Environment strategy: transformative changes for sustainability

5. Systemic constraints of reform-oriented approaches in sustainability action

There is growing evidence on the limits of reform-oriented approaches for achieving sustainability goals. Reformist approaches, i.e. ones that seek to modify corporate behaviour, rather than ones that seek to reshape broader economic mechanisms, rules and political economies, for example, is growing. For example, Santika et al (2023) review the evidence on market-based mechanism effectiveness in tackling the deforestation impacts of global trade in tropical commodities. This demonstrated the limits of certification and environmental provisions in Free Trade Agreements. Similarly, Payments for Environmental Services (PES) schemes are promoted by many international organisations, but they are critiqued by many social scientists for commodifying and privatizing nature and dispossessing local communities and undermining local livelihoods (To, 2019; 2013; Van Hecken et al, 2021), especially Indigenous Peoples. IPBES (2022) recently assessed the transformative potential of PES and classed them as being more incremental, rather than PES. PES are an example of neo-liberal reform-oriented approaches (Büscher, 2012). Upcoming research also demonstrates inadequacy of environmental provisions in Free Trade Agreements (Santika et al, 2024). There are systemic constraints for responsible business initiatives, which seek to modify corporate behaviour, but are not able to achieve sustainability changes, because they do not address the underlying causes (Nelson and Flint, 2017). See Box 1.

Box 1: Food transformations toward sustainability are severely constrained by the industrialisation of and corporate power within the food system.

There is growing concentration of power and resources in food systems with just a very small number of companies controlling the food system, which has already been largely transformed into an industrial and commercial entity. The latter is not delivering food security to all, because of major food inaccessibility issues (e.g. food deserts in wealthy countries where consumers do not have access to affordable, nutritious food). Power relations, incentives and structures mean that corporate food regimes have quasi-absolute control of food governance with ongoing expansion of quantity-oriented, efficient food production at the expense of sustainability, especially in expanding low- and middle-income markets.

The increasing globalisation of value chains, also means that food in the UK is increasingly sourced from afar, outsourcing our environmental impacts (Santika et al, 2023). Tele-coupled agri-food systems have ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ places and connecting flows, with commodity value chains increasingly shaping negative impacts on land use in sourcing localities and, through spillover and leakage effects, in other geographies (Liu et al., 2015). The distant linkages involved, create material, cognitive and emotional disconnections between producers and consumers (Beery et al., 2023) leads to a lack of care in relation to these invisible impacts, increasing consumerism, and enabling weak consumption governance and value-action gaps. Consumer confusion about provenance is increased by proliferations of product and corporate sustainability labels, brands and certifications, which themselves have limited impact (Santika et al, 2023). Media stories which can sometimes shine a spotlight on negative impacts are limited by ‘othering’ processes, i.e. processes of distancing from other groups, associated with assumed superiorities.

By focusing on universal, technical measures of environmental impacts, insufficient attention is paid to the uneven nature of these impacts, and the uneven responsibilities for causing ecological damage. Climate, biodiversity and social equalities justice requires recognition of outsourced, distant impacts, such as those outlined in Box 1. Certain groups have more power and capacity to dominate others, enabling the reproduction and intensification of inequalities and the over-exploitation and degradation of nature – treated solely for its instrumental value as a resource for human benefit. Injustices are currently not well recognised, but these include the coloniality-related taking of wealth (Hickel et al, 2023) and inequities in the global trading system that reproduce inequalities (Dorninger et al, 2021). Despite increases in per capita incomes and associated consumption emissions over past decades, creating a global middle class and raising millions out of poverty in the global South, the world’s richest households in the global North continue to emit more (Dorninger et al, 2021). Global carbon inequality is striking (Chancel, 2022). Nearly half the growth observed has merely allowed the wealthy top 10% to increase their consumption and grow their carbon footprints, with all the associated ecological damage entailed. Santika et al (2023) recently assessed the commodity impacts of palm oil and cocoa and found that in palm oil, cocoa and coffee, using global data, high income countries have the highest per capita consumption and their consumption rates have dramatically increased in the last two decades, pointing to the major inadequacies of reformist approaches.

Sector-oriented and landscape-based approaches emerged in response to the limits of product sustainability standards in agri-food systems, but have yet to demonstrate robust evidence of impact, and, arguably, share the same limitations as the latter, in not addressing underlying causes. The notion of distinct sectors is embedded in certain ways of viewing the world and sector-transformation approaches tend to focus on technical tweaks to achieve market transformations, rather than to shift to a post-growth future. They thus largely constrain imaginations to the sector and its internal market and corporate behaviour reform, rather than addressing deeper, underlying causes of unsustainability in each sector (e.g. capitalist relations, anthropocentric perspectives etc). Despite decades of investment in West African cocoa sustainability initiatives, because these were focused upon cocoa productivity and voluntary supply chain initiatives, and only latterly on smallholder income diversification and living wages, and broader landscape polycentric governance (i.e. multi-scale institutions with decentralised layers of authority), for example they have been largely unsuccessful (Ingram et al., 2018; Nelson and Phillips, 2018; Kalischek et al., 2023). While there are now advances with mandatory due diligence on human rights and environment and supply chain deforestation, for example, in the EU, there are still many questions regarding the ability of these legal measures to effect change. Further, instead of focusing on rural transformations, and instead narrowly considering farmers as cocoa producers, for example, they have ignored other incentives (e.g. young people moving into gold mining) (Nelson and Phillips, 2014). Low cocoa prices to farmers have not been addressed by any of the reform-oriented responsible business and supply chain interventions. See box 2.

Box 2: Voluntary standards and due diligence: The example of deforestation

Despite the now decades-long development of voluntary codes for business and sustainability product and corporate standards and certification, as well as sector-wide initiatives and commitments, impact evaluation evidence is mixed on their effectiveness (Santika et al, 2023). Many supply chain sustainability commitments have been unfulfilled, such that agricultural commodity-driven deforestation persists. Companies are unlikely to achieve their voluntary zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the absence of improved implementation (Bager and Lambin, 2022).

In commodity-driven (palm oil, cocoa) deforestation, high-income countries have the highest per capita consumption and consumption rates have dramatically increased over the last two decades (Santika et al., 2023). Despite pockets of corporate action, larger amounts of capital continue to flow into business-as-usual commodity agriculture, because of a ‘lack of market uptake, loopholes leading to partial implementation, low compliance, and limited scope’ of commitments, with corporate commitments having a ‘small impact’ (Lambin and Furumo, 2023, p. 254). Some region- and commodity-specific ZDCs have led to small reductions in deforestation, but scaling requires a wider corporate supply base and market coverage (Lambin and Furumo, 2023).

New mandatory legal deforestation instruments are not yet proven. Despite a hardening of corporate accountability in global value chains within EU deforestation regulations, which will increase foreign corporate accountability for negative socio-environmental externalities, whether the approach is effective will depend upon the regulatory design, acceptance, compliance, implementation, enforcement improvements, and avoidance of leakage effects (Berning and Sotirov, 2023). It is not clear how such leakage effects can be tackled, without major expansion of sustainability efforts in other international markets, such as Asia (Berning and Sotirov, 2023) or without inter-governmental agreements or treaties. Inter-governmental entities have the potential to shape their own trading blocs, but they are embedded in global capitalist dynamics, with most of their subsidies promoting large-scale, industrial agriculture. The EU casts deforestation as a supply side issue of production and governance challenges in sourcing localities, however, this approach ignores the root cause – the EU’s overconsumption of deforestation-related commodities and asymmetric market and trade power relations. Continued access to agro-commodities and biofuels for green transitions and sustainability reputation is enabled, but transformative approaches are blocked, with the EU avoiding firm targets and degrowth, or decoloniality informed policy measures to tackle over-consumption (Kumeh and Ramcilovic-Suominen, 2023).

Green growth arguments are challenging, because evidence suggests that decoupling is not happening on necessary scales and speed. Green growth currently dominates global environmental responses. Continuing with economic growth while staying within planetary boundaries means separating the former from environmental destruction, achieved via technological advancements or decoupling (Vadén et al., 2020). Countries have agreed to implement the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and decoupling is central to 8.4, but it is not currently being achieved on the required temporal and geographic scales needed, with limited prospects of sufficient absolute or relative decoupling, in the absence of major action by high consumption countries and social groups (Hickel and Kallis, 2021; Ward et al, 2016; Vaden et al, 2020; Parrique et al, 2019). While many governments argue that investment in sustainable transitions and poverty reduction requires economic growth (GEO 6), the equitable degrowth movement (Hickel & Kallis, 2020) seeks constraints on consumption in high consumption nations to downscale the overall economy and reduce material throughput, while also recognizing that growth is needed in poorer nations. Without a rigorous consumption governance is needed instituted to reduce the volume of materials and energy resources consumed and still sustaining human wellbeing (Lorek and Fuchs, 2013; Jackson, 2009).

Environmental damage resulting from economic growth is already undermining economic growth and is projected to do so in increasing magnitudes with greater costs. The consequences of economic growth are increasing damage to environments, climate and peoples, for example heat stress undermines the productivity of workers, which creates the risk that the damage accelerates and the economic crash will be larger and more serious than previously anticipated. To respond to such challenges requires post-growth economic imaginaries and pathways, e.g. deeper conceptualisations of wellbeing economies. Kotz et al (2024) compare the damages to magnitude of mitigation costs and find that the ‘economic damages resulting from climate change until 2049 are those to which the world economy is already committed and that these greatly outweigh the costs required to mitigate emissions in line with the 2°C target of the Paris Climate Agreement. They also project permanent average income losses of 19% worldwide by 2049, compared to a baseline without climate breakdown impacts with reductions in the US and Europe being approximately 11% whereas in Africa and south Asia it will be 22% demonstrating the challenge of climate injustice (Kotz et al, 2024).

Responsibilities for climate emissions and biodiversity impacts etc, are uneven, but responsibilities for action are often placed on those with the least adaptive capacity and most vulnerability. There is a concentration of wealth of high net worth individuals who have outsized environmental impacts (Oxfam International, 2023) and mechanisms to tackle their impacts are urgently required, not least as such groups have more resources to adapt their behaviour and mitigate their impacts. In contrast, the placing of responsibility on poor, vulnerable groups as those who should respond to sustainability challenges (Blythe et al, 2018, p1217) rather than to those who hold power and wealth (e.g. asset holders) (Buscher and Fletcher, 2020). Too often the focus has been on sourcing localities and communities in conservation or business responsibility projects, without addressing the rules and power relations that constrain their agency.

The evidence presented points to the need for changes in the way we organise economies and the underlying principles, values and structures. This means both new imaginaries of post-growth economies and their implementation plus support for actions that restrict damaging sectors.