shocks in relation to equity market returns and volatility for 24 European Economic Area (EEA) countries. In addition to traditional panel regressions, we also deploy the Diebold-Yilmaz (2014) spillover index for a closed network analysis. We differentiate in the cross-section across the core EU block, PIIGS countries, EU enlargement countries joining after 2004, and other non-EU countries, to provide insights into the ongoing debates on the European energy market stability. While we find evidence of the manifestation of energy risk throughout the sample period, we find that until 2019 the primary sources of volatility spillover in the EEA economic network arose from economic or political uncertainty. Energy risks, measured by large crude oil and natural gas price shocks also significantly contributed to equity market volatility, with increasing volatility risk arising from natural gas, a green labelled energy source after 2019. Last, we show that CEEC equity markets are more sensitive to oil and natural gas price shocks when domestic currencies depreciate against the Euro.     

Future health of indigenous peoples A human ecology view and the case of the Amazonian Shipibo-Conibo

Health has its basis in the relationships between human societies and cultures and the environment. The health of indigenous peoples living in traditional territories is threatened today by the destruction of this environment and the introduction of new contagious diseases; those who move to urban areas suffer even worse health because of ‘civilization’ diseases and the loss of the social networks that provide personal support and health care. Contrary to expectations, an epidemiological transition has not occurred in developing countries where many of these groups live. Two apparent underlying causes—persistent poverty and political inequality—are among the factors that will affect the future health of indigenous groups, together with trends in population, urbanization, and the environment. Indigenous groups can play a major role in determining that future and are already doing so through territorial-control projects aimed at protecting the environment on which their health and well-being depend.     

Population decline and the new nature: Towards experimental “refactoring” in landscape development of post-industrial regions

From an everyday perspective, a consequence of population decline and de-industrialization is the growth of natural areas: less industry and less people means more nature in the future. In the real word, the situation is more complicated. Using the development of a new lake district as a successor of brown coal industry and strip mining in the southern parts of the city of Leipzig (Germany) as a touchstone, this paper will explore some of the challenges and future opportunities for the design of ‘new nature’ in post-industrial landscapes. To discuss how fields such as ecology and engineering can fulfill their role as innovative players in times of population decline, two seemingly contrasting strategies for making decisions under conditions of depopulation in landscape development—called here scientific non-knowledge—are introduced: refactoring and public experiments.     

UK mutual fund performance: Skill or luck?

Using a comprehensive data set on (surviving and non-surviving) UK equity mutual funds, we use a cross-section bootstrap methodology to distinguish between ‘skill’ and ‘luck’ for individual funds. This methodology allows for non-normality in the idiosyncratic risk of the funds — a major issue when considering those funds which appear to be either very good or very bad performers, since these are the funds which investors are primarily interested in identifying. Our study points to the existence of stock picking ability among a relatively small number of top performing UK equity mutual funds (i.e. performance which is not solely due to good luck). At the negative end of the performance scale, our analysis strongly rejects the hypothesis that most poor performing funds are merely unlucky. Most of these funds demonstrate ‘bad skill’. Recursive estimation and Kalman ‘smoothed’ coefficients indicate temporal stability in the ex-post performance alpha's of winner and loser portfolios. We also find performance persistence amongst loser but not amongst winner funds.     

Principles of humanistic enterprise in Japan : A new economic system of the future

The Japanese economy and management since the Second World War have been guided by the influence of Japanese cultural uniqueness. Misunderstanding of the nature of the Japanese economy stems in part from lack of a universal principle derived from the Japanese experience. The ‘Humanistic Enterprise System’ (HES) advocated by H. Itami in his latest work is one of the most useful concepts developed to date, and views the Japanese HES economy as supplying the paradigm for 21st century global economics. HES is based on a people-centred economic philosophy in which human resources are primary for economic activity, and consists of three principles—employee sovereignty, general sharing, and an organized market.     

Economic cycles and socialist policies

The interpretation of economic cycles in the literature ranges from the technical/economic to the political. It is argued here that the question of the transition from the end of the B-phase in a cycle to the beginning of the A-phase is essentially a political rather than an economic issue. Each succeeding B-phase has been hailed by socialist movements as the ‘crisis’ that would ignite true class consciousness, although such interpretations have failed to appreciate the variety of mechanisms available to prevent change and looked at only at those available to promote it. An analysis of innovation and reform shows that these linked, contradictory phenomena, although anti-conservative in the short run, are simultaneously essentially conservative in the middle run and anti-conservative in the long run. Their processes are likely to lead to the demise of capitalism as a world-system but will lead to its replacement by a new world-system that will not necessarily be non-exploitative, egalitarian and democratic—ie will not necessarily be socialist.     

Reconciling the electricity industry with sustainable development: backcasting — a strategic alternative

The concept of Sustainability has emerged from a recognition that all terrestrial systems, be they natural or human, are interconnected, and cannot, therefore, be adequately understood through reductionist analysis. Such an understanding has fundamental implications for the policy making process. While specialist knowledge remains an essential prerequisite in the development of effective ‘sustainability’ policies, it is not in itself sufficient. An equally important, and all too often neglected, component, is the understanding and insight gained from synthesising detailed and disparate information from across a range of disciplines. With this in mind, this paper builds on Lovin's and Robinson's earlier ‘backcasting’ work to suggest an alternative strategic structure for reconciling a reliable and affordable electricity industry with the broad tenets of sustainable development. Within this alternative model, electricity demand, as well as supply, becomes an endogenous factor in the policy making process. Moreover, the model essentially rejects the mechanistic optimisation underpinning both the contemporary market model and the earlier planned structure of the electricity industry. By contrast, the backcast proposed here embraces wider environmental and social responsibilities through a more circumspect appreciation of current knowledge and hence a more flexible and responsive policy agenda.     

The environment in an ‘information society’: A transition stage towards more sustainable development?

Social scientists and futurists have suggested that societal development is advancing to a novel stage, to an ‘information society’. However, the crucial qualifiers of this ‘new’ society are ambiguous. Furthermore, environmental goals have created new challenges for information society studies. This paper examines the interaction and dynamics between the information society and sustainable development, which most often manifest themselves as competing scientific and socio-political discourses. On the one hand, there is the potential for reducing the stress on the environment: the emergence of information technologies and services can lead to a dematerialisation of production and immaterialisation of consumption. On the other hand, there are risks: positive environmental effects might be overcome by the ‘rebound effect’ caused by excessive economic growth. It is concluded that further theoretical and empirical studies are needed in order to examine the complex and contradictory relationship between the information society and environmental issues.