ijse cover (i).qxd 05/01/2007 13:49 Page 1 ISSN 0306-8293 Volume 34 Number 1/2 2007 International Journal of Social Economics Living in common and deliberating in common: foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security Guest Editors: P.B. Anand and Des Gasper www.emeraldinsight.com ISSN 0306-8293 International Journal of Volume 34 Social Economics Number 1/2 2007 Living in common and deliberating in common: foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security Guest Editors P. B. Anand and Des Gasper Access this journal online _________________________ 3 CONTENTS Editorial advisory board __________________________ 4 Guest editorial ___________________________________ 5 Goods and persons, reasons and responsibilities Des Gasper ___________________________________________________ 6 Public goods, global public goods and the common good Se´verine Deneulin and Nicholas Townsend _________________________ 19 Destabilising identity structures: the impacts of domestic and international policy programs in the 1994 Rwanda genocide Je´roˆme Ballet, Franc¸ois-Re´gis Mahieu and Katia Radja _______________ 37 Education in pre- and post-conflict contexts: relating capability and life-skills approaches Jean-Luc Dubois and Mil`ene Trabelsi ______________________________ 53 Access this journal electronically The current and past volumes of this journal are available at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0306-8293.htm You can also search more than 150 additional Emerald journals in Emerald Management Xtra (www.emeraldinsight.com) See page following contents for full details of what your access includes. A deliberative ethic for development: a Nepalese CONTENTS journey from Bourdieu through Kant to Dewey and continued Habermas John Cameron and Hemant Ojha _________________________________ 66 Sustainable livelihood approaches and soil erosion risks: who is to judge? Tim Forsyth __________________________________________________ 88 Allocating responsibilities in multi-level governance for sustainable development Sylvia I. Karlsson ______________________________________________ 103 Note from the publisher_________________________________ 127 Call for papers ___________________________________________ 129 www.emeraldinsight.com/ijse.htm As a subscriber to this journal, you can benefit from instant, Structured abstracts electronic access to this title via Emerald Management Xtra. Your Emerald structured abstracts provide consistent, clear and access includes a variety of features that increase the value of informative summaries of the content of the articles, allowing your journal subscription. faster evaluation of papers. How to access this journal electronically Additional complimentary services available To benefit from electronic access to this journal, please contact Your access includes a variety of features that add to the EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD IJSE Dr James Alvey Professor Stylianos A. Sarantides 34,1/2 Massey University, New Zealand University of Piraeus, Greece Dr Josef Barat Professor K.K. Seo Minister of Transportation, Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii at Manoa Professor Y.S. Brenner Department of Economics, University of Utrecht, Professor Udo E. Simonis 4 The Netherlands WZB Science Centre, Berlin, Germany Professor Tan Chwee-huat Professor Clem Tisdell Faculty of Business Administration, National University of Queensland, Australia University of Singapore Dr Matti Viren Dr Floreal H. Forni University of Turku, Finland Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales del Professor Jimmy Weinblatt CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina Department of Economics, Ben Gurion University, Professor Patrick McNutt Israel Patrick McNutt & Associates, Dublin and Visiting Professor Zhang Wenxian Fellow, Manchester Business School, UK Fudan University, Shanghai, China Dr Daniel O’Neil Professor Laszlo Zsolnai Department of Political Science, The University of Director, Business Ethics Centre, Budapest Arizona, USA University of Economic Sciences, Hungary Professor Doktor Manfred Prisching Karl-Franzens-University, Graz, Austria International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 p. 4 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 Guest editorial Guest editorial This set of papers derives from a joint workshop of two study groups of the Development Studies Association of the UK and Ireland – the Group on Development 5 Ethics and its sister on Environment and Sustainable Development – which was held at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, on 26-28 March 2006. It is the first of two sets of papers from the meeting. The second set will appear in the Journal of International Development later in 2007. The two study groups had long seen strong connections between their core interests and are very satisfied by the outcome of the cooperation. A call for proposals brought a large response, from which a selection was made with reference both to inherent promise and to the interconnections between the two groups’ concerns. This led to a workshop programme with 20 papers under four headings: (1) goods, rights and well-being; (2) security and insecurity; (3) public goods and the millennium development goals; and (4) governance. All papers had relevance to at least one other of these headings, which contributed to rewarding discussions at the workshop and in the follow-up. In this set the papers respond singly and collectively to the challenge identified in the title: “Living in common and deliberating in common – foundational issues for sustainable human development and human security”. The opening paper, “Goods and persons, reasons and responsibilities” draws out the main themes and lines of argument. We gratefully acknowledge the warm hospitality and contribution in organising the workshop from Flavio Comim and Angels Varea of the Capability and Sustainability Centre, St Edmund’s College. We also acknowledge with thanks the contributions of all those who participated in the workshop and the financial sponsorship of the Development Studies Association. P.B. Anand Bradford Centre for International Development, University of Bradford, UK, and Des Gasper Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands International Journal of Social Economics Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 p. 5 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0306-8293 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0306-8293.htm IJSE Goods and persons, reasons 34,1/2 and responsibilities Des Gasper 6 Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present exploration of themes that interconnect six studies in environmentally and socially sustainable human development. Design/methodology/approach – The article presents an overview of the papers included in this special issue. Findings – As humanity threatens to undermine its habitat, a social economics returns to core concepts and themes that became expunged from neoclassical economics: serious examination of persons, seen as more than given points of desire; a broadened perspective on types of good, including a non-neoclassical conception of public goods as publicly deliberated priority goods that are not well managed through free markets and “common goods” as shared bases vital for everyone; study of what commodities and goods do to and for people; a central role for public reasoning about which are public priority goods, rather than using only a technical definition of a public good; an acceptance of notions of ethical responsibility and responsibilities concerning the provision and maintenance of public priority goods determined through public reasoning; and attention to institutional formats for such deliberation. Amongst the greatest of public priority “goods” are the concepts of common good and responsibility. Research limitations/Implications – The findings reinforce the agenda of socio-economics for central attention to the mutual conditioning of economy, society, polity, and environment, including analysis of the sociocultural formation of economic actors and of ideas of “common good”. Originality/value – Cross-fertilization of theorization with cases from Costa Rica, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, Rwanda, sub-Saharan Africa and global arenas. Keywords Sustainable development, Socio-economic regions, Social economics, Social responsibility Paper type General review Introduction At the start of the twenty-first century, humankind faces “interesting times”. Global climate change linked to a carbon-rich lifestyle threatens to eliminate various small island states, destabilise many countries and bring spillover effects that will rock even the richest. Distress and ambition, widening comparisons and growing expectations fuel global-wide drives for respect, for consumption, for status and even predominance. These factors can fuel angry conflicts, intra-national and trans-national. The potential for larger conflagrations seems to increase. Presentday violent conflicts are already frighteningly large in impact: an estimated three to four million people have died prematurely since the mid-1990s in the wars in the former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo. In its small neighbour, Rwanda, following a fall of around 40 per cent International Journal of Social in national income per capita (in US dollar terms) as a result of world market shifts Economics (Eriksson et al., 1996) some Rwandans suffered yet greater declines, for example losing Vol. 34 No. 1/2, 2007 pp. 6-18 0q30E6m-8e2r9a3ld Group Publishing Limited The author wishes to thank to P.B. Anand and the contributors to the special issue, particularly DOI 10.1108/03068290710723336 Sylvia Karlsson, for their comments on an earlier draft. their land or job, as an IMF-designed economic programme enforced “structural Goods, persons, adjustment” on this fragile society. Many lost their lives, or their souls, as the country reasons and was then led into an Armageddon of scape-goating; between half a million and a million responsibilities people were chopped and bludgeoned to death in a matter of weeks in 1994. A metaphor used locally was “crushing the cockroaches”. Ballet et al. (2007) show how “economic adjustment” contributed to “identity shift” followed by ethnic “cleansing”. The effects of such disintegration will not be kept for ever far from the fortresses of the rich, suggests 7 the human security paradigm (UNDP, 1994): discontents, diseases, drugs, criminal networks, weapons, violent practices and refugees are all liable to spread. Living together in peace requires deliberating together, and some acceptance of being participants in a common human enterprise. Not only should rules and agreements be kept concerning foreseen cases and contingencies; but also people must be able to together constructively face unexpected risks and challenges. Living together involves more than is assumed in many “rational choice” models of the interaction of myriads of calculating individuals, each considered to be completely pre-formed and purely self-interested. The standard picture in prominent strands of business and management thinking, and in the associated social science, is a world of “Missing Persons” (Douglas and Ney, 1998). People are treated purely as economic agents, acquisitive individuals whose primary characteristic is a personal set of given preferences, which they calculatedly seek to fulfil. They are not real persons, formed from birth within society and potential participants in its processes of political management, including concerning the formation and negotiation of preferences, processes that involve far more than a bargaining between fixed packages of desires. The title of this overview paper reflects two studies that appeared in 1984 and have helped to bring some reorientation of thinking in social economics and social philosophy, coincidentally both written by Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford: the Economist Amartya Sen’s Goods and People and the Philosopher Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Through a series of conundrums, about for example how we should consider future generations, Parfit forced analysts to review the natures of rationality, identity, and moral reasoning. He introduced a classification of existing conceptions of “What makes someone’s life go best” – hedonistic theories, desire-fulfilment theories, and objective list theories – which helped to trigger and organise some of the subsequent investigations into the nature of well-being. His work employed perhaps a subtler conception of persons than Sen’s – note his very use of the term “persons” rather than “people” – yet Sen’s work as a whole has pushed the conceptualisation of well-being and its determinants further. Goods and People made a claim about ends, namely that what is important is not the amounts of economic goods sold but how people live and can live. In a classic sister paper, “Rational fools” Sen (1977) discussed the persons who hold and pursue ends. Parfit was a pure Oxford philosopher, applying a sharp intellect in the seclusion of his study and the cloisters of his college – in intensive interchange with other such thinkers – to query and illuminate basic concepts and premises. Sen represents a marriage of that tradition with the wider and richer materials of the social sciences, drawn not only from the armchair, but also the cloister and the seminar room but from organisations, movements and experience around the world. “The world” is understood here in the full sense, not only with reference to economically rich countries. IJSE The papers in this collection follow in the same spirit: probing and reworking basic conceptions in the light of attention to wideranging experience and wideranging 34,1/2 theory. The papers are by social scientists whose work is stimulated, tested and enriched both by philosophical investigations, such as exemplified by Sen and Parfit, and by a commitment to interdisciplinary and international comparison and communication, such as represented by Sen amongst others. 8 Overview of the papers The papers are organised and discussed here in relation to two central themes: living in common and deliberating in common. Nearly, all the papers deal with both; the emphasis gradually moves from the first to the second theme. Two more strongly theoretical papers take the lead in, respectively, the first and second parts: Deneulin and Townsend for the theme of living in common; and Cameron and Ojha for deliberating in common. Deneulin and Townsend show the difference between conventional economics concepts of public goods and an older concept of “the common good”. While the former are necessary so is the latter, which may rest on a more sophisticated understanding of human personality and interaction. This is particularly important for current discussion of global public goods. Two papers on intra-societal violence, by Ballet et al., and by Dubois and Trabelsi, illustrate the breakdown of life in common and conversely the requirements of sustaining a life in common, including for some elements of shared identity, acceptance of mutual responsibilities, and appropriate life-skills including for discussion and deliberation. Ballet et al. focus on how people have partly distinctive identities and how these are constituted and can be reconstituted: in other words, how people are persons and can become monsters. Dubois and Trabelsi explore how education could help to consolidate people’s formation as responsible citizens who are able to listen and debate in public fora, as opposed to a formation as ready recruits for genocide. Cameron and Ojha extend this theme of deliberation in common. They head a set of three papers on environmental governance, including also those by Forsyth and Karlsson, that develop methodological and normative themes that have wider relevance than for environment alone. Both Cameron-Ojha and Forsyth look at deliberation in natural environment arenas: at the political frameworks for reasoning that set who are included or excluded, on what terms, and by what means. Karlsson looks at alternative principles for allocating responsibilities for public bads. Her focus on issues that cross national borders returns us to Deneulin and Townsend’s concern with global public goods (and bads). Her conclusion reiterates the central importance of a sense of common good, in order to secure these global public goods. The papers show the broadening of a “sustainable development” perspective to cover social, cultural and political environments and values and not only physical environments. Ballet et al. for example apply the precautionary principle to the social environment of markets and polities. Sometimes called a “sustainable human development” perspective (Banuri et al., 1995), this broadened view is nowadays often and perhaps more effectively described as a “human security” perspective (CHS, 2003). We return to it at the end of the paper. The intervening sections consider in turn the themes in the paper’s title: (public) goods, persons, (public) reasoning, and allocation of responsibilities. Goods Goods, persons, Most introductory economics textbooks present a picture of the organisation of “the reasons and material aspects of social life” that runs as follows. “Factors of production” are supplied responsibilities by “Households” and offered in factor markets where the buyers are the “producers” of “goods”. These goods are then sold in product markets, to other producers (as intermediate goods), or to Households in their role as Consumers which in turn allows the households/consumers to sustain their roles as suppliers of factors. This simple 9 perspective provides the framework for hundreds of pages of instruction, and indeed typically for several years of university study. Economics is treated as centrally the study of a system of market activity, a system of flows of commodities. Cameron and Ojha mention the attempts to extend such a model into the management of Nepal’s currently more community-controlled forests. Some major limitations of the framework are that: first, it directs primary attention to monetized outputs regardless of their impacts on people; second, it ignores the environments of the system of market activity, and leads to their subsequent admission only in marginal and subsidiary roles; third, it leaves a hole where persons should have been partly malleable agents who seek to understand and in turn mould their environments, including through constructing and reconstructing discursive orders; and fourth, it suggests by default that a social order is or can be a bargain between a set of preformed individuals. Goods and the good A market-centred perspective can give the impression that the social world consists of individuals who exist prior to society and then interact in markets and quasi-markets. In the theoretical model of a perfect market system there is no need for individuals to jointly deliberate, as opposed to self-referentially calculate and bargain, because firstly, goods (commodities, including time) are the good, and secondly, market mechanisms provide all necessary coordination in the world of goods. Sen’s Goods and People built in contrast on an Aristotelian insight. Rather than presume that Goods are good – let alone take a monetized measure of the circulation of commodities as the central measure of human welfare – we should examine how people live: how long, how healthily, how peacefully, how far in accordance with reasoned values; in other words, we should consider what people do with goods and what goods do to and for people. This is, in part, an invitation to deliberate jointly. Such a perspective has been absorbed into discussions of sustainable development and is why they interface easily with discussions of development ethics, other than in “deep ecology” views. It makes us ask: sustainability of what? and why? Rather than assuming that maintenance of a particular form of land use is essential, for example, we should look at the sustainability of particular “environmental functionings” (Tim Forsyth, at the St Edmund’s College Workshop) and valued human outcomes. This connects to a conception of public goods as publicly deliberated priorities for maintaining a society. Public goods and the underlying notions of the nature of a public realm Economic activity relies on a social basis and an environmental basis, and also affects both of these. Figure 1 shows the nesting of systems, and hints at the myriad of interactions. An economic system that undermines its social and environmental bases is