Alternative Energy Strategies for the United Kingdom Revisited: Market Competition and Sustainability

Energy and electricity demand forecasts for Britain made in the late 1970s by a research team from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), under the leadership of Gerald Leach, are assessed with the benefit of hindsight. These researchers broke the energy market down into some 400 end-use, fuel, and appliance categories. They then assessed the potential for energy saving in physical terms, using available technical fixes, for each category. The resulting “bottom-up” projecitons of energy consumption departed from the historic correlation with economic growth, or “top-down” approach. It enabled the IIED team to postulate an alternative, low energy strategy for the United Kingdom to 2025. This study subsequently had a great influence on energy planning elsewhere in the industrialized world, although it was not without its detractors.The IIED energy demand projections are reviewed in the context of both the greatly increased market competition in the UK from 1979 onward, and the need to achieve sustainable development. It is shown that, although total primary energy consumption in the mid-1990s was much in line with the forecasts in the Leach report, the reasons for this and the structure of the newly competitive energy market are quite different from that originally postulated. However, the critics of the IIED team did little better. Long-term energy projections (25–50 years) as one-off, static exercises appear to be of little value for energy planning purposes. They can, as in the case of the Leach report, be a great source of data and ideas, as well as stimulating debate about new strategies. It is argued that rolling projections using a rather broad, sectoral approach that is continuously updated at not greater than five-year intervals, in a similar manner to econometric forecasts, are more useful for energy planning purposes.     

Creative destruction Zhu Jia Jiao, China

Chinese water towns have experienced tourism investment since the adoption of the Open Door Policy in 1978. These river-based settlements offer an ancient small-town atmosphere, historic architecture, and a diversity of heritage commodities. The implications of this development in one such town, Zhu Jia Jiao, are examined through application of the model of creative destruction. Data collected on investments, tourist numbers, and resident attitudes reveal that this destination is in the model’s second stage of advanced commodification, which may be maintained if limits are placed on arrivals. Findings should be beneficial to other communities which are basing their development on marketing small-town heritage.     

Global Heritage and Local Problems: Some Examples from Indonesia

This article examines what happens to those who live in and around monuments as a result of World Heritage designation. Using the examples of Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia as study sites, it is argued that the values that local people attach to heritage are often different from, although not necessarily less important than, the values ascribed by international agencies, government officials, tourism developers and others. However, their perspectives are often not adequately represented or respected by other participants in the planning and management of sites, to the detriment of both the plans and the people. The tendency to adopt top-down, rational comprehensive planning procedures has resulted in the disenfranchisement of local people, giving greater prominence to expressions of national, 'official' culture and nationalism at the expense of local culture. It has tended to freeze sites and displace human activities, effectively excluding local people from their own heritage.     

Unemployment,marginalisation and survival in Greater East London

This article draws on selected findings of one of a series of surveys conducted by the authors in the Eastern Cape province, dealing broadly with labour market issues. Particular attention is accorded to levels of unemployment, the extent of migrancy, the operation of extended networks of support, and survival strategies. This is followed by a brief look at perceptions of crime, and the extent to which crime is seen as an effective survival mechanism by the most marginalised. It is concluded that economic reconstruction in the province should take account of certain prevailing realities, including the operation of extended networks of support and the relative lack of mobility of the most marginalised, the limited capacity of the informal sector to absorb further numbers of the structurally unemployed, and the relative propensity of the most marginalised to engage in crime as a survival strategy.