Why a new approach to sustainable development is needed.

Alice Moncaster (University of the West of England) reflects on the lack of progress in sustainable development over several decades. This failure is argued to be linked to how sustainable development has been framed: the separation of technical issues from social justice and equity. Understanding, involving and empowering communities (and wider society) is the key to making progress and achieving sustainable development goals.

Introduction: sustainable development

Over 30 years ago, sustainable development was defined as a concept which combined technical concerns, e.g. limiting resource use and protecting ecosystems, with social aspirations, in particular equity within and across nations and generations.  The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) Brundtland report Our Common Future (1987) divided sustainable development into six wide-ranging sub-issues: population, food security, ecosystems, energy (‘choices for environment and development’), industry (‘producing more with less’) and the urban challenge. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Agenda 21 (1992) added recommendations that local authorities should lead change, and that ‘ongoing consultation and partnership with a wide range of actors in the local community’ were a necessary precursor for sustainable development.  These influential initiatives led to the series of Conferences of the Parties (COPs) and the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), now revised as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

The two reports therefore offered a way of framing of the complex concept of sustainable development. Frames are ‘cognitive shortcuts that people use to help make sense of complex information … through selective simplification’ (Kaufman et al. 2017), a useful approach for helping to understand a problem, and thereby to finding a solution.

Martello & Jasanoff (2004) proposed, however, that rather than problems being framed in a way that helps us to find solutions, it is often the other way round: how we have already chosen to solve the problem will determine how we then decide to frame it.  Flyvbjerg (1998) demonstrated further that our chosen solutions are only accepted when they are proposed by those already in positions of power, while solutions suggested by the less powerful are more likely to be dismissed. What are understood to be valid solutions to, and appropriate framings of, a problem, then, depend more on who is providing the solutions than on what they are claiming them to be. This matters, because it means that the people who hold power will determine how a problem is framed, and therefore what solutions are proposed. Alternative perspectives and framings which might be equally, or more, valid are excluded from the debate.

In the decades following the WCED report and Agenda 21 there was an abundance of academic writing proposing different framings for sustainable development. Palmer et al. (1997) represented it as four quadrants of Environment, Equity, Public Participation and Futurity.  Hopwood et al. (2005) mapped the then global initiatives on a graph of environment against equality, identifying three zones from the current ‘status quo’ (low on both axes) through to ‘transformation’ (high on both). Williams and Millington (2004) framed sustainability in terms of our approach to Earth’s resources, and described concepts of ‘strong sustainability’ as that which reduces the demand on resources and necessarily involves social change, and ‘weak sustainability’ which assumes that solely technical solutions will be capable of replacing spent resources.

From sustainable development to sustainable construction

Global initiatives and policy directives make an impact through their implementation within industrial sectors, and ultimately through the individuals who have the power to act on the directives (Barrett & Fudge 1981). Moncaster and Simmons (2015) suggest that this implementation is also a political process, including contests over control of decisions, negotiation and compromise.

Policies in Europe have long focused on energy efficiency of buildings (Economidou et al. 2020), including the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) enacted chiefly through the mechanism of national building regulations, requiring gradual improvements to new buildings. A year after the EPBD first came into effect, Charles Kibbert guest edited a special issue of Building Research and Information on ‘The next generation of sustainable construction’ (Kibbert 2007); the papers in this issue suggest that just one year after the ratification of the EPBD, ‘sustainable construction’ was predominantly being framed as the need to reduce operational carbon.  This ignores a number of other long standing technical issues, including the embodied energy and carbon cost of new buildings (Szalay 2007), while the operational energy of existing buildings has failed to achieve reductions (Filippidou et al. 2017). Shove also points out that the EPBD framing ignores the fact that energy efficiency is not the same as energy reduction (Shove, 2018). While wider perspectives continued to be discussed in the academic literature (for example Murtagh et al. 2020), Udomsap and Hallinger (2020) find that the predominant framing of sustainable construction has continued to focus on technical issues of materials, construction management, and recycling and waste reduction, with social sustainability issues much less considered in this domain.  

Whoever has made this choice of framing, two recent reports from the UN (UNEP 2024; United Nations 2024) suggest that the reduction of carbon emissions from the built environment has not yet been achieved. This raises the question: might alternative approaches to sustainable development and sustainable built environment focused on equity as well as the environment achieve more?  This could consider the needs and views of local communities, and be led by local authorities, as recommended by Agenda 21 and the earlier academic framings discussed above.

Re-framing sustainable construction

A number of examples of such alternative framings can be found, both led by industry and academia.  One has recently been offered by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA, 2024) which commissioned sixteen expert ‘horizon scans’ to identify what should be done differently over the next ten years, identifying anew the need to understand both global differences and appropriate local responses. One scan for example suggested that for Europe, with a mature building stockand population growth predicted to be almost static up to 2050, political change is needed to move towards greater equality, rather than more construction adding further carbon emissions.  In Africa, however, the population is predicted to grow by one billion people over the next 25 years, with the majority using only a fraction of the energy of Europeans and sharing little historic responsibility for climate change. Across much of this continent there is a huge need for appropriate sustainable and low carbon housing and infrastructure to combat poverty and provide resilience.

The negative impacts of global trade are also important.  A study of brickmaking in Bangladesh demonstrates a widespread detrimental impact in both social and environmental terms, with the removal of topsoil leading to local flooding and crop losses, and in turn, to increased social reliance on often indentured work in polluting and toxic brick kilns (Parsons et al. 2024).  The local environmental degradation is further magnified by global climate change, which in turn is also directly affected by the hidden carbon impacts of these bricks being exported long distances to other countries. These local and global environmental and social costs are invisible to purchasers, and no part of this impact is considered in the current dominant framing of sustainable construction.

The potential role of local authorities is demonstrated through a local authority-led project exploring innovative approaches to increasing resilience to groundwater flooding in the UK.  One aspect of Project Groundwater focuses on community resilience and has funded research by Claude Nsobya who compares case studies from Uganda with the Chilterns (UK) (Nsobya et al. 2024). The project rationale starts from the acceptance that technical solutions to mitigate flood risk are just not enough; instead, it is critical to work with and within communities to increase social, community, economic and individual human capacities for resilience, while recognising and accepting the critical role of the local authority in supporting communities.

Recombining equity and environment

The important message of the Brundtland Report and Agenda 21, and the earlier academic framings of sustainable development, focused on the twin aims of improving equity and protecting the environment at global and local scales. However those who have determined the current framing of sustainable development have addressed these separately, focusing on technical solutions to decarbonisation while often excluding the concerns of local communities and failing to empower local authorities to lead change. There is growing evidence that this framing has failed. If governments and global leaders are serious about their ambitions for sustainable development, then alternative perspectives and framings must be considered.  Sustainable construction, too, needs to allow new voices, from communities, local authorities, and the widest section of society, to reframe the concept to one which recognises social justice and equity as its principal concern.

References

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Filippidou, F., Nieboer, N. & Visscher, H. (2017). Are we moving fast enough? The energy renovation rate of the Dutch non-profit housing using the national energy labelling database. Energy Policy, 109, 488-498.

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