Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Ian Scoones: Reinventing Sustainable Modernization

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Join Endgame YouTube Channel Membership! Support us and get early access to our videos + more perks in return: https://sgpp.me/becomemember ----------------------- In the midst of climate change and global economic development, numerous prescriptions for solutions emerge to mitigate problems and pave the way toward a sustainable future. However, a lingering question persists: are these solutions universally applicable? Ian Scoones, a British agricultural ecologist and prolific writer, delves into the notion that perhaps the key to attaining a sustainable future lies in one simple action: listening to the people. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #Sustainability ----------------------- About the guest: Professor Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. He is also the co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convenor of the Future Agricultures Consortium. Ian laid down the foundation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that we know today through his famous work, Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) which was established in the late 1990s. His famous books include, “Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development” (2021), “The Politics of Green Transformations" (2015), and “Dynamic Sustainabilities: Linking Environment, Technology and Social Justice in a Dynamic World” (2010). The host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Gita is also just appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. ----------------------- Read Ian’s Books for Free: “Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development” (2021) "The Politics of Green Transformations" (2015) ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps163notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: Daring Entrepreneurs | Wandering Scientists | The Take Visit and subscribe: SGPP Indonesia | Visinema Pictures

So, you know, a singular focus just on growth or, you know, technology-led growth is not enough these days, if it ever was. It was a sort of modernization zeal that created very often the problems that we're facing now. Hello, teman, today we're getting to get a doctor Ian Scunz. He was a guru or professor at the University of Sussex. Bidangu is related with pertanian and ecology. Healue. He was done readies, many of publications and book.

Hi, Ian, thank you so much for gracing our event. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I want to inquire of your childhood in England. And later on, you know, lead us to, the point where you made a decision to pursue whatever you were pursuing at the moment. Tell us. Well, I was born quite a long time ago in southern England. I grew up in the countryside. It was a sort of farming area. I was passionate about nature and wildlife and conservation questions. and that was a sort of leaping off point for me

to get interested at school in biology and ecology. And then I went off to university and studied biology, but it was quite a sort of conventional science-orientated course. I loved it, but what I wanted to do was relate this to some of the other things that were happening. in the world. I was, you know, got involved at university and all sorts of activism, around the anti-apartheid movement, around anti-nuclear activism. This was in the 1980s. And, you know, somehow I wanted my science to connect with action. So that's when, you know,

when I was doing my PhD, which started off at Imperial College in London, I thought, well, okay, so I'm going to be an ecologist. That's going to help change the world. And then I got to do my fieldwork. My field work was in Zimbabwe, which is in southern Africa. And I was living in a very, very rural area and quite basic village conditions and learning about livestock and livestock and grazing and how people manage the land. But about halfway through my PhD, I thought, actually, it's the people who are more interesting

than the livestock, or at least it's the livestock and the people interactions. So my PhD moved from a sort of fairly conventional biology PhD, looking at grasses and population movements and how animals graze and all of that, to one that probably I would describe now as a livelihood study, trying to understand. how people interact with the environment and how questions of sustainability and development are played out in this particular

rural setting. So in a way that was my first move in the 1980s in Zimbabwe towards a more rounded perspective which I've carried on ever since. My tutors at university found it then difficult

to know where I was going to be examined because I was doing it the school of biology, but actually I was doing a lot of stuff which was in economics, a lot of stuff that was in anthropology. And in those days, interdisciplinarity, I mean, it's a sort of common word these days in universities, it just wasn't the thing. So in the end, they concocted some things and I got a PhD in the end. But yeah, that was the moment. And it was very inspiring time to be Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe had actually only very recently become independent, became independent only in 1980. It was a time of hope, it was a time of excitement, a time when, you know, the expectations of development in a, you know, relatively poor country in southern Africa, you know, potentially could be realized.

And there were a lot of us inspiring people around. There was one particular man, sadly now late, who I think for all of this time has been one of my great inspirations. He was called Zephanaya Piri. Just a farmer lived in a very humble village near where I lived in an equally humble village. But he was known locally as the water harvester. It was a dry area. there were you know dry land cropping was hard there were regular droughts people struggled to make ends meet

but mr peary as we called him because he was definitely older than us he had to have the respect to being called mr peary he had transformed his farm into something quite incredible he was capturing water from these rocks that live near that were near his home he was deep and he was picking pits. He was managing a small wetland that was there and making that the most productive area that you could imagine. And his work, I mean, you know, we came across him just by chance, but became a central part of what happened subsequently in that area. He set up what was called the Jashawani Water Projects. And in a way it was just a classic idea of how small things innovation at a local level, using local knowledge,

understanding the local environment could really transform what was a pretty harsh, difficult dry land area. So I sort of took that inspiration from Mr. Piri and it's always resonated with me, long after he's passed to galvanize me, that some of these ideas can come and make a difference. Why Zimbabwe? Yeah, it's a good question.

It's a good question from Sussex to Zimbabwe. I mean, you know, as you know, Zimbabwe and the UK have a long and troubled connection through colonialism. I was friends with a colleague of mine who was teaching there soon after independence, helping people out in various schools. And he said, oh, well, come, you know, it's a really fascinating place, exciting place. And I stayed for several years with this wonderful family who I'm still in contact with, the Mukamuris, and yeah, it sort of has become my second home. Because I actually don't have particular family connections,

and people in Britain do have family connections to Zimbabwe. But yes, it was one of those fortuitous things. And, you know, since, well, it's been, what, 35, even more years now since I've been working there on and off. with Zimbabwe and colleagues who I've worked with over that period. So it wasn't because of its peculiar ecological characteristic or whatever. Well, I was interested in what's called savannah ecology. These are ecosystems that have a mixture of grasslands and trees. I mean, that was my ecological background.

and I was particularly interested in how grazing systems emerge in those settings, because the savannas of the world, I mean, there are many in Southeast Asia, but there are plenty in Africa as well, the savannas of the world are the important ecosystem for livestock, for wildlife, for grazing systems more generally. And I was interested in debates at that time, which were challenging some of our ecological understandings of these systems. Right. Because in the past, the assumptions were, well, you know, you have a, you know, in the mid- Midwest

of the United States or Australia, for example, all you need to do is put lots of fences in and manage these grasslands as if they were, you know, like fields, like agronomists to, you know, stabilize, control, manage in a simplified way. But actually these ecosystems are highly variable. And understanding how livestock make use of them and wildlife make use of them is a really, really important understanding. And it has major implications for how we think about what we do in terms of livestock development and so on. So that was, I suppose, my sort of scientific question that I wanted to investigate. But as I said, I just got sort of involved in the place, in the people, meeting the likes of Mr. Piri.

A wonderful other guy called Mafao, who was interested in indigenous trees, and we developed a little project on indigenous tree growing. You know, I was in my 20s. This was an exciting time. This was a time when you could, you know, could do interesting things. And it was a time in Zimbabwe, as I said, where, you know, people were experimenting, people were hopeful after. for a terrible period of colonialism, a terrible period of war. This was a time of hope and excitement. So it was fun and exciting to be part of it.

And it's a very beautiful place. So if you ever go there, go and... I've never been there, but I've been to a lot of parts of Africa. But it's definitely on my list. Well, Zimbabwe is an amazing place. Troubled in many ways, but still an amazing and exciting place. Yeah. Walk through some parts of your book.

you know, sustainable livelihoods and rural development. It's been translated into so many languages, one of which is Bahasa. What are some of the key parts of your book that, you know, our audience in at least Southeast Asia deserve to, you know, pay attention to? Yeah, well, I'm so delighted that it's now in Bahasa. It's also in a variety of other languages, as you said, and Insist Press and Udina's Insist Press did a fantastic job in getting it out and available to a wider audience. And Nurhadi in particular did an amazing job, I understand, in translating it,

which is not an easy job. Yeah. Because these terms don't always easily translate. It's beautifully translated. Yeah. Well, Nurhadi Siddhara Rock is the translator who should get all the credit for that. And it's got a lovely cover, I think, too. Yeah.

Credit should go to the artist's collective. Taring Padi, I think, it's called Fantastic Beautiful Cover. Anyway, that's the book. That's book as exists in Indonesian. But it does have a little bit of a backstory to it, which I should tell, which explains why I ended up writing the book. So in the mid-1990s, we were involved in a research project based at the University of Sussex, but with colleagues in Bangladesh, in Ethiopia, and in Europe.

Mali, and we were puzzling over trying to think about changes in rural systems. Because at that stage, rural development as an approach had rather sort of run aground. It had become very technocratic. It was all about just delivering particular types of technical solution. But actually, the complexities of rural life are such that, you know, those don't often work. So we began to develop what we called a livelihoods approach, but then became a sustainable livelihoods approach, because sustainability, you know, this is the mid-90s,

this is soon after the big conferences around sustainability and so on. It became increasingly, increasingly a central question in development to connect economic growth and economic transition with making sure that the environment was protected, or not necessarily protected, but at least sustained the ability of people to live. So we puzzled over this. And a lot of the work in development was led appropriately by economists. Either macroeconomists looking at the big picture trade questions and so on,

or micro-economists, agricultural economists, looking at inputs and outputs and how people made use of those for particular outcomes. But we were also, we were very interested. disciplinary team. We had economists on the team, but others were saying, well, economics is really good at some things. It's good at assessing, you know, what are the inputs, what are the outputs, what are the outcomes, and doing that in a quantitative way. But actually, there's a lot more going on in that process. There are institutions, there is gender relations, there are, there's power and politics, they're organizational forms and so on.

So that's why we then, as it were, developed this, the original Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, which came out in 1998, I think. It might have just left there as a sort of nice idea for a research project, and it certainly helped us in our research project. But actually, this coincided in the UK with a transition. politically. In 1997, Tony Blair got into government. He and Gordon Brown and their minister, Claire Short, were very keen on setting up a separate development department, which became Diffid, the department

for international development. And central to the first white paper and the first plan for that department was, by chance, the idea, well, not completely by chance, was the idea that we should think about livelihoods, or sustainable livelihoods. So it was lucky we had that conversation early on. It got established in policy. It became a sort of focus for investment and political action. And people within DIFID and then subsequently across UN organizations

and a lot of the international NGOs took this up as a way of thinking about rural development in a slightly different way, getting away from the old sectoral approach. There were some people working on agriculture, some people working on education, some people working on marketing and so on. But actually, what we really wanted to do was start from what people did in places

and work up from there and ask the question, well, what can development, external interventions of different sorts, help and how can it help? And it's not always just a sexual intervention. It could be, but it's often more than that. So, you know, before we knew it,

this sustainable livelihoods thing in the late 1990s became a sort of big, had a big momentum around it. And there were lots of experiments, some good, some bad, in all parts of the world where this approach was applied. So it was about 10 years after all of that that we had a little reflection, okay, so where did all this go? What was missing from the original formulation?

What have we learned from all this practical implementation on the ground? And that was the impetus for writing the book. So it was a sort of reflection back, but also an attempt to take it forward. Because although, you know, there were lots of critiques, quite valid critiques at this framework, they become very instrumental. It was just just wrapped up in aid bureaucracies.

It just became a sort of standard approach for spending money and so on. I mean, you know the process. It's often the way, you know, new idea becomes old idea, and it just gets stuck. But I look back on it. and thought, well, actually, there's some good ideas in there, and they haven't gone away, this challenge of integration, this challenge of thinking more laterally and holistically, this challenge of breaking down silos and connecting things, this challenge of connecting disciplines,

connecting economics, with its useful inputs with other, with, you know, sociology and anthropology and political science and so on, in a more integrated cross-disciplinary way. So we started with the basic question, which is at the center of the livelihoods framework, which is essentially running across the framework. How do context influence the way different people put together assets, i.e. the resources they have at their disposal, which can be economic, they can be knowledge, they can be financial and so on, they can be natural resources. how do context influence how these different resources are put together

to result in different livelihood pathways? So it could be agriculture, it could be diversification out of agriculture, it could be migration, connections to cities and so on, with what outcomes? And we were also interested in outcomes, not only outcomes that are about driving growth and employment, but outcomes that were about ensuring economic, income and inclusive arrangements, but also sustainability outcomes.

Are these livelihood pathways generating processes that will be sustainable for the next generation and the generation after that? And that was important to bring that debate into rural development thinking, because it hadn't been, because the environmental people often kept very separate from the development people, as if these were two separate worlds, they're not. And we can come back to some of those contradictions, I'm sure. Yeah. And then we added to the basic question, which I think to some extent is the most important question,

in developing these different livelihood options with these different outcomes, what are the institutions, what are the politics, what are the processes that allow this to happen or not allow this to happen? Because in any different setting, you're going to get all sorts of institutional and political arrangements that allow people to flourish with their livelihoods or the opposite. And very often we don't think about those institutional configurations deeply enough when we think about development. As I say, development tended to be very technical. All we need to do is, you know, add a bit more a new seed variety, a bit more fertilize,

that was the sort of idea behind the Green Revolution, which was important, but it wasn't enough. So that's where we ended up. And the book took up some of the critique, took up some of the critique that this was just simply an sort of instrumental development-oriented thing, that it didn't have enough politics in it, that we weren't thinking enough about the political processes

that allow livelihoods to happen, been too idealistic. And we were being too localist. Actually, livelihoods emerge in these wider contexts of nation states and the degree to which there is space within nation states for these type of options. So the next, the book then reflects back on this and develops an extended, what I call an extended livestock livelihoods framework, which are, series of questions, which are essentially political economy questions. Because at that stage, this book was written in 2014. It came out in English in 2015, I think. At that stage, Iowa had become very involved in debates about agrarian political economy. In other words,

how does politics and economics interact and affect the way that people can thrive or not thrive? and questions of class, of race, of gender, of difference. How does that affect how people can see their livelihoods through? So I was inspired by another book which is actually in this same series, written by Henry Bernstein, who is a professor at the University of London, and he came up with these very simple four questions of agrarian. in political economy. And I thought, yes, these are livelihoods questions.

These are actually at the centre of extending these livelihoods approach. And the four questions are, who owns what, you know, basic questions of access, which is going to affect what resources you can do to make a livelihood. And it's going to be differentiated by rich and poor, men and women, etc., etc. who does what? I mean, you know, what do people do? But that's about the social divisions of labour, about different forms of employment, temporary and permanent. Who gets what? That's questions of accumulation and differentiation, you know, basic questions in political economy, how patterns of accumulation occur. And then what do they do with it? These are the questions of, of, of, of, what?

what are the livelihood strategies. And we see in all parts of the world that people aren't just farmers, they aren't just rural, they mix things, people move between urban and rural areas, people farm, but they also do off-farm work. They are doing a whole variety of different labour to make their livelihoods in a diversified way. And that's really important to get your head around, because if you're going to support people, in order to reduce poverty, to boost rural development, then you've got to understand what people do. Just focusing on people as agriculturalists is not enough.

So I found that really useful. I mean, it's very basic, very simple, but it just fitted with the earlier framework and gave it a bit more, I don't know, a bit more oomph to the general discussion of what are livelihoods. And that's at the center of the book that we've been discussing. Do you sense that there is now a greater divergence between politics and sustainability? Well, that's a very good and big question.

I mean, I think at a rhetorical level, political debate has got to grips to some extent with sustainability questions. You know, climate change is right up there in global debates, and correctly so. But I don't think the wider question of sustainability has been grasped. It tends again to be, oh, well, we've just got to deal with an energy transition. Oh, well, we've just got to deal with getting out of fossil fuels. I mean, those are all important. I'm not going to deny that. But sustainability is much broader.

I'm with you. It's about thinking about how environmental systems generate the possibility of living on this planet at the most broad level. And the sustainable development goals, you know, which were established a while back, 2015, more or less the same time this book came out, you know, there were 17 goals. they covered the whole array of different ambitions for humanity. They provided a framework within the United Nations for thinking about sustainability and development together. I thought that was a really useful move. I think it was an important move.

And, you know, most countries around the world, at least at a rhetorical level, are saying, well, we're trying to gear our economies and our social services sector and our investment in natural resources towards achieving the sustainable development goals. But the problem is, and it's the old problem that the Sustainable Livelyhoods framework and approach tried to tackle way back in the 1990s was that they became siloed, 17 goals. And everyone had their own goal. You know, the urban people went for the urban goal.

The energy people went for the energy goal. The health people went for the health goal. that was not the point of the sustainable development goals. They have to be seen together. And my argument, you know, when they came out, not surprisingly, was, hey, you know, we've got this framework, we've got this approach called sustainable livelihoods. It's about the same outcomes, making sure development and sustainability work together. But we're not integrating.

We need to have a way of thinking across sectors, across, across the way economies and societies work, that don't end up siloing us. And this is very difficult. I mean, you've been in government, so you know how difficult it is. You know, different ministers have different portfolios. Budgets go in different ways.

There are bureaucracies that have their own area of work. It's very difficult to move beyond thinking in that divided up way. So even though politics recognizes sustainability these days, much more than it did even 10 years ago, even five years ago, and climate change and the effects of the climate on all of us is driving awareness appropriately, I don't think there has been this transition into thinking about sustainability in a broader way.

And I think that's a problem, And I think that's where, as it were, if we were going to go further with the book, those are some of the debates that we really need to. You know, I get a sense that what you've written is not reflected in the way people are actually supposed to be changing their lifestyles. And it just tells me that there's not a whole lot of agency on the parts of most people around the world would respect to sustainability, much less, you know, the political ownership taking or lack their off with respect to the issue of sustainability, right? And I think it is a greater concern today than it would have been maybe five, ten, or twenty

years ago with respect to tackling climate change issues at the rate that people are actually not adopting new kinds of lifestyles. And at the rate that if you take a look at or you listen to many politicians around the world, they don't seem to be understanding what needs to be articulated, what needs to be done with respect to climate change. Does not worry? No, I couldn't. I couldn't.

It worries me a lot. Yeah. I mean, you know, in Europe at the moment, we're experiencing forms of weather that are extreme. in all extremes, from extreme heat to massive storms to, you know, and attributing that to climate change is difficult, but clearly climate change has an effect on weather patterns of this sort. And, you know, people are facing this on a day-to-day basis. We're in the rich countries of, you know, the northern part of where I live, you know, we're insulated from it

to some degree, but there are many other people around the world, including my friends in Zimbabwe, for example, who are not. They're on the front line of these global changes, but they're not in these fora for discussing which way to go. And, you know, there's a sense of disconnect between politicians who are very happy to talk about climate change, but not necessarily think through the implications of the fundamental implications of a transition to a more sustainable approach. And that's why to some extent the livelihoods approach focuses in its framework on outcomes. You know, we have to deliberate as society what world we want. So, you know, a singular focus just on growth or, you know, technology-led

growth is not enough these days, if it ever was. I mean, in the periods of, you know, sort of early 1960s, 70s modernization, that was all that politicians could talk about. You know, people gained independence. They gained opportunity to construct development. It was a sort of modernization zeal that created very often the problems that we're facing now. So I think, you know, what we, one of the discussions that we have had centrally around the livelihoods approach is, is how do you convene these deliberations on outcomes? So what are the trade-offs between sustainability and poverty reduction? What are those trade-offs between economic growth and environmental sustainability?

How do we deliberate on how these work? And then work backwards, as it were, through the framework to say, well, which livelihoods, which institutions, which forms of asset and so on, will deliver those type of outcomes? Because I think very often we end up just talking about the means rather than the ends, in the sense that we end up just thinking about, well, perhaps all we need to do is change our diet, or perhaps all we need to do is adopt a degrowth policy,

or perhaps all we need to do is just get everything into renewable energy. But the question is, do those deliver the outcomes that we want? Not necessarily, or not necessarily for all places at all times. So that's why I think the livelihoods approach is just a useful way of thinking about these things. Because I think just a sort of ideological assumption coming out of a sort of narrow form of environmentalism can get us in just as many problems as we were in before. So I think that's when we talk about green transformations, transformations towards sustainable livelihoods.

We've got to think about the multiple pathways to get there. And they'll be different in Indonesia to Zimbabwe to the UK, for sure. So there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to global sustainability. And that's why I think, you know, again, sometimes the SDGs have become a little bit too prescriptive, often driven by ideas about development that come from, well, not where the challenge is laid. So, I mean, these need to be national projects. These need to be about a political deliberation about which way to go. So in some other parallel work that we did on green transformations,

there's another book on that very topic. We, you know, we began to think about, well, how do you generate these type of transformation? How do you think about how to mobilize social movements, mobilize the private sector, develop the capacities of the state to facilitate transitions or transformations more to these new alternative pathways. And they can be multiple. There's no one way to the final end point. There are multiple ways. And that's why, as it were, getting away from the sort of simplistic, yes, let's change the diet, let's just cut out particular types of industry. let's just adopt these types of technology.

But thinking about it, again, holistically, the argument of the livelihoods approach is critical. And we came up with this thing in the centre that I used to run, sadly now closed, that looked at which direction to go. This is one debate to have. In other words, which trajectory does, do you want your society, economy and so on, to move in? That's a crucial debate because there isn't a singular transition to a green economy or a green future.

There are many. So which direction do you want? And it may be different in rural areas to urban areas and definitely different across countries. The second question was, how are the benefits and costs of this transformation distributed? So who wins, who loses? Very basic question. Because it's all well and good saying, yeah, we must eliminate all coal production, which ultimately we must do.

But in the interim, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of regions, there are a lot of livelihoods associated with fossil fuel production, various sorts. It's not just the big companies, it's the people who are involved in these settings. So how are costs and benefits distributed? You know, who wins, who loses? And the third question was around diversity. What are the diversity of technologies, institutions, approaches and pathways that we need in order to get to this endpoint. And we call this the 3D framework. Surprise, surprise.

Diversity, distribution, and direction, diversity, and distribution. These three need to be thought of all together. Because if you only think of one, if you only think of the direction, and you don't think about distribution, people are going to say, well, You know, we don't want that. You're imposing this green taxation or this green solution on us, and, you know, we don't want it. And if you don't think about diversity, you're not going to have the diversity of technological, social, and other solutions to meet your different directions. So they all have to be thought about together.

And cutting across all three of them is another D, democracy, because none of this can be done without bringing people. with you. Let me you know let me let me lay it out to you you know

I've been talking about this a few times about something that's paradoxical we when we talk to people of sustainability

they just seem a little too elitist to me right they talk about the nice future that we're going to have in terms of

carbon neutrality by 2050 it only resonates to probably no more than 15 to 20% of the population of the world. Whereas the other 80 to 85%

of the population of the world are still worried about putting food on a table. You know, regardless of what methods they use to put food on a table. Right. And I've been saying this, you know, many times in that in order for anybody from a developing country like I am, like where I'm from, you know,

one needs to be modern thinking to be able to understand a narrative of sustainability. And one needs to get a really good definition of what it takes to be modern. One metric is electrification, right? I mean, you need to be electrified to the extent of 5,000-k-watt-hour per capita. Countries like India and Indonesia are electrified only to the extent of 1,300-kilowatt hour per capita now. It takes India and Indonesia at a rate of their power generation capabilities build out on a yearly basis of 19,000 megawatts and 3,000 megawatts, respectively for India and Indonesia. it takes 100 years for us to get to 6,000 megawatts,

I mean, kilowatt hour per capita. Right there you know, things are just not right at the rate that these two narratives, the narrative of development and narrative of sustainability are just totally irreconcilable. Right?

You can go to Glasgow, you can go to Paris and cheer lead upon narrative that this is how the world is going to be, but when you go back to Zimbabwe, you go back to Nigeria, you go back to India, you go back to Indonesia. We don't care if we got to emit carbon by burning coal

because that's the only thing. That's the only means we have to put food on the table. And there's not a whole lot of discussion on, you know, finding the right alternatives that would be economically feasible for the country, a developing country. You know, the narrative for a developing country is to develop and to develop. You need to grow. to grow, you need to burn.

And I don't know. What do you think? Well, I agree entirely with you that there's this sort of disjuncture between the discourse around environmental solutions and where most of the world is. The majority world is in a different place. And I think we have to recognize that and be realistic. about it. And that's why I think, you know, these ideas about the three Ds, the direction and the distribution and the diversity. The four D's. The four D's with the with democracy in there, become crucial. And I think, you know, it's very important for, you know, increasingly powerful

countries, whether it's Indonesia or India or China or Nigeria, to begin to articulate a vision for, you know, sustainable. sustainability transitions and transformations towards green futures that are located in the realities of those settings. Because, as you say, it's an elitist, let's call it a colonial vision very often that's foisted across the world, often with a very technocratic version. Yeah, all of you people, you must adopt this technology or that technology or that technology. and all our collective problems will be solved. Now, it's not to say some of those technologies may not be useful, but it's, again, it's rather like where the debate in rural development got stuck in the 1960s.

All we need to do is high-yielding varieties and fertilise that will solve our rural development problems, and now the rhetoric is all we need is solar palinals and windmills. I'm making it overly simplistic and all our energy problems with. But this is, you know, again, falling into the trap of thinking about means, not ends. And that's why it's so, so important for, you know, conversations in Indonesia or wherever to have a really inclusive, deep discussion about the end point. So what do we want in our society that makes us sustainable, but also means that development,

which does include some elements of growth and poverty reduction and so on, happen. And it will be different. And I think that's where we have to get to this idea of these multiple pathways and not just be reliant on what some people call a sort of eco-modernist solution. All we have to do is galvanize the technologies, and impose them around the world with huge amounts of climate finance. I think we'll just end up with a lot of the same problems we've had with development

in its previous incarnations, which didn't have the climate tag on it. Yeah. I mean, you make the point about modernity or being modern, and I couldn't agree more, that having access to electricity is important for all sorts of things, whether it's, you know, making sure that you can pump water for your farm or whether it's having lights for your kids to be able to read at night, to be able to study. You know, it's one of the basic things. But there are, you know, there are multiple modernities out there.

Let's not assume that there's one version. Yeah. Because, I mean, you said you done work in the United States. We don't necessarily want a version of an intent. energy-intensive fossil fuel-consuming modernity all over the world. It would be a catastrophe. So I think people have to reinvent what a modern way of life is. And it shouldn't be a two-track thing.

You know, the Americans can have their air conditioning, but elsewhere they can't. It needs to – but it doesn't need to end up with us. having just one version of that. So I think that's where the debate must go. And again, back to the livelihoods approach, I still think it is a useful way of thinking about it because it doesn't start with a solution. It starts with a diagnosis.

Where do we want to get to? What outcomes do we want? And then how do we get there through what combinations of mobilizing, what assets, what institutional arrangements, what livelihood pathways and how do we support that? And that's why I think that's the better way to go

than just coming with a pre-packaged set of solutions out of the cupboard. To borrow one of your four letters, one of the Ds that you've mentioned, do you think that we could be more diagnostic by way of democratizing the conversation, a little bit more. I get the sense that the conversations have been a little too elitized as opposed to democratized, right?

It serves the purpose of a few only as opposed to the 200 countries that live on this planet. And at the rate that it's, at the rate that the, you know, the conversation is not adequately democratized, we're rushing ourselves into solutions that, may not be applicable to those that live in Nigeria, those that live in Kalimantan, you know. Precisely. No, I mean, I think the process of democratization debates around debates about innovation, about development, about what sustainability means is absolutely at the core of this. Because it's only then do you have access to a diversity of ideas.

That's another D. Only then do you have access to a sense of multiple pathways, different directions, another D. And only then can you address questions of distribution to make sure that people are included in that conversation and don't get left out of these big and necessary transitions and transformations that are going to have to happen if we're to deal with climate change and associated environmental questions. So, you know, I think it's crucial. And political cultures in different parts of the world will have to invent this in different ways. You know, these conversations can happen in different places.

They can happen in the mosque. They can happen in the schools. They can happen in parliament. They can happen in people's fields and people's community centers. They can happen around forms of organization, new forms of organization, that take up the sustainability agenda along with their existing struggles. So, you know, labor unions, for example, or shouldn't just be about fighting for labor,

they should be fighting for sustainable livelihoods. Farming activists and movements need to think about, well, how do we improve the lot of peasants in Indonesia? easier or wherever, but in a way that makes sure that those, the futures of their peasants, of these peasants, the children of the people in the movement, have a sustainable life. And so on. And, you know, again, I think we talked about this before, not allowing the environmental movement, the environmental concerns to become separated from very basic concerns about livelihood, development, economic change.

And I think that's been the part of the problem. And it's a sort of, it's been replicated from the way the environmental movement emerged in Northern Europe and the US. And it's been, as it were, transferred and translated into different settings around the world. And I think, you know, it's important for people like yourselves in Indonesia to reinvent the environmental movement and bring it back into the center of society and not have the environmental movement just as climate activists, just as people who are interested in nature conservation.

Environment, you know, questions of sustainability are central to everything. And that's why we call it sustainable livelihoods. You know, it's not livelihoods and sustainability, it's sustainable livelihoods, livelihoods that can persist long into the future despite the challenges that we face from biodiversity loss and climate change and pollution and so on. All of those have to be tackled if we are going to deal with these. And it does require a democratic approach. It does require civil society, politicians, people in business, city mayors, all to get involved in a very fundamental way. And I think it's a central role for governments to create that platform.

Ian, that sounds nice, but it just sounds almost impossible to achieve. Right. I mean, we're talking about creating a new political culture all over the world where anybody that's in a position of leadership, whether it's at home, at the church, at the mosque, at the mosque, at the synagogue, at the labor union, at the soccer game, at a football game, at a whatever place that's supposed to manifest social institutions are supposed to be talking, the talk,

so that people will behave and show the kind of livelihood that's supposed to lead up to sustainability. That's, I'm not saying it's an impossibility, but I'm saying it's going to be very difficult for the 200 countries around the world to achieve that sort of a, you know, quality of political culture that's felt and bled and lived in every echelon of the society, don't you think? It certainly, I mean, it certainly is a challenge, but we've, I mean, we've,

we've seen big transformations before. You know, think 30, 40 years ago, what was the, what were the role of, the role of, the role of women in political systems and in the economy, very different to now. You know, probably if we had that conversation 40 years ago about, we would have said, oh, that's too difficult. Surely we can't expect women to be involved in politics. Surely that's impossible. Surely religion will be against that.

Surely men will block the realization of, we're not. women's emancipation hasn't been fulfilled completely, but major changes have happened. Why, how? Changes in political culture, changes in the way that we think about the world and organized movements. I mean, organized movements around these debates then become really important. So I don't deny that it's a challenge. I mean, unquestionably, it's certainly a challenge in the UK.

And we go forward a bit, and then we go back a bit, and we go forward a bit. But, you know, even if you think back 10 years ago, some of the discourse around these discussions has shifted. So, yeah, I agree it's challenging, but we, you know, people in the community of ideas and the community of practitioners have got to be pushing things out there. I'm not a complete utopian. but I have hope. I'm with you. I have hope.

I'm a hopeful person too. I have hope. Yeah, I think if we give up and give in to despair, then, well, then there's nothing we can do. If we have a vision and if we have a set of tools, I'm not saying that this book provides all the tools, but it's one amongst many that you can.

going to have in your toolbox, a set of ideas, then I think we can do things. And I think we can do things in ways that, yeah, our children will look back and say, ah, these guys, you know, they were very basic, but at least they started something. Just as we look back to feminist movements from the 1970s and we say, my goodness, they were absolutely on the margins, but now, you know, they managed a struggle that is so important to our societies and transformed our societies. Let me push the envelope a little bit. In an era where there is increasing social emisseration, greater degree of elite overproduction,

add to these two, you know, the fact that the global order has become a lot more multi-polar, right? How do you multilateralize, you know, certain behavioral frameworks that would entail the kinds of livelihoods that you're suggesting, right? It would have been probably easy in a unipolar kind of world where one guy could tell everybody what to do, right? Yeah, but that's not a very democratic. approach. I know, I think, I think, you know, thinking at a global level is not democracy in a

parliamentary sense, and we're not expecting global government, but actually having a multipolar world where voices from places like Indonesia or Nigeria or even Zimbabwe or wherever can be part of the conversation actually enriches it massively. And, you know, China has taken the lead in a lot of technological innovations very rapidly, in a relatively top-down type of way, as is the way with China. But they move fast and can show us both the benefits and indeed the dangers of doing things. So we don't want to all follow an American, Euro-American model. That was the failure of development from the 1960s in that unipolarly.

post-cold war world. There was a particular vision. It was imposed in the post-colonial era on the world through so-called development and aid. And, you know, there were some benefits. I don't deny there were some benefits. I mean, I work at an Institute of Development Studies, which was established in that period. But actually, is the diversity of experiences, experiments, new ways of thinking. that allow the multiple directions and multiple forms of pathway that we were talking about before to emerge.

And, you know, if Indonesia does a very interesting experiment in, you know, energy transitions, it may be that other countries in the region or other countries somewhere else in the world could learn something from it. So, you know, I'm not of the view that, you know, a world government, a cockpit approach to solving the world's problems is the way to go. I mean, some people make that argument, you know, the challenge is so urgent, it's so important that actually somebody needs to take control. And it's usually me, you know, the person speaking. and it's usually a white male northern person who thinks they know how to run the world

because they think if they were in charge everything would be solved I think that is just an illusion and a dangerous illusion we cannot solve these problems they're so intricate they're so complex they're so nonlinear they're so variable there's uncertainty is central to the way that we have to tackle global problems, they have to be emergent. They have to

be come out of discussions in particular places through particular mobilizations of different forms of knowledge, different forms of action. And that's where you get agency back into the process. Yeah, it might take a bit longer, but I think it will be more sustainable in the longer term than some godlike figure coming from somewhere saying, you will do this. We know that doesn't work. So, you know, I think, you know, I remain hopeful. I think the challenges are so large, they're so important.

And I think the galvanization in all these social spaces that you were listing earlier on will happen. Yeah. They already are happening. You know, people are discussing. at the soccer game, why is the weather so hot? They are saying,

you know, these very basic questions can then translate into an awareness, translate into a sense of action. The agency only goes to the extent of recognizing that there is a problem. It doesn't go to the extent of doing something about it.

Well, that troubles me. That's why I'm not a sort of idealist in the sense that everything can, emerge out of individual action or from the bottom up. States, governments still are important and as ways of providing the sort of regulatory but also discursive framework for doing things. And that's why leadership becomes crucial and why politicians, hopefully, and there are some around the world, take these sort of arguments seriously and run with them. You know, I mean, look at Brazil.

I mean, Brazil had a president who wasn't interested in the environment at all. It's got a new president, and the rate of deforestation in the Amazon basin in Brazil has declined by 30 or 40 percent in a year or two. You know, this is why political action and leadership can make a difference. So it's that sort of platform that people need to see. And that's why governments need to think about, you know, industrial policies that have a focus on a particular direction that they will lead their countries in. And it's, you know, not old-style state planning.

They're going to have to bring the private sector with them. They're going to have to bring investment from outside. they're going to have to mobilize people. And that does require states to get involved in discussions about direction. But they're also going to be, have to be involved in discussions about distribution. Because if that transition that they set off on results in the emiseration of even more people, they're going to get voted out in the next election correctly. So, you know, it has to be this continuous balance.

thing act between the 3Ds, if you like, in the context of a democratic debate. So, yeah, I'm not the idealist who says everything can happen or all can happen from the individual actions of individual people who become aware. That's important. But states need to be states with the private sector, with international finance, with the global community, need to get firmly in there and see that very much. part of their mission. And the sort of bigger plans for developing countries were very much part and parcel of what people did in the 60s and 70s. You know, they used to be five-year plans. Well,

we need a 25-year plan for a transformation of all economies around the world into a more sustainable alternative. And that requires a democratic debate about which directions to go, who wins, who loses, how people are compensated, and what diversity of options we can put on the table. And it needs to start yesterday. I mean, that's the challenge. And, you know, one of the challenges, of course, is governments aren't in long enough.

That's why the Chinese can get, you know, can think in a 30-year, 40-year time horizon. Or 100 years. Or 100 years, because the party has a sense of that longevity. And I'm not saying that that's necessary the solution, but it's an important reflection on the short-termism of electoral politics and electoral cycles that we all get into. So it's one of the downsides of that type of democracy. From a livelihood standpoint, what do you think can be done to entail some sort of a political culture that, will do exactly what you've just described.

Well, I think, you know, the starting point of the livelihoods framework, as I said right at the beginning, is to understand what people do all day, to connect with people, to understand what their challenges are, who they are, why they are, what they do, ask those four questions, how do people gain access to resources or not? What do people do with them? What are the patterns of accumulation that allow some people, people to get on, some people not. And what are the implications of all of that for sustainability and livelihoods?

And I think it's really, really important in debates about development, debates about economies, is to connect with what people already do. Because too often policy debates happen in rarefied settings in capital cities, in international conferences, in air-conditioned, air-conditioned, air- conditioned rooms with the elites, but they're not connecting with what really people do and how people live. And I think the livelihoods, you know, idea, if you like, or set of ideas is to start with what do people really do, what are the challenges people face, and how do we build policy from that, not start with a set of simplistic solutions that get imposed through a transfer of technology or

transfer of policy ideas. But think about this holistically. Think about this in an integrated way. Think about this in a way that allows politicians and others to get a sense of what's happening. Because I think very often there's this massive separation between, you know, the political elite who are detached from their constituencies, even if they're, you know, notionally representing them.

And I think we need to reverse that. And we need to get people from Kalamantan or Sulawesi or other parts, the remoter parts of Java and so on and get them into the conversation. How do you live? How do you struggle? What are your challenges of development and sustainability? And build our debates from there. And I think that's what the livelihood's approach can really help,

because the livelihoods framework allows policy people to start making the connections, to start thinking about, well, what are the challenges here? Where's an intervention point that we might be able to improve people's lives and build those interventions from there? And I think, you know, I said, you know, in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, there was this flurry of livelihoods projects that emerged out of the livelihoods framework and all the interest in it in the aid agencies and so on. And I was a bit dismissive of them at the time when we were talking about them earlier on

because I think they tended to instrumentalize and make things limited. But there was a lot of good learning that went on then. And we kind of lost that now. People who retreated back into their silos, retreated back into a very sort of technocratic way of dealing with development. And a lot of the climate people who've sort of come in later into this conversation didn't engage with that earlier livelihoods debate as well as they might do now. And maybe they can start thinking in that way and we can revive some of that learning and lesson learning, making fewer mistakes perhaps than we did in the 90s and early 2000s. but reinvent it now for now and in a time when the challenges are really facing us head on.

Are you optimistic about attaining carbon neutrality by 2050 based on what you're suggesting, juxtapose with what you're seeing happening around the world? I'm not massively optimistic. It depends what we call by carbon neutrality because there's a lot of versions of what carbon neutrality is. If carbon neutrality really is just richer polluters offsetting and dumping their offsets through offsetting arrangement in poorer countries, then I don't think that really is where we need to go. But I think, you know, at the same time, there are bigger trends that we didn't expect a few years ago. I mean, no one, well, maybe some people,

but certainly me, I didn't expect the costs of renewable energy to come down at such a rate, such that a transformation of the energy sector within, you know, without spending a vast amount of money, is feasible and it's happening, you know. Off-grid solar is, you know, you go into places where I lived in the 1980s in Africa. We didn't have any lights. We had candles. These days there are small-scale solar panels manufactured in China available for a handful of dollars and they provide electric light off-grid in villages.

That is amazing transformation. Just in a period that I've been working in those village, same villages in Zimbabwe over 30 years. So, I mean, you know, there are things that are happening that are driven by, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. capacity for scientific and technological innovation, that are changing the price structures, that allow things to happen in ways that we never imagined. So I don't think we should be completely unoptimistic, but at the same time, there are

major vested interests in the existing structure around which industrial economies function and the fossil fuel companies and the associated fossil fuel industry-related activities are immensely powerful. They're powerful within governments through lobbying, but they're powerful within wider economies. And we haven't seen the moves of transition within those type of companies

in that core fossil fuel industries. in the way that is going to be necessary to really genuinely reduce global warming by 2050. And I personally don't think market-based solutions that allow offsetting are the way to go, unless that acts to drive down overall carbon consumption. If it is a mechanism to do that, then that's a good thing. But if it's just a matter of shifting your carbon around the world and allowing allowing offsets to make people feel better, then I think that's not going to solve the problem.

You know, as I was reading this publication by an expert institution on the field, they were saying that in the next couple of decades, the demand for fossil from the automotive sector is going to decline. But that's going to be offset by the demand for fossil from the two, other large sectors, i.e. aviation and petrochemicals, which means that it's just going to be plateauing in the next couple of decades, you know, the demand for fossil. That's a bit of a concern. Unquestionably. No, I mean, you know, the emergence of electric vehicles and so on is changing the automotive industry, absolutely, although it's creating other challenges because, you know,

we need to get materials for batteries. Everything in the car. is petrochemically, you know, derived. And, you know, lithium mining in different parts of the world is a very controversial, controversial question. But yes, I mean, just shifting it to different industries, I mean, you know, this is why states become important and, you know, global initiatives become important to put the squeeze on the airline industry to reduce its fossil fuel consumption and ditto the petrochemical industry. Yeah, I mean, there are big challenges out there, and we're probably straying beyond my deep knowledge of rural development and livelihoods.

But, I mean, you know, it's situated in the same debate, and, you know, unless we can create sustainable livelihoods, these wider shifts in economies and energy use and the way that we use carbon are not going to happen in the period. that needs to happen if we are going to maintain temperatures, even at two degrees, even at two and a half degrees, let alone one and a half, which is the target from Paris. The day when I see myself and the people around me choosing to walk to work, cycle to work, and just not turn on the lights as many times as much as I have been or we have been all this time,

that's when I'll feel optimistic about carbon neutrality in 2050. But unfortunately, our lifestyle is just not there yet, you know. No. Well, I mean, in our cities, it's not constructed like it. I can cycle to work, but it's relatively easy in Sussex compared to Jakarta. I'm not sure. I've never been to Jakarta, but I'm not sure I want to cycle in the traffic in Jakarta. You got to check it out.

It's different from Sussex. Oh, man. Yeah, but we've constructed cities around the motorcar. You know, we've got to reimagine cities. We've got to reimagine work. We've got to reimagine housing. You know, right to the very core of all the elements of our lives are going to have to be quite fundamentally reimagined.

Yeah. And it's going to take time. What it takes is imagination for people to be finding solutions. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, maybe, you know, the city government of Jakarta are going to put in bike lanes and have free e-bikes within the next 10 years. You never know. You never know. It depends on that political culture. Yeah. Within your household, within your social institutions, within, you know, the overall ecosystem, you know. Precisely. And that's why the conversations in all those sites. have to carry on and why inputs from podcasts like this, hopefully we'll

galvanize some of those conversations. Amen. Ian, you got any final points for us in the developing countries? I don't think so, Gita. We've covered a huge array, and I really appreciate the invitation for the wide-ranging conversation. But I hope listeners to the podcast will

go and get hold of the book. You can read it in Bahasa. Indonesian. You can buy it from Insist Press. You can also, if you want to read it in English, you can download it for free, but the cover is better on the Indonesian one. So I think you should go and buy it. All good bookshops. On that note, I hope you don't mind having a commercial break in the end. Oh, no, no, no, no, we'll do whatever we can do to promote your book, you know. Good, good. Ian, it's been a blast. Really enjoyed it. Very much too

And thank you for the time And I hope to see you in person Yeah, welcome to Sussex I will, I will I will, I will All right, take care Good one, all right, cheers Tremant, that's

Professor Ian Scunes from University of Sussex Thank you. This is En-G