BANERJEE. Who Sustains Whose Development Sustainable Development and The Reinvention

Organization Studies
http://oss.sagepub.com/ Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee Organization Studies 2003 24: 143 DOI: 10.1177/0170840603024001341 The online version of this article can be found at: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/24/1/143
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Authors name
Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
Abstract
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee International Graduate School of Management, University of South Australia, Australia
This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwords of today: sustainable development. I argue that, despite claims of a paradigm shift, the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economic, not ecological, rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specied by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the transformation of nature into environment, a transformation that has important implications for notions of how development should proceed. The rational management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on developing countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this regime of truth for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be made efcient because of the capitalization of nature.
Keywords: sustainable development, neo-colonialism, NorthSouth relations,
environmentalism, critical management studies In the early phases of colonization, the white mans burden consisted of the need to civilize the non-white peoples of the world this meant above all depriving them of their resources and rights. In the latter phase of colonization, the white mans burden consisted of the need to develop the Third World, and this again involved depriving local communities of their resources and rights. We are now on the threshold of the third phase of colonization, in which the white mans burden is to protect the environment and this too, involves taking control of rights and resources. . . . The salvation of the environment cannot be achieved through the old colonial order based on the white mans burden. The two are ethically, economically and epistemologically incongruent. Mies and Shiva (1993: 264265)
Introduction
Organization Studies 24(1): 143180 Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi)
After more than 200 years of industrialization in the Western world and more than 50 years of development in the Third World, the benets delivered by the grand design of progress and modernity are, at best, equivocal. Despite phenomenal advances in science, technology, medicine and agricultural production, the promise that development would eradicate world poverty remains unfullled in several parts of the globe, especially in the Third World.
0170-8406[200301]24:1;143180;031341
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Organization Studies 24(2)
Progress has come at a price: global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, air and water pollution are all global problems with wide-ranging impacts on human populations, impacts that are signicantly more harmful for the rural poor in Third World countries, and for people who derive their sustenance from the land. Let me begin with a cautionary note on terminology so as not to offend postmodern sensibilities. I use the terms rst world, Third World, developed, underdeveloped, traditional, modern, colonizer, and colonized with an understanding of the essentialist and binary nature of these categories. For instance, I realize there are first worlds within third worlds and third worlds within rst worlds, but I deploy these and other categories strategically and politically here, in the spirit of what Spivak calls strategic essentialism. In some ways, my critique examines the foundations of knowledge construction about the Third World and the ways in which it becomes constituted and represented by a particular set of discursive power relations that underlie the development discourse. As Escobar (1992: 25) argues, Third World reality is inscribed with precision and persistence by the discourses and practices of economists, planners, nutritionists, demographers and the like, making it difcult for people to dene their own interests in their own terms in many cases actually disabling them to do so. Perhaps we can now add the discourses and practices of environmentalists and conservationists to the list, as the earlier quote by Mies and Shiva implies. Although such categorizations might preclude a sense of agency for Third World resistance movements, I discuss in the conclusion of the paper how transgressions of these categories could create new spaces of resistance. The concept of sustainable development has emerged in recent years in an effort to address environmental problems caused by economic growth. There are several different interpretations of sustainable development, but its broad aim is to describe a process of economic growth without environmental destruction. Exactly what is being sustained (economic growth or the global ecosystem, or both) is currently at the root of several debates, although many scholars argue that the apparent reconciliation of economic growth and the environment is simply a green sleight-of-hand that fails to address genuine environmental problems (Escobar 1995; Redclift 1987). In this paper I look critically at the concept of sustainable development. I examine the political, economic, and developmental assumptions that inform the notion of sustainable development and discuss the consequences of these assumptions. I argue that sustainable development, rather than representing a major theoretical breakthrough, is very much subsumed under the dominant economic paradigm. As with development, the meanings, practices, and policies of sustainable development continue to be informed by colonial thought, resulting in disempowerment of a majority of the worlds populations, especially rural populations in the Third World. Discourses of sustainable development are also based on a unitary system of knowledge and, despite its claims of accepting plurality, there is a danger of marginalizing or co-opting traditional knowledges to the detriment of communities who depend on the land for their survival.
Banerjee: Who Sustains Whose Development?
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The papers main argument is at the broader level of political economy rather than an individual organization. However, I would argue that the critique is also relevant for organization studies because of the role played by supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. Although these are not corporate organizations in the traditional sense of the term, they are powerful agents in advancing discourses of sustainable development. Moreover, there is a nexus between the policies of these organizations and business organizations, especially large transnational corporations which are at the forefront of the debate on biotechnology and sustainable development. Transnational corporations are major agents that inuence the environmental and trade policies of the World Trade Organization as well as other global agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a broader sense, the various agents that determine global environmental policies form a loose network of powerful bodies that construct a particular form of reality about the natural environment. Thus, examining the political discourse of sustainable development will reveal its role in shaping organizational discourses on the environment. Sustainability means different things to different people: what I attempt to demonstrate in the paper is how colonial thought informs this meaning creation and its resultant disempowering effects on sections of society such as rural populations. I conclude by discussing alternate formulations of sustainable development and implications for the study of organizations.
Theoretical Genealogy
Four theoretical streams inform my critique of sustainable development. I draw upon insights from postcolonial theory to understand the construction and representation of the Third World. The work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Radhakrishnan, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Vincent Mudimbe are particularly relevant in developing a postcolonial critique of colonialism and imperialism. I also present contemporary critiques of development as a prelude to developing a critique of sustainable development. This critique draws from the work of Arturo Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Vandana Shiva, Ramachandra Guha, and Gustavo Esteva, among others. I use the Foucauldian notion of power, in particular his formulation of disciplinary power, as an analytic that examines the production of truths about nature and sustainability through disciplinary power and the subsequent control of knowledge. And last, but definitely not the least, when theory fails me, when I have difculty in formulating notions of agency, I draw upon insights from many grass-roots activist movements all over the world: Aboriginal land rights movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Chipko movement, and the Zapatista uprising, to name a few. A comprehensive review of postcolonial theory is beyond the scope of this paper (see Mani 1989; McClintock 1992; Prakash 1992; Pugliese 1995;
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Radhakrishnan 1993; and Said 1986 for a variety of insights into the eld). In a broad sense this school of thought attempts to problematize issues arising from colonial relations (Shohat 1992) through a retrospective reflection on colonialism, the better to understand the difficulties of the present in newly independent states (Said 1986: 45). However, using the term post in postcolonialism is problematic because it assumes that colonialism as a historical reality has somehow ended (Mani 1989) without acknowledging the complicity of colonial relations in contemporary discourses of development and progress in NorthSouth relations. As a result, the post absolves itself of any claims for present consequences of the damages caused by colonization (Said 1986). Examining discourses of sustainable development using theoretical perspectives from colonialism and imperialism might allow us to see how contemporary global environmental discourses serve as markers for the third phase of colonization that Mies and Shiva (1993) allude to. In this postmodern age of liberal democracy, the concept of imperialism seems almost quaint, which probably explains the silences in theorizing imperialism in contemporary social sciences (Patnaik 1990). Imperialism has been conceptualized in a variety of ways, primarily using a political framework. For instance, imperialism described theories and practices developed by a dominant metropolitan center to rule distant territories, by force, by political means or by economic, social, and cultural dependence. Doyle (1986: 45) defines empire as a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. Colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, involves the establishment of settlements on outlying territories. The end of empires and direct colonial rule did not mean the end of imperialism, and its traces can be observed in the general cultural sphere . . . in specic political, ideological, economic and social practice (Said 1993: 8). The traditional politics of power, i.e. military strength, diplomacy, and weapons development, have evolved into an age of geo-economics in which winners and losers in the global economy are created by state-assisted private entities (Luttwak 1999). However, as Said (1993) argues, accumulation and acquisition are not the only actions of imperialism or colonialism. Their ideological formations assume that certain territories and people actually require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge afliated with domination. In the context of management and organizations, it might be more appropriate to understand imperialism as an economic system of external investment and the penetration and control of markets and sources of raw materials (Williams 1976: 159). Political and military imperialism shows itself clearly; the problem lies in articulating the different guises of imperialism in liberal free market economies. Thus, if imperialism is to be viewed as a fundamental set of economic relations, then examining the range of relations (such as the relationship between nation states, international institutions, and transnational corporations) becomes an important task in
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order to uncover the presence of imperialism in current institutional structures and processes. Placed in the context of imperialism, the operation of international nance capital becomes signicant in its hegemonic institutionalization through the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. Therefore, conicts between countries of the North and South in various international trade forums, as well as protests by peasants and workers in the poorer countries of the world over property and resource rights, are often aptly framed as anti-imperialist struggles. Thus, imperialism today is inextricably linked with culture, society, economy and polity. Its operation is often masked and, because imperialism has learned to manage things better, it is difcult to identify its disciplinary power in all its nuances a power that normalizes experiences, rather than provides avenues for resistance and change. Imperialism is operationalized through different kinds of power: institutional power (agencies such as the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank), economic power (of corporations and nation states), and discursive power, which constructs and describes uncontested notions of development, backwardness, subsistence economies, while preventing other narratives from emerging. As Said (1993: 8) points out, the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting. Foucaults (1980) analysis of power reveals how disciplinary practices constitute the boundaries of discourse, determining what is and what is not, what can be done and what cannot, what should be and what should not (Clegg 1989). These practices are discursive in the sense that they constitute and are constituted by knowledge appearing as specific institutional and organizational practices. They become discursive because they reproduce knowledge through practices that are made possible by the structural assumptions of that knowledge (Clegg 1989). The rules generated by discourse are not derived from some sovereign source but instead become natural rules or norms. The power of science and the scientic method in everyday discourse is an example of how science normalizes social and cultural realms, not because of the superior rationality of science but because of its procedures of normalization arising from its disciplinary power. This power is not necessarily between sovereign and subject or state-controlled economic or political power; in fact Foucault (1980: 102) argues that these are limited sites of power and calls instead to shift our focus of inquiry to the study of the techniques and tactics of domination. This disciplinary power is not located at a legitimate site of sovereign or state but transmits itself through a complex system of institutions, regulations, texts, policies, and practices signifying not relations of sovereignty but relations of domination what Foucault describes as subjugation through a constitution of subjects. Thus,
. . . [disciplinary power] is a mechanism of power that permits time and labor, rather than wealth and commodities, to be extracted from bodies. It is a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner through levies and obligations over time. It presupposes a tight knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign. This new type of power,
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which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty is one of the great inventions of bourgeois society, a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and the type of society that is its accompaniment. (Foucault 1980: 105)
Sovereignty still exists; in the modern era it has become democratized and functions along with the mechanisms of discipline, concealing the fact that the democratization of sovereignty was fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion coercion that was more apparent and visible during colonial times but operates in increasingly sophisticated ways in the postcolonial era. Mudimbe (1988) highlights three characteristics of colonialism: the domination of physical space, reformation of the natives minds (particularly in terms of knowledge systems and culture), and incorporation of local economic histories into a Western perspective. As we shall see, all these practices are very much evident in contemporary discourses of sustainable development, which are informed by either Enlightenment notions of taming a savage wilderness through Western scientific rationality or Romantic notions of a pristine, unspoiled wilderness that needs to be conserved at all costs (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). In either case, the implications for nonWestern cultures, especially indigenous communities, are particularly severe. The domination of physical space can include both domination of nature and the appropriation of nature. The former involves the destruction of nature; the latter involves its consumption, predominantly through a visual sense incorporating the spectacularization of life (Lefebvre 1991: 286), as evidenced by the rise of ecotourism in afuent countries where consumers pay premium prices for the authentic nature experience. Here meanings of nature and the environment arise in a network of signs, messages, and images, which seems to suggest that design rather than nature is the organizing principle of todays society (Chaloupka and Cawley 1993). Or, as Baudrillard (1981: 201) declares, nothing escapes design. Everything belongs to design and there is no nature out there. . . . This designed universe is what properly constitutes the environment. The past decade has seen a rise in this kind of designer environmentalism, whose basic message is that the worlds environmental ills can be solved by buying green and natural products, The Body Shop and Ben & Jerrys being two prominent examples that come to mind. In the postcolonial era, the colonizercolonized relationships are played out in trade conflicts between developed and underdeveloped countries, resulting in the so-called NorthSouth divide, a complex relationship characterized by rhetoric, defensiveness, and ideology. Analyzing Third World experiences of imperialism and colonialism in the context of sustainable development discourses might transform our understanding of the past while enabling us to construct a history of the present and our attitude toward the future. As Said (1993: 47) points out, despite the great contributions of Western theorists such as Foucault and Williams, the imperial experience for these scholars is quite irrelevant, a theoretical oversight that is the norm in Western cultural and scientic disciplines. The twin discourses
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of development and sustainable development share structural characteristics of colonizing discourses. Like Orientalism, a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said 1979: 3), development functioned as a discipline for the production and management of the Third World in the postWorld War II period, as we shall see in the next section.
The Invention of Development and the Creation of Underdevelopment
A useful starting point might be to locate current discourses of sustainable development within the larger discourse of development in order to highlight its continuities and discontinuities. Although the term development has been in common usage for over 200 years, most scholars agree that the contemporary notion of development was endorsed by President Harry Truman. In his inaugural address on January 20, 1949, Truman outlined a global program for development:
We must embark on a bold new program for making the benets of our scientic advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. . . . The old imperialism exploitation for foreign prot has no place in our plans. (Cited in Escobar 1995)
This of course set the stage for the new imperialism the creation of underdevelopment, resulting in a new perception of the West and the rest of the world. This was the rst time that the term development was used in the context of underdevelopment, giving it a new meaning. The Third World was born at that moment: on that day, over 2 billion people became underdeveloped because, as Esteva (1992: 7) argues, they were transmogried into an inverted mirror of others reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue, a mirror that denes their identity, which is really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority. Many Third World countries have paid and continue to pay a disastrous price for this catching-up development and, as several scholars have pointed out, the consequences have been particularly severe for rural populations (Adams 1990; Escobar 1995; Esteva 1987, 1992; Mies and Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989). Farmers and peasants in the Third World as well as indigenous peoples in different parts of the world were classified as living in a subsistence economy and needed to develop in order to reach acceptable standards of living. This had enormous economic and sociocultural influences on indigenous peoples and farmers throughout the world; for instance, all resources were directed at producing cash crops rather than the traditional crops people used to grow. The detrimental effects of this form of development actually undermined subsistence and led to underdevelopment (Shiva 1989; Hyndman 1987; Mies and Shiva 1993). In an insightful analysis of the development discourse, Escobar (1995) has
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demonstrated how development rst created the notion of poverty (based on modern, capitalist indicators such as dollar income per capita, material possessions, resource extraction, science and technology, market economies) then modernized the poor, transforming them into the assisted. This set in place new modes of relations and mechanisms of control under the clarion call of development. Development proceeded by constructing problems, applying solutions and creating abnormalities, such as the illiterate, the underdeveloped, the landless peasants who would later be treated and reformed (Escobar 1995: 56). This was a scientic and technological process that subsumed differences in culture, constructing people as variables in the grand model of progress and validating the assimilative imperatives of development under the banner of national interest, which was frequently the case for the new nations of the Third World. Placed in this context, development simply became another name for economic growth. The rationale was that economic growth should be made paramount. Economic growth would alleviate poverty by creating wealth, which could then be used to solve social problems. This separation of the economic from the social is characteristic of modern Western economic thought, whereas in many non-Western sites no clear separation existed. During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was becoming obvious to development planners that economic growth did not necessarily mean equity and that unbridled economic growth had several adverse social consequences. The gap between rich and poor continued to widen: on a per capita income basis, the rich to poor ratio was 2:1 in 1800, 20:1 in 1945, and 40:1 by 1975. The richest 20 percent of the world account for 82.7 percent of global income, while the poorest 20 percent earn 1.6 percent of global income (Waters 1995). In the newly industrializing countries, economic growth was inevitably accompanied by an increase in income disparity. The social aspects that accompanied development, such as unemployment, underemployment, environmental and habitat destruction, and increasing inequalities, were seen as social obstacles that needed to be overcome for development to proceed smoothly. There was no recognition that some development programs actually led to poverty and social problems, resulting in a sort of global apartheid that separates the world into people who participate in the global economy and others whose basic conditions of life have been destroyed (Beck 2000; Shiva 1993). Increasingly the economic realm began to dene social and cultural aspects for Third World populations. This regime of development depended solely on the modern Western knowledge system, and rejected and marginalized non-Western forms of knowledge. Development became a metaphor [that gave] global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbing people of different cultures of the opportunity to dene forms of their social life (Esteva 1992: 9). What had been produced in the particular politicosociocultural context of industrialized countries in the West was now generalized to the rest. In Foucauldian terms, development derived its power from subjugated knowledge . . . a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated; nave
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knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scienticity (Foucault 1980: 82). If the history of development is to be seen as a history of imperialism and colonialism, it is the powerknowledge nexus that can illustrate how development came to be seen as a version of reality and entrenched as the only normative reality (Spivak 1988). To quote Harvey (1996: 131):
[The genius of the 18th-century political economy] was that it mobilized the human imaginary of emancipation, progress, and self-realization into forms of discourse that could alter the application of political power and the construction of institutions in ways that were consistent with the growing prevalence of the material practices of market exchange. It did so, furthermore, while masking social relations and the domination of the laborer that was to follow while subsuming the cosmic question of the relation to nature into a technical discourse concerning the proper allocation of scarce resources (including those in nature) for the benet of human welfare. . . . The practice and theory of capitalistic political economy with respect to the environment has [sic] consequently become hegemonic in recent history.
The real success of development, as Escobar (1995: 71) points out, was to synthesize, arrange, manage, and direct entire populations and countries based on a unitary system, resulting in the colonization and domination of natural and human ecologies. In the postcolonial era, these mechanisms of control are still very much in place whether through international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, or through government policies of industrialization and modernization. The escalation of environmental problems also led to the struggle for natural resources, which resulted in a number of battles between poor farmers, peasants, and indigenous populations on one side and corporate and government interests on the other. The notion of sustainable development was conceived in the midst of these struggles as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), environmental organizations, and various peasant and indigenous groups, as well as international institutions such as the United Nations, called for a conceptual and political re-examination of development.
Sustainable Development: The Concept and Its Implications
The concept of sustainable development emerged in the 1980s in an attempt to explore the relationship between development and the environment. Although there are over 100 current denitions of sustainable development (Holmberg and Sandbrook 1992), the one most commonly used is that of Brundtland (WCED 1987). According to the Brundtland Commission, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, direction of investments, orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs (WCED 1987: 9). This broad definition is at the root of several controversies and there is considerable disagreement among scholars in different disciplines over how this denition should be operationalized and how sustainability should be measured. The Brundtland denition is not really
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a denition; it is a slogan, and slogans, however pretty, do not make theory. As several authors have pointed out, the Brundtland definition does not elaborate on the notion of human needs and wants (Kirkby et al. 1995; Redclift 1987), and the concern for future generations is problematic in its operationalization as well. Given the scenario of limited resources, this assumption becomes a contradiction because most potential consumers (future generations) are unable to access the present market or, as MartinezAlier (1987: 17) elegantly puts it, individuals not yet born have ontological difficulties in making their presence felt in todays market for exhaustible resources. Apart from attempting to reconcile economic growth with environmental protection, the sustainable development agenda of Brundtland also focuses on social justice and human development within the framework of social equity and the equitable distribution and utilization of resources. Sustainability, as Redclift (1987) points out, means different things to different people. Although theories of sustainability sometimes stress the primacy of social justice, the position is often reversed and justice is looked upon as subordinate to sustainability, and since neither sustainability nor social justice has determinate meanings, this opens the way to legitimizing one of them in terms of the other (Dobson 1998: 242). The terms sustainability and sustainable development are used interchangeably in both academic and popular discourses and the concept is promoted by situating it against the background of sustaining a particular set of social relations by way of a particular set of ecological projects (Harvey 1996: 148). Thus, the debate about resource scarcity, biodiversity, population, and ecological limits is ultimately a debate about the preservation of a particular social order rather than a debate about the preservation of nature per se (Harvey 1996: 148). Discourses of development and sustainable development construct a particular view of nature and the environment. A detailed exploration of the various meanings of nature is beyond the scope of this paper given the historical, geographical, and cultural complexities that inform its meanings, including Western notions of democracy, theology, society, enlightenment, romanticism, and modernity. However, I do not use the terms nature and environment interchangeably. The transformation of nature (depicted in European traditions as a wild, untamed, often hostile force) into environment (more manageable and goal directed) is one of the hallmarks of modernity, in which domination of nature becomes a key indicator of human progress rather than a transformation of the relationship between humans and nature (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). One consequence of conceptualizing nature as environment is the abstraction of singularity from the multiple meanings of nature, ranging from the essence or character of an object; the physical world around us; living and nonliving things; the specic ecology of places; notions of wilderness and ruralness; and the aesthetic or spiritual values assigned to nature. As Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue, modernistic conceptualizations of nature do not reveal its contested meanings: nature as landscape, as an object of scientic scrutiny, as threatened and in need of protection, as a resource-providing system, or as a source of spiritual
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renewal. Nature is thus made more real when it becomes the environment, something that is separate from social and cultural practices and that can be managed to produce discrete, observable and measurable outcomes. Although the natureculture dichotomy underlying the Enlightenment tradition has been criticized for being largely responsible for the environmental degradation of the planet in the name of development (Dunlap and Catton 1979; Escobar 1995), contemporary discourses of sustainable development are plagued by the same modernistic assumptions of rationality in their reliance on scientic inquiry and the separation of people from the biophysical environment (Merchant 1980; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). In a content analysis of different definitions of sustainable development, Gladwin et al. (1995) identied several themes, including human development, inclusiveness (of ecological, economic, political, technological, and social systems), connectivity (of sociopolitical, economic, and environmental goals), equity (fair distribution of resources and property rights), prudence (avoiding irreversibilities and recognizing carrying capacities), and security (achieving a safe, healthy, and high quality of life). Despite its broad goals, what is being sustained does not seem to be in question because, as Hart (1997: 67) points out, the challenge is to develop a sustainable global economy: an economy that the planet is capable of supporting indenitely. Thus, the challenge is to nd new technologies and to expand the role of the market in allocating environmental resources, on the assumption that putting a price on the natural environment is the only way to protect it, unless degrading it becomes more protable (Beder 1994). Thus, even in the popular Brundtland report, development is accorded a priority over the environment: environmental protection constitutes an integral part of the development process (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). If the debate truly was about environmental and social sustainability, surely one would expect the relationship to be reversed, on the assumption that development proceeds within the constraints and limits of the biophysical environment. Rather than reshaping markets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainable development uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation to determine the future of nature (Shiva 1991). The language of capital is quite apparent in discourses of sustainable development. For instance, Pearce et al. (1989) emphasize constancy of natural capital stock as a necessary condition for sustainability. According to Pearce et al., changes in the stock of natural resources should be nonnegative, and man-made capital (products and services as measured by traditional economics and accounting) should not be created at the expense of natural capital (including both renewable and nonrenewable natural resources). In other words, growth or wealth must be created without resource depletion. Exactly how this is to be achieved remains a mystery. A majority of the sustainable development literature is of this eco-modernist variety (Bandy 1996) and addresses ways to operationalize the Brundtland concept. Thus, concepts such as sustainable cost, natural capital or sustainable capital are developed and touted as evidence of a paradigm shift (Bebbington and Gray 1993). There is limited awareness of the fact that traditional notions
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of capital, income, and growth continue to inform this new paradigm. The uncritical acceptance of the current system of markets is also problematic: although markets are indeed efficient mechanisms to set prices they are incapable of reflecting true costs, such as the replacement costs of an old-growth tropical rainforest or the social costs of tobacco and liquor consumption (Hawken 1995). In an analysis of the sociology of nature, Macnaghten and Urry (1998: 2) argue that current discourses of nature and the environment all assume the existence of a singular nature rather than emphasize that it is specic social practices, especially of peoples dwellings, which produce, reproduce and transform different natures and different values. They argue against three doctrines of the received view of the environment, or what they call environmental realism, environmental idealism, and environmental instrumentalism. Environmentalism realism refers to the transformation of nature into a scientifically researchable environment in which modern Western science can identify environmental problems and articulate appropriate solutions. Social and cultural environmental practices are subsumed by the realities of scientific inquiry. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue against this singular view of nature by describing the cultural processes involved in the naturalization of nature. They describe how the environment entered social discourse through specic social and cultural processes, such as student activism and the countercultural movements of the 1960s. Environmental idealism analyzes nature by examining the range of values held by people about nature; these environmental values are assumed to be stable and consistent. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) refute the notion of investigating environmental values without contextualizing the temporal and spatial arrangements of peoples lives. Individual valuation of nature, they argue, is ambiguous, contradictory, and context specic. Environmental instrumentalism refers to the responses of individuals and groups to environmental problems that are determined by evaluating individual or collective interests against environmental trade-offs through costbenet analysis or other market-based mechanisms. The assumption here is that the individual subject will weigh the costs and benefits of different behaviors and, once presented with the facts, will understand that it is in their interest to behave in an environmentally responsible manner, believing that governments and public institutions will also act to protect the environment. Macnaghten and Urrys (1998) research on British consumers shows little support for this proposition: few respondents appeared to possess such a strong sense of agency and high levels of trust in public institutions.
Elements of these three doctrines can be observed in discourses of sustainable development, whether at the level of international and national policy (as manifested in the policies of the United Nations, the World Bank, national governments, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Agenda 21) or
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regional and local governments. For instance, Article 35.3 of Agenda 21 developed at the Rio Summit of 1992 declares that:
Scientific knowledge should be applied to articulate and support the goals of sustainable development. . . . [T]here needs to be an increased output from the sciences in order to enhance understanding and facilitate interaction between science and society . . . [aimed at] strengthening the scientic basis for sustainable management . . . enhancing scientific understanding . . . building up scientific capacity and capability. (Emphasis added)
The report goes on to say, of crucial importance is the need for scientists in developing countries to participate fully in international scientic research programs dealing with the global problems of environment and development so as to allow all countries to participate on equal footing in negotiations on global environmental and developmental issues. How all countries can participate on equal footing remains unclear, given the structural inequalities between the North and the South. There is also the implicit (and incorrect) assumption that scientists from developing countries represent the interests of the rural poor, who are dependent on the natural environment for their survival and who value and manage nature differently. For instance, in its social and environmental report, the mining giant Rio Tinto describes the companys values of land use . . . in particular, that science should be the basis of understanding and managing the environment (Rio Tinto 1999: 15). This is precisely the point: whose science are we talking about here? Certainly not indigenous ecology, a science used by communities for more than 70,000 years to manage their environment. This scientic and economic reinvention of nature does not recognize that the environmental and social objectives of diverse populations are often different and sometimes incompatible (Redclift 2000). The new language of sustainable development scientific understanding, citizenship, species rights, intergenerational equity obscures the inequalities and cultural distinctions surrounding environmental resources. A similar sleight-of-hand is used in justifying opposition to environmental protection policies. A recent report (paid for by the coal industry lobby in the United States) found that millions of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities could be pushed into poverty by tough new restrictions on energy use called for by the Kyoto Protocol (Mokhiber and Weissman 2000). The fact that minority communities in the USA have been used as dumping grounds for decades did not enter the debate and neither did the risks of global warming to these communities. The role of science in validating indigenous knowledge is also problematic, with a double-edged irony. Scientic agriculture led to modern practices of monocropping with high-input intensive farming techniques. The environmental problems that were created as a result also needed scientific solutions. A recent study found that planting different varieties of rice produced larger harvests (Yoon 2000); this success of polyculture was presented either as a discovery of modern science or as validating centuriesold indigenous agricultural practices. This is another example of colonial
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discourse in which local economic histories are incorporated into Western scientic and economic perspectives. Why modern scientic practices escape this validation test is not a question that gets asked often in the promotion of new and sustainable agricultural practices. This is not to deny the many benefits delivered by Western science and technology; rather it is to understand which systems and peoples have been marginalized in this process and how control of natural and biological resources has shifted from peasant populations to transnational corporations. In recent years, a number of subdisciplines such as evolutionary biology, conservation biology, and ecology have attempted to produce a greener version of science (Barlow 1997) under the assumption this would lead to deeper meanings about nature and ecology. However, these arguments do not address the inequalities of resource use among the worlds populations. It is possible for a science to be valid in its knowledge claims and still produce domination effects. And, despite the advances in science and technology, considerable disagreement still exists among scientists about the causes and consequences of, as well as solutions to, the worlds environmental problems. The noted biologist Edward Wilson (1992: 325) advocates caution in developing ways to regenerate existing ecosystems: ecology is still too primitive a science to predict the outcome of predesigned biotas. However, there is still the assumption that scientic knowledge will help solve these problems in the future. Environmental realism and idealism underlie many of the policy documents of the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Convention on Biodiversity, and multinational trade agreements such as NAFTA and ASEAN, as well as texts on biodiversity and the environment and books on green business (Agenda 21; Barlow 1997; Hawken 1995; Wilson 1992). Barlow (1997: 26), discussing Edward Wilsons thesis on biodiversity, writes: Edward Wilson believes that science offers humankinds not only an awareness of the biodiversity crisis and the tools for saving species but also a story that can change our very souls to take on the task. There is also a cozy relationship between economic ideology and Western science: although admitting that traditional economic valuation methods almost always undervalue biological diversity, Wilson (1992: 271) calls for new ways to draw income from wildlands: the race is on to develop methods, to draw more income from the wildlands without killing them, and so to give the invisible hand of free-market economics a green thumb. Hawken (1995: 81) pursues a similar line of reasoning: I believe customers and buyers are getting incomplete information, because markets do not carry the true costs of our purchases. When customers start receiving proper information the whole story things will change. Again, the instrumentalist assumption is clear: there is a collective will to change consumption behavior all that is needed is proper information. The Brundtland approach to sustainable development aims at achieving economic growth, environmental protection, and equity simultaneously by reconciling the irreconcilable. Although such a goal is laudable, there are serious concerns about whether it is achievable (Kirkby et al. 1995). The
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major proposals of the Brundtland agenda include changing the quality of growth, ensuring a sustainable level of population, conserving and enhancing the resource base, managing technology and environmental risks, and incorporating the environment into decision-making. There is also an underlying assumption that market forces can be relied upon to achieve sustainable development, although political interventions, international agreements, and national environmental regulation also have a role to play. However, the notion of global sustainability is problematic in that it obscures structural inequalities in resource access and use amongst different regions of the world. As we shall see in the next section, discourses of sustainable development serve to deepen the existing NorthSouth divide in terms of natural resource conservation and utilization.
Who Sustains Whose Development?
Definitions employing global perspectives are usually subsumed under a monocultural denition of global, dened according to a perception of the world shared by its rulers (Escobar 1995). The reframing of the relationship between economic growth and the environment and the ecocentric philosophy of spaceship earth is simply an attempt to socialize environmental costs globally (McAfee 1999), which assumes equal responsibility for environmental degradation while obscuring signicant differences and inequities in resource utilization between countries. The sustainability of local cultures, especially peasant cultures, is not addressed; instead, global survival is problematized as sustainable development, an articulation that privileges Western notions of environmentalism and conservation. The problem does not recognize that Western environmentalism has effects similar to those of development: rather than empower peasant populations throughout the world, environmental and conservation policies transfer control of rights and resources to national and international institutions that have failed these populations for over 50 years (Mies and Shiva 1993). Global environmentalism, espoused as a solution to the environmental ills facing the planet, remains rmly rooted in the tradition of Western economic thought and dehistoricizes and marginalizes the environmental traditions of non-Western cultures. Environmental problems such as pollution do not recognize national or regional boundaries, yet the global solutions advocated by the industrialized countries perpetuate the dependency relations of colonialism. Images of polluted Third World cities abound in the media with no acknowledgment of the corresponding responsibility of industrialized countries, which consume 80 percent of the worlds aluminum, paper, iron and steel; 75 percent of the worlds energy; 75 percent of its sh resources; 70 percent of its ozone-destroying CFCs; and 61 percent of its meat (Renner 1997). The poorer regions of the world destroy or export their natural resources to meet the demands of the richer nations or to meet debt-servicing needs arising from the austerity measures dictated by the World Bank. It is ironic to the point of absurdity that the poorer countries of the world have to
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be austere in their development while the richer nations continue to enjoy standards of living that are dependent on the austerity measures of the poorer nations. Neither the dangers of environmental destruction nor the benefits of environmental protection are equally distributed: protection measures continue to be dictated by the industrialized countries, often at the expense of local rural communities. This perverse logic pervades notions of sustainable growth. Consumer spending and condence are primary criteria for sustaining the socioeconomic system whereas welfare policies for the poor are dismantled because they are a pernicious drain on growth (Harvey 1996). Thus, the teeming millions in the Third World are responsible for damage to the biosphere whereas conspicuous consumption in the first world is a necessary condition for sustainable growth (Harvey 1996). Exploitation of these communities in the name of environmental protection and conservation continues despite 50 years of decolonization in the Third World. Colonial modes of conservation are still deployed by the new nation states. In India, for instance, vast tracts of land used by peasant communities are designated as tiger reserves for the enjoyment of foreign tourists and local elites, while the communities who depend on the land for sustenance are displaced. This has happened with the Chenchu community in southern India. The community pays for the protection of tigers but no one pays for the conservation of their communities, something they have been doing for thousands of years (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). An alternative solution proposed by the Chenchu tribe did not merit serious consideration by state government ofcials: the proposal was to transfer all the tigers to the capital city of Hyderabad, after evacuating all its residents, and to designate the city a tiger reserve. Sustainable development attempts to reconcile these opposing interests and aims to maximize economic and environmental benets simultaneously. This is a contradiction in terms, because sustainability and development are based on very different and often incompatible assumptions. To sustain means to support from below, to supply with nourishment; it is about care and concern, a concept that is far removed from development, which is an act of control, often a program of violence, organized and managed by nation states, international institutions, and business corporations operating under the tenets of modern Western science (Visvanathan 1991). Environmental concerns articulated in the discourse of sustainable development are concerns because they threaten the sustainability of the economic system. The assumption is that the only way these concerns can be addressed is by putting a price on environmental assets. Current environmental policies are based on this logic and do not address the damaging consequences these policies can have for millions of people who depend on the land for survival and for whom environmentalism is not a quality of life issue but a matter of survival (Guha 1989). These differing environmental objectives in industrialized and Third World countries pose another contradiction for sustainable development. Environmental concerns in the industrialized countries revolve around conserving rural spaces, valuing the aesthetics of nature, keeping beaches
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clean, and providing the opportunity to acquire a suntan without the risk of cancer. Environmentalism in the Third World, especially in rural areas, is about keeping control over natural resources, about having control over the technology that transforms the environment (Redclift 1987). As the rate of international transactions continues to increase in todays global market economy, environmental degradation in the developing countries also continues steadily to worsen. As several researchers have pointed out, the socalled greening of industry in developed countries has, in many cases, been achieved at the expense of Third World environments through the relocation of polluting industries to developing countries (Escobar 1995; Goldsmith 1997; Redclift 1987). Critics of sustainable development also argue that it can colonize areas of Third World social life that are not yet ruled by the logic of the market or the consumer, areas such as forests, water rights, and sacred sites (Escobar 1995; Visvanathan 1991). The rural poor directly depend on the biophysical environment for survival, and notions of conservation and protection that are common in developed countries are contestable in developing countries. Although poverty and environmental degradation are often linked in the literature, the role of development in diminishing the rural populations access to natural resources is not frequently discussed. Rather, the tendency is to blame the victim: farmers and peasants who engage in industrialized farming using fertilizers and pesticides are blamed without examining the role of the chemical industry or the market-based institutions that are responsible for promoting their use. Global discourses of sustainable development, as evidenced by the policies of the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, all assume that poverty rather than affluence is the real problem of environmental destruction. Slash-and-burn peasants are blamed for the destruction of the forests, whereas logging and timber companies, which have a far greater impact, are given tax incentives for following sustainable practices (Banerjee 1998). Green incentives are provided for corporations and policy measures are put in place to evaluate and minimize the ecological impacts of logging. There are no indicators that can measure the devastating impact on local communities. Even the construction of a single road has multiplier effects: it reduces the transaction costs of the logging company (at public expense) while increasing land alienation of local communities, converting a hitherto knowledgeable and resourceful community into a pool of unskilled labor (Gupta 1997). This sustainable process is praised by corporations and governments for creating employment opportunities for local communities, but they fail to recognize the disempowerment and poverty created as a result of the dispossession of land and natural resources. In the sustainable development discourse, poverty is identied as the agent of environmental destruction, thus legitimating prior notions of growth and development. The global denition of environmental problems by the North results in local problems for the South because the handful of industrialized countries that set the global agenda are guided by narrow, local and parochial interests
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(Shiva 1993: 150). Conicting objectives over resource use further exacerbate the equity problem because the industrialized countries sustain inequalities by imposing a monopoly knowledge that constitutes the parameters of global environmental problems (Beck 1996; Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Global environmental policy regimes, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness, do little to address the concerns of indigenous peoples. The Second International Indigenous Forum on Climate Change at The Hague in November 2000 issued a declaration listing their concerns. Of primary concern was the exclusion of indigenous peoples from participating in the development and the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. The Forum also professed concern that
. . . the measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based on a worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only their carbon absorption capacity. This worldview and its practices adversely affect the lives of Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly, our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which are consecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations. (IIFC 2000)
The notion of carbon sinks leads to a system of tradable emissions: countries are allowed not to reduce their emissions if they plant trees instead. This system can have perverse outcomes: a country can get environmental credit for (a) not reducing its emissions, (b) leveling old-growth forests, and (c) replanting trees to grow new forests, i.e. creating carbon sinks. This is typical of the reductionism inherent in modern science whereby forests are valued only for their carbon sequestration capacity. This monocultural mindset of scientific forestry does not recognize that forests are not just carbon sinks or timber mines for local communities: they are their source of food, agriculture, and medicine, in short, their entire livelihood. Despite highlighting issues of poverty and equity, contemporary discourses of sustainable development do not criticize the structural conditions that characterize the increasing intrusion of capital into the domain of nature, which results in the capitalization, expropriation, commodification, and homogenization of nature. The economic relations that underpin contemporary sustainable development strategies have evolved from the violent histories of colonial capitalist relations, which informed development for much of the 20th century. If discourses of sustainable development articulate notions of equity, democracy inclusion, then a critical perspective will allow us also to see it as a product of a racialized justification for modernization, in which marginalized peoples are subject to a new dependency and a new colonialism (Bandy 1996: 542).
Sustainable Development in Organizations: Implications for Organization Theory and Practice
How and why did the discourse on the environment arise in the rst place? Many historians trace the modern Western environmental movement to the publication of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in 1962. Whereas earlier environmental concerns focused mainly on suburban aesthetics or localized
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pollution problems, Carsons representation of environmental problems highlighted the threats to nature (and the human body) posed by widespread use of pesticides. The ensuing scientific debates on the limits to growth, population pressures, and the carrying capacity of the planet were part of a larger cultural critique of industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s. Public perceptions of environmental problems and increased environmental legislation were two key reasons the environment became an important issue for corporations, resulting in the need for companies to sell environmentalism in order to be perceived as green (Banerjee 2001b; Newton and Harte 1997). Newton and Harte (1997: 91) argue that organizations also paint themselves green to avoid regulatory control: one of the aims of the Vision of Sustainable Development promoted by the Business Council for Sustainable Development is to maintain entrepreneurial freedom through voluntary initiatives rather than regulatory coercion. In recent years there has been a minor explosion of articles dealing with corporate greening in the management literature. Much of this literature attempts to incorporate current notions of sustainable development into corporate strategy (see, for example, the 2000 special issue on the management of organizations in the natural environment in the Academy of Management Journal, the 1995 special issue on ecologically sustainable organizations in the Academy of Management Review, or the 1992 special issue on strategic management of the environment in Long Range Planning) and discusses the emergence of corporate environmentalism and organizational processes of environmental management (Banerjee 2001b; Crane 2000; Fineman 1996). That corporations play a signicant role in achieving sustainability is not in doubt. The question is, are current environmental practices compatible with notions of sustainability? Some researchers caution that the greening of industry should not be confused with the notion of sustainable development (Pearce et al. 1989; Schot et al. 1997; Welford 1997; Westley and Vredenburg 1996). Although there have been signicant advances in pollution control and emissions reduction, this does not mean that current modes of development are sustainable for the planet as a whole (Hart 1997). Most companies focus on operational issues when it comes to greening and lack a vision of sustainability (Hart 1997). In a recent Greening of Industry conference, the proposed corporate strategy for sustainable development had no surprises: the focus was on scientic innovation, public service and turning the world populations into active consumers of its new products, and expanding global business into the less affluent segments of the worlds population (Rossi et al. 2000: 275). Echoing Wilsons (1992) call for a biology of restoration, Hawken (1995: 11) suggests an economy of restoration as a solution to the environmental crisis. Corporations would compete to conserve and increase resources rather than deplete them. Hawken proposes three ways by which this can be achieved: eliminate waste from all industrial production; change our energy use from carbon based to solar and hydrogen based; and create feedback and accountability systems that reward restorative behavior. Although these
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solutions are also informed by environmental realism and idealism and assume there is both a scientic solution and a collective will of consumers in the afuent countries to serve and nurture the aspirations of the poor and educated (Hawken 1995: 214), developing technologies, processes, and regulatory mechanisms to reduce the environmental impact of business is definitely one area in which there is agreement among all constituents of society. In addition, Hawken suggests that the small- and medium-scale sector is better able to carry out the task of restoration effectively than are large transnational corporations. Efforts to broaden the scope of greening to include social sustainability are also under way. This triple bottom line approach assesses the social and environmental impacts of business, as distinct from its economic impact (Elkington, 1999). Elkington (1999: 73) describes interactions between the environment, society, and the economy as three shear zones that produce a variety of opportunities and challenges for organizations. Many of the advances in cleaner technologies and emissions reductions have arisen from the economicenvironment shear zone, which is an area that business corporations are most comfortable with since it delivers measurable benets to them. Outcomes of the socialenvironment and socialeconomy shear zones are more ambiguous (for corporations at least), although the assumption here is that organizations need to integrate these as well in order to survive in the long term. Theoretical perspectives of the triple bottom line approach focus on maximizing sustainability opportunities (corporate social responsibility, stakeholder relations, and corporate governance) while minimizing sustainability-related risks (corporate risk management, environmental, health and safety audits, and reporting). Proponents of the triple bottom line claim that, by using these and other parameters, it is possible to map the environmental and social domains of sustainability and ultimately to assess the performance of corporations. However, research on the environmental and social dimensions of corporate sustainability is very much in its infancy. Although this approach is proving to be popular among large transnational corporations, the impact on local communities is unclear. The same companies that are being targeted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous communities because of their negative environmental and social impacts are the leaders in espousing triple bottom line principles; it remains to be seen whether this approach can deliver real benefits to communities or whether it becomes a more sophisticated form of greenwashing. There is a real danger that the glossy social performance reports of transnational corporations may deect attention from the grim realities of their environmental performance. Discourses of sustainable development are becoming increasingly corporatized. For instance, the Dow Jones recently launched a Sustainability Group Index after a survey of Fortune 500 companies. A sustainable corporation was dened as one that aims at increasing long-term shareholder value by integrating economic, environmental and social growth opportunities into its corporate and business strategies (Dow Jones Sustainability Group
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Index 2000). It is interesting to observe how notions of sustainability are constructed, manipulated, and represented in both the popular business press and academic literature. As evidence of the deleterious effects of development mounts, the discourse shifts from sustainable development to the more positive sounding sustainability and then shifts the focus to corporate sustainability. Corporate discourses on sustainability produce an elision that displaces the focus from global planetary sustainability to sustaining the corporation through growth opportunities. What happens if environmental and social issues do not result in growth opportunities remains unclear, the assumption being that global sustainability can be achieved only through market exchanges. This (post)modern form of corporate social responsibility produces a truth effect that is not dissimilar to Milton Friedmans (1962) concept of corporate social responsibility involving the maximization of shareholder value, despite the rhetoric of stakeholders and corporate citizenship (Banerjee 2000; 2001a). Despite framing sustainable development as a strategic discontinuity that will change todays fundamental economics, corporate discourses on sustainable development, not surprisingly, promote the business-as-usual (except greener) line and do not describe any radical change in world-views. As Monsantos ex-CEO Robert Shapiro puts it, Far from being a soft issue grounded in emotion or ethics, sustainable development involves cold, rational business logic (Magretta 1997: 81). So what implications does this critique of sustainable development have for the study of organizations? Given how this discourse is constructed at higher levels of the political economy, it is unlikely that any radical revision of sustainable development will emerge from organizations. For any such rethinking to occur, a more critical approach to organization theory is required and new questions need to be raised not only about the ecological and social sustainability of business corporations but about the political economy itself. Corporate environmental management practices are informed by the larger debate on sustainable development and, consequently, radical revisions can occur only if there is a shift in thinking at a macro level. I will discuss three implications of a critique of sustainable development for the study of organizations. First, we need to broaden our denition of organizations and open up new spaces for critique. An overwhelming proportion of research in management focuses on traditional prot-oriented corporations. The bulk of research on not-for-prot organizations is framed by similar corporate goals: how can we raise more money for charity, how can we get more people into museums or libraries or zoos? Very little research takes place on strategies for activist groups and organizations, and the theories and practices required to oppose corporate actions (Frooman 1999). There are very few studies in the management literature about the operations of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Although these are not corporate organizations in the traditional sense of the term, they are powerful agents in advancing the discourse on sustainability and should come under the purview of organization studies. We also need to
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acknowledge that modern organizations often reflect colonial formations. Employing a postcolonial perspective for the study of organizations might provide new spaces for critique and resistance. Although critical organization theorists portray organizations as structures of domination, legitimacy, and reexive social systems (Courpasson 2000; Leaive 1996), recent debates in organization theory between modernist and postmodernist forms of organization are curiously silent on the colonial dimensions that frame organizationenvironment relationships. Second, we need to open up new spaces and provide new frameworks for organizationstakeholder dialogues as well as critically to examine the dynamics of the relationships between corporations, NGOs, governments, community groups, and funding agencies. Contemporary discourses of organizations and their stakeholders are inevitably constrained by practical reasons such as the profit-seeking behavior of corporations (Trevio and Weaver 1999). Although the vast literature on corporate social responsibility, stakeholder integration, and business ethics is based on the assumption that business is inuenced by societal concerns, the dominance of societal interests in radically reshaping business practices is in some question (Mueller 1994). The domain of corporate social responsibility cannot be assessed by primarily economic criteria and neither can an environmental ethic be developed through an ethically pragmatic managerial morality that primarily serves organizational interests (Snell 2000; ten Bos 1997). Although NGOs do serve as important counterpoints, their relationships with corporations and governments are often ambiguous and framed by categories furnished by international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, categories that are inimical to many groups that are negatively affected by corporations (Spivak 1999). Increasing accountability of both corporations and NGOs to local communities and translating participation in more meaningful local contexts without reducing social movements to some other form of domination (the prerogatives of donor agencies, for example) are challenges for the future (Escobar 1992; Derman 1995). Third, we need to question espoused corporate practices of sustainability. Discourses of corporate greening, whether based on deep ecology, ecocentric or sustaincentric management, need to be interrogated and their constructs and concepts examined with a critical lens. Despite calls for a fundamental revision of organization studies concepts and theories (Shrivastava 1994), there are no explanations as to how this will occur. It is unclear how alternate conceptualizations of an organizations environment (Shrivastava 1994) or a complete moral transformation within the corporation (Crane 2000: 673) will naturally lead to social justice or a more equitable distribution of resources. Fundamental changes in organizations cannot occur unless there are corresponding shifts in the larger political economy and crucial questions regarding the role of a corporation and its license to operate in society are addressed. All the exhortations of green organization theorists do not begin to address the tremendous impediments to restructuring the political economy and abandoning conventional notions of competition and consumption (Newton and Harte 1997). If organizational
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analysis involves understanding the processes of how organizations are produced in particular societal contexts (Leaive 1996) and how external constraints of the environment are translated into organizational imperatives (Knights and Morgan 1993: 212), then a critique of contemporary notions of sustainable development should allow us to examine the emergence of grassroots organizations involved in resistance movements as well as highlight corporate strategies of co-optation and management of the environment. It should examine the structures and processes that discursively produce external environmental constraints and how social and cultural relations are changed by organizations. It should broaden the debate to include the political economy and alternative approaches to addressing environmental problems, something that the current environmental management discourse fails to do (Levy 1997). It should also allow us to see how nation states, international organizations, and transnational corporations support the needs of international capital. A critique of capital and capitalisms should be placed rmly at the center of the debate rather than in the uneasy invisible position it currently occupies in most organizational theories (Pitelis 1993). Arguments that question the sustainability of current economic systems are rarely found in the literature and much of the theorizing on green business is what Newton and Harte (1997) call technicist kitsch, laced with liberal doses of evangelical rhetoric. As long as conceptions of sustainable development continue to be driven solely by rationalizations of competitive advantage, no paradigmatic shift in world views of nature and sustainability can take place. Green consumption will not save the world because, rather than attempting politically to reconstitute the mode of modern production to meet ecological constraints, it advocates nonpolitical, nonsocial, noninstitutional solutions to environmental problems (Luke 1994: 158). Corporate green marketing strategies continue to focus on the economic bottom line at the organizational level (Banerjee 1999) without addressing the macro marketing implications of the relationships between technological, political, and economic institutions and their role in environmental decline (Kilbourne et al. 1997). A critical examination of the relationship between the dominant socioeconomic paradigm and the environment will highlight how colonial capitalist development increases social inequalities and, despite its knowledge claims, results in a loss of ecological knowledge. Any effort at envisioning alternate ecologies must involve visions of alternate societies and politics as well (Guha 1989). The debate over biotechnology is a pertinent example of how broader scientic, political, and economic discourses, structured by colonial formations that frame NorthSouth relations, can produce discursive effects at the organizational level. The loss of biodiversity owing to industrial agriculture involving heavy chemical inputs is recognized as a global environmental problem. The solution proposed by the scientic and business community is a new revolution: biotechnology. This new revolution is simply a logical extension of the chemical revolution of the 1950s and not only serves to sustain corporate and scientic structures of power by creating intellectual property rights in life forms but also threatens to colonize life forms and
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recolonize spaces in the Third World, a region that contains two-thirds of the worlds plant species. Patents and intellectual property laws on genetic resources such as seeds protect and serve the corporate and institutional interests of developed countries while violating peasants and farmers rights in the Third World. Medicinal plants, nurtured and sustained by indigenous cultures, were appropriated by pharmaceutical companies without any payment and later used to develop protable drugs protected by patents and trademarks. The knowledge of indigenous cultures in recognizing and using the medicinal properties of these plants is positioned as traditional and not novel and hence can be obtained without payment, whereas the knowledge of pharmaceutical companies requires protection. The recent NorthSouth conflict over the World Trade Organizations controversial Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) at the Uruguay Round of the GATT (WTO 2000) is a case in point. The TRIPS agreement legitimizes private intellectual property rights over life forms. These rights apply to individuals, states, and corporations, not to indigenous peoples and local communities. In effect, governments are asked to change their national intellectual property rights laws to allow patenting of micro-organisms, non-biological and micro-biological processes. Two related problems arise from imposing a regime of intellectual property rights in indigenous knowledge. First, traditional knowledge belongs to the indigenous community rather than to specific individuals. Second, as indigenous communities all over the world have discovered, national governments are increasingly employing neoliberal agendas (some willingly, a majority through coercion) that have adverse impacts on their livelihoods by restricting community access to natural resources. Equitable sharing of commercial benets through mutually benecial contracts between indigenous groups and transnational corporations are unlikely to occur given the disparities in resources and capacities to monitor or enforce the terms of any contract. The TRIPS agreement resulted in mass protests by indigenous and peasant communities as well as NGOs in Asia, Africa, and South America that continue to this day (Dawkins, 1997). These resistance movements, along with widespread protests by European consumers, have had some effect in slowing the adoption rates of biotechnology by transnational corporations. After an aggressive campaign to promote biotechnology in agriculture, several leading transnational corporations have now retreated from this arena, at least temporarily, because of the backlash by European consumers. The regime of intellectual property rights creates a new meaning of biodiversity that focuses on commodifying and trading the benefits of biodiversity. For this to occur, privatization and ownership are necessary conditions (Redclift, 1987). Once again, biodiversity becomes framed in terms of market preferences, resulting in the poor (but biodiversity rich populations) sustaining the rich. Assessing market preferences for nature is based on invalid assumptions, as McAfee (1999: 133) argues: contrary to the premise of the global economic paradigm there can be no universal metric for comparing and exchanging the real values of nature among different
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groups of people from different cultures, and with vastly different degrees of political and economic power. The reinvention of nature by biotechnology, apart from assuming no material ecological impact, provides legitimacy for the dominant order and ruling elites. As Harvey (1996: 147) points out, notions of scarcity and limits in natural resources are rooted in social systems in which a natural resource becomes a cultural, technical and economic appraisal of elements and processes in nature that can be applied to full social objectives and goals through specic material practices. For example, the proposed mechanisms for ensuring a free and fair ow of information, such as intellectual property rights over genetically modified living organisms, serve to protect certain interests. The controversial TRIPS agreement was developed in large part by the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC), which consisted of many transnational rms including Bristol Myers, Merck, Monsanto, Du Pont and Pzer. Monsantos representative described the TRIPS strategy:
[We were able to] distill from the laws of the more advanced countries the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property. . . Besides selling our concept at home, we went to Geneva where we presented our document to the staff of the GATT Secretariat. . . . What I have described to you is absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry identied a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and other governments . . . the industries and traders of the world have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians. (Cited in Rifkin, 1999: 52)
The colonial capitalist undertones of this statement are not hard to discern: the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property obviously have to be developed based on the laws of the advanced countries. Thus, nature, once a commons and a resource, is reinvented as a vast gene pool, inspiring todays molecular biologists and corporate entrepreneurs in their quest to capture and colonize the last frontier, the genetic commons that is the heart of the natural world (Rifkin, 1999: 170). The recent battle over patenting extracts from the Neem tree, known and used for its medicinal properties for thousands of years, is an example of this biopiracy. Claiming intellectual property rights over Neem extracts is based on a system of multiple exclusions that denies indigenous knowledge and agricultural practices. The knowledge that these extracts could be used for medicinal purposes, as pesticides, and for contraception already existed and was in the prior public domain, which is what patenting laws seek to establish. If this knowledge had existed in the West, these patent applications would never have been considered. The fact that this prior knowledge existed in poor rural communities allowed a non-novel entity to be constructed as novel and patented under current intellectual property rights legislation (Shiva, 1993). The struggle is far from over: legislative changes in the European Union recently allowed patents to cover life forms (Downes, 1996). The number of applications for genetic patents received in the United States rose from 4,000 in 1991 to 500,000 in 1996 (Enriquez and Goldberg, 2000). The World Trade Organization is also under pressure by the United States to
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remove the exception it currently has on life forms and to accept, as well as enforce, patents on life forms. Another argument made by proponents of biotechnology is that the Third World is too poor and cannot afford to worry about bioethics. As Shiva (1993) has pointed out, the dichotomy between ethics and knowledge is a Western construct that enables the colonization and control of cultures where no such dichotomy exists. It is the illusion of neutrality of this ethics-free knowledge that is able to deny alternate knowledge systems.
Alternate Visions
Although I have painted a fairly dismal picture of the domination effects of environmental discourse, it is important to realize that these practices and policies are contested. Resistance movements against globalized corporate agriculture and biotechnology have emerged in different parts of the world. Global alliances among diverse groups have had recent successes, most notably the failure of the WTO Third Ministerial Meeting in Seattle in 1999. As Shiva (2000) argues, solidarity among different groups scientists, planners, environmentalists, producers, and consumers is needed to prevent resistance being marginalized (or polarized as being between uninformed citizens and informed scientists) and for the debate to continue in the public sphere. Many groups all over the world are engaged in dialogue, protests, and violent and non-violent action with corporations, governments, and international institutions. They vary from small, locally based activists to large, powerful NGOs and environmental organizations, as well as coalitions of different groups. These include the 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice, a coalition of over 200 organizations (grassroots, womens, solidarity, policy, social and economic justice, youth, labor, and development) working at international, national, and local levels in an attempt to transform the lending policies and structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The 50 years is enough refers to 50 years of development policies in Africa, which the coalition claims have been a complete failure, with overall standards of living lower than they were 50 years ago. One of the more successful resistance movements, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, used a similar slogan Basta ya! (Enough!) when it presented its 11-word program to the Mexican government: Trabajo, Tierra, Techo, Pan, Salud, Educacin, Democracia, Libertad, Paz, Independencia, y Justica (work, land, shelter, bread, health, education, democracy, liberty, peace, independence, and justice) (Ross 2000: 20). If visions of sustainable development are to have an emancipatory goal, there needs to be a reconceptualization of current notions of progress and development. These concepts not only are limiting but represent a failure of the imagination: the Western technocentric approach serves only to empower corporate and national economic interests and prevents communities from preserving their rights to control their resources. An unpacking of the notion
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of development is required and concepts of sustainability must go beyond seeking a compromise between environmental protection and economic growth. This involves reversing the industrial appropriation of nature as well as recognizing the structural and natural limits of sustainable development (Redclift 1987). It requires a search not for developmental alternatives but for alternatives to development (Escobar 1995). The current focus on capital and markets to achieve sustainable development is restrictive and disallows alternate ways of thinking and knowing. We need to apply insights from other forms of knowledge, however traditional they may be, and interpret these knowledges in economic, scientific, political, cultural, and social terms that challenge existing views of the world and of nature. Sustainable development is not just about managerial efciency (although that has a part to play); it is about rethinking humannature relationships, re-examining current doctrines of progress and modernity, and privileging alternate visions of the world. It requires a retracing of steps to the juncture where nature became transformed into environment, distancing the natural world and positioning it as a resource to be mastered, in the way that human feelings and expression become mastered through culture. Contemporary notions of sustainable development are embedded in the development discourse that requires the death of nature and the rise of environment. Alternate visions can be imagined only by rescuing sustainable development from this dichotomy. A critical perspective will enable us to recognize that current norms for sustainable development have emerged within a particular historical context, which is the modern capitalist notion of the business corporation operating within a Judeo-Christian ethical framework. In addition to making this assumption explicit and critically examining its implications, we should seek alternate ways of constructing knowledge and developing norms. Current management theories rarely question whose norms are used; rather they tend to normalize conflicting criteria for development and progress. As Rifkin (1999) points out, rather than focusing on the good and bad aspects of the new biotechnologies, we need to ask difficult questions. What are the consequences for the global economy and society of reducing the worlds gene pool to patented intellectual property controlled exclusively by a handful of transnational corporations? What are the structures and processes of power inherent in the new technologies? What impact do they have on the biological diversity of the planet? Who controls this technology? What are its social and cultural impacts? Although developing countries continue to argue for access to these new technologies in various international forums, caution should be exercised in monitoring the impact of these technologies in order not to repeat the mistakes of the Green Revolution, which, while enhancing crop production in a few regions, also accentuated inequalities and increased income disparities (Shiva 1991). Deconstructing singular constructions of nature is important since it allows us to examine how notions of nature are linked with dominant ideas of society, or what Catton and Dunlap (1978) call the dominant western world view. An understanding that meanings of nature are derived from societies and
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cultures allows us to examine what ideas of society and of its ordering become reproduced, legitimated, excluded, validated through appeals to nature or the natural (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 15). For instance, universalized scientific discourses of the environment tend to ignore local cultural differences in NorthSouth trade and environmental relations while masking neo-colonial modes of development in which global environmental problems create the moral base for green imperialism (Shiva 1991). The scientific rationality of ecological modernization constructs a global discourse of environmental problems to which the only solution is for society to modernize itself out of the environmental crisis by increased investments in new environmentally friendly technologies. In many ways the critique of sustainable development and its ancillary corporate environmental management practices is a critique of modernity, with its metanarratives of progress and development. Nature has been deployed as a singular category in this discourse to promote an ecological world order that continues to repress alternate formulations. As mentioned earlier, there is no one global solution. I am not suggesting that the way out is a return to the premodern, even if this were possible. Modernity has produced uneven effects in the Third World, where premodern, modern, and postmodern forms coexist in heterogeneous congurations (Escobar 1992). Although much is to be gained by using insights from postmodernism to expose the fallacies behind rationality and progress, this must be accompanied by questions of social justice and a position of visible political interest. The politics of representation and the nexus between interests and identity (despite their essentialist overtones) continue to play a crucial role in indigenous struggles throughout the world. Despite postmodernisms disavowal of metanarratives, there are problems with the way the post in postmodernism can operate in the guise of knowledge (see Radhakrishnan 1994). Postmodern insights into the fragmentation of identities, the multiplicity of political spaces, and the decentered character of social life can contribute to the creation of new collective organizations and social movements that acknowledge multiplicity and contradictions without imposing a unitary logic (Escobar 1992). Postmodern formulations of nature and the environment might draw attention to the ideologies that reify and reduce nature, including human nature, in the service of clarity and order (Phelan 1994: 59). As Phelan (1994: 59) points out, the questions that need to be asked are not what should we do or not do to nature to save it, but instead how do we understand ourselves and our world and how should we negotiate our relationships with ourselves? This would displace categories that have been used to construct Third World groups while generating alternate ways of seeing and constructing social and cultural self-descriptions in grassroots social movements (Escobar 1992). Recovering biodiversity and the commons involves a refusal to recognize life forms as corporate inventions and property and allow their privatization. Environmental struggles by peasant populations are not just about land or resources: these are cultural struggles in defense of cultural diversity. We should not entertain notions about global sustainability unless we know
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whose globe and whose sustainability we are talking about. Grassroots social movements do not focus on the whole of society but are concerned with local and regional communities. As Escobar (1992) argues, these are not teleological projects with predetermined directions, but they foster a sense of agency in the communities. This requires a transformation of the political, economic, and institutional arrangements that characterized the regime of development, in Estevas words, to intensify the process of construction of direct democracy (Esteva 1986, cited in Escobar 1992), which several social movements are attempting to do (the Zapatista movement in Mexico comes to mind). The rhetoric of democracy and participation in contemporary discourses of free markets and in international forums on sustainable development also needs to be examined with a critical lens. At the 1992 Rio Summit there were open conflicts between corporations, their trade associations, NGOs, and indigenous community leaders over environmental regulations. The demands of NGOs were shelved, and instead a voluntary code of conduct developed by the Business Council for Sustainable Development (consisting of a number of transnational corporations) was approved in what was supposed to be a democratic process of developing an action plan for sustainable development (Hawken 1995). The policies from the Rio Earth Summit and the more recent Johannesburg Earth Summit (an even bigger failure according to many NGOs and environmentalists) stressed the role of transnational corporations in promoting sustainable development, but they are silent about corporate responsibility and accountability for environmental destruction. Development, sustainable or otherwise, in a globalizing world is inherently anti-democratic, as several indigenous groups have found. As Subcomandante Marcos, a leader of the Zapitistas, stated:
When we rose up against a national government, we found that it did not exist. In reality we were up against nancial capital, against speculation, which is what makes decisions in Mexico as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, South America everywhere. (Zapatista 1998).
The story is depressingly familiar to indigenous communities all over the world. In this case, ofcials of the World Bank met in Geneva and decided to give a loan to Mexico on condition it exports meat under the agreements laid down by the World Trade Organization. Land used by indigenous communities to grow corn is now used to raise cattle for fast food markets in the United States. This is an inherently undemocratic process in which peasant populations do not have the right to decide how they want to live. It is another example of how imperialism operates in the Third World: one state (in this case representing the interests of the rich countries, the international institutions they support, and their transnational corporations) controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society, by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. The following was a response to the Zapatista uprising by a transnational bank, a major nancer in the restructuring of Mexicos economy:
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The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy. (Mexico, Political Update, Chase Manhattan Bank; cited in Zapatista 1998)
If this is an example of a corporate triple bottom line strategy to integrate social and environmental issues, the future for resistance movements is very bleak indeed. The diversity of social movements in different parts of the world might provide an alternative reading guide that could transform hegemonic notions of development and modernity (Escobar 1992). The study of traditional ecological knowledge is becoming increasingly in vogue for Western scientists and pharmaceutical corporations. It is crucial to examine this practice with a critical lens in order to understand the stakes involved: who is doing the study and for what purpose? For example, an ongoing United Nations Development Programme project is called Global Sustainable Development Facility 2B2M: 2 Billion to the Market By the Year 2020. The project title itself embodies what is wrong with current notions of sustainable development in that it reveals the continuities of this alleged discontinuity from prior notions of economic growth and development. The fact that a significant proportion of the projects team members are from transnational corporations with documented negative environmental and social impacts on indigenous and rural populations simply strengthens the notion that these international organizations do not and cannot serve community interests. Not one of several hundreds of United Nations projects has ever challenged economic globalism or growth-oriented solutions despite their rhetoric of empowering rural communities. In the current political economy it is simply not possible simultaneously to empower rural communities and transnational corporations, and, as we have seen, any compromise tends seriously to disadvantage the former group. In the search for alternatives to development, apart from a critique of contemporary notions of development, we need to situate our theories within appropriate social movements: for example, traditional ecological knowledge should not be separated from the political, economic, and cultural struggles of indigenous peoples and peasant populations (Carruthers 1996).
Conclusion
Just as the development era consolidated the hegemony of expansionist monopoly capital in Third World sites through large-scale, export-oriented programs and policies that inverted the survival needs of local cultures, the sustainable development era also threatens to map people into certain coordinates of control (Escobar 1995). Any activity outside the market economy is disallowed, which seriously disadvantages the subsistence activities of peasants and indigenous communities all over the world. The reliance on technology to solve all problems the hallmark of the development era continues today with the comforting caveat that technology use should be appropriate. The violence that the so-called Green
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Revolution perpetrated on peasant populations is well documented (Mies and Shiva 1993; Shiva 1989, 1991). The same agencies and corporations that hailed the development of pesticides and herbicides as a technological green revolution (now deemed unsustainable) are extolling the virtues of biotechnology. Farmers and indigenous communities continue actively to resist this new imposition, which once again threatens their survival in the name of sustainable development. Sustainable development, despite its promise of local autonomy, is not egalitarian because environmental destruction is not egalitarian: it is more devastating for people who possess few resources to prevent the destruction of their natural spaces (Bullard 1993). If, as Amartya Sen (1999: 3) states, the quality of life should be measured not by our wealth but by our freedoms, then contemporary discourses of sustainable development, despite their emphasis on quality of life, fall short on delivering freedom; in fact, like development, sustainable development delivers economic unfreedoms to a marginalized majority of the worlds population. These populations are more often than not composed of the poor, the people of color, the women and the children of the Third World (Bandy 1996). The literature on sustainable development has virtually no discussion on the empowerment of local communities, except for some passing references to consulting with communities or ensuring their participation, without providing any framework for how this is to be achieved (Derman 1995). It does criticize the growth model of development, but it positions marginalized local communities as either victims or beneficiaries of development. In the era of sustainable development, it appears these communities will continue to be inscribed as passive objects of Western history and to bear the brunt of what Mies and Shiva (1993) ironically call the white mans burden, a burden that means further loss of community rights and resources. The new biotechnologies of sustainable development have the potential to transform farmers into factory workers on a global scale (Dawkins 1997). This will convert seed custodians into seed consumers, a development that is not sustainable. Sustainable development is to be managed in the same way development was managed: through ethnocentric, capitalist notions of managerial efciency that simply reproduce earlier articulations of decentralized capitalism in the guise of sustainable capitalism. The macroeconomic criteria of sustainable development have now become corporatized: development is sustainable only if it is profitable, it is sustainable only if it can be transacted through the market. This notion of sustainable development packaged and sold by international agencies, governments, and transnational corporations needs to be unpacked and deconstructed, which is what I have attempted to do in this paper. As Visvanathan (1991: 380) points out, the Brundtland report, Our Common Future, focuses on uniformity and order; it organizes the future into resources, energy, populations, cities and towns, with little place for plurality, difference or multiplicity. There is still a belief that better technology and management and better and more inclusive procedures by international institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization can save the planet. Eco-efciency, green marketing, and eco-modernization will
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not save the planet. Current discourses on sustainability ensure that economic rationality determines ecological rationality, resulting in even further erosion of alternate cultural and social values assigned to nature. In effect they extinguish the very cultural and social forces from which possible solutions to the present crisis might emerge. As Redclift (2000) points out, there is a danger that current discourses of sustainability, with their focus on what is sustainable and how it is measured, will lose their radical and political edge. Perhaps sustainable development will follow the fate of the modern environmental movement, which is being increasingly depoliticized by environmental policies that translate environmental choices into market preferences. As Gould (2000: 12) argues, if discourses of sustainable development are to retain their radical and political edge, they must ultimately be rooted in the relationship between specific human populations and specific ecosystems located in specific places. Transnationalism and international institutions operating under neoliberal economic regimes have little regard for the specicities of places or the communities that inhabit them and cannot and will not generate sustainable local economies. Current development patterns (even those touted as sustainable) disrupt social system and ecosystem relations rather than ensuring that natural resource use by local communities meets their basic needs at a level of comfort that is satisfactory as assessed by those same communities. What is needed is not a common future but the future as commons, the plurality of life worlds to which all citizens have access. It is not merely the availability of nature as being but of alternative imaginations, skills that survival in the future might require (Visvanathan 1991: 383). While continuing the epistemic violence of colonial development, sustainable development simultaneously reies global capitalism as the liberating and protecting force that can ensure survival of the human race this is the logic of the world it seeks to construct and impose. The Third World, still in need of development, now needs to be told how to develop sustainably. The consumer is still the king: nature is not so much understood as consumed, and the power dynamics in this new era of globalization and postdevelopment remain unchanged (Banerjee and Linstead 2001). As Bandy (1996) argues, the sustainable development discourse is a new rhetoric of legitimation the legitimation of markets, of transnational capital, of Western science and technology, and of Western notions of progress that in turn legitimizes the violence of (post)modernity. The challenge of sustainable development is ultimately about challenging this legitimacy, it is about challenging the epistemological foundations of knowledge and of the power this knowledge has in dening reality. Perhaps revisiting other knowledges will enable us to define another reality, a reality that does not privilege the natureculture dichotomy, which has proved so disempowering for billions of people. But that is another story.
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Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management at the International Graduate School of Management, University of South Australia, Adelaide. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996. He has taught there as well as at the University of Wollongong, where he headed the doctoral program, and RMIT University, where he was Director of the Doctor of Business Administration program. His research interests are in the areas of sustainable development, corporate environmentalism, sociocultural aspects of globalization, postcolonial theories, and Indigenous ecology. His work has appeared in Organization, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Marketing, Organization & Environment, Media, Culture & Society, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Environmental Education, the Journal of Advertising, and Advances in Consumer Research. Address: International Graduate School of Management, University of South Australia, Level 5, Way Lee Building, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. E-mail: apache@unisa.edu.au

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Organization Studies

European Group for Organizational Studies

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Organization Studies 24(2)