Equity in the context of sustainable development

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EQUITY IN THE CONTEXT OF
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Note for UN-GSP
Version 2.0
PREPARED AT THE REQUEST OF
MR JAIRAM RAMESH
MINISTER FOR ENVIRONMENT AND FORESTS, INDIA
BY
S Lele
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment
(ATREE)
&
T Jayaraman
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)
April 13, 2011

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1. INTRODUCTION
The introduction of the concept of Sustainable Development (SD) was seen as
a profound paradigm-shift by many analysts, activists and policy-makers, as
it brought environmental concerns to the centre-stage of development. The
Brundtland Commission report is of course best known for its defining
statement: `”Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs''. Equally important is the clarification that follows: “the
concept of 'needs', [refers to] in particular the essential needs of the world's
poor, to which overriding priority should be given”. The report, which
provided a sense of global acceptability to the concept of SD, based its
considerations on the argument that development was not possible in the long
run without protecting the environment. It simultaneously recognized that
environmental degradation was further impoverishing people (World
Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). The conception of
sustainable development in the report gave a high priority to poverty
alleviation and to equitable development, arguing that “a world in which
poverty and inequity are endemic will always be prone to ecological and other
crises” (p.43) and that “long before these are reached, the world must ensure
equitable access to the constrained resource” (p.45).
In spite of this originally broad-based formulation, , the deployment of the
concept of SD in practice has been marked by significant weaknesses.
First, in the process of the further diffusion of the concept and its apparent
general acceptance , the dimensions of equity and poverty alleviation tended
to be de-emphasized (Lélé, 1991). Even in the final report itself, the original
term “Sustainable and Equitable Development” (Jacobs et al., 1987) which was
current in the discourse, was truncatedto just sustainable development.
A second, related, weakness in the entry of SD into the mainstream discourse,
was that several multilateral finance and development institutions, important
bilateral aid agencies, as well as many national governments, continued to
privilege economic growth in GDP terms as the focus of development. This
trend continues despite the parallel and growing realisation that national
income is only a partial measure of development that matters and that such
growth can co-exist with a wide range of inequalities include widening income
disparities, Subsequently, the Millennium Development Goals brought back
some focus on issues other than economic growth, but they gave short shrift to
environment itself (Drexhage and Murphy, 2010).1
1 Environment has become only 1 of 8 goals, and the specific targets set under this goal are very weak,
to say the least .

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Third, by using the term ‘sustainable’ as if it captured all aspects of
‘environmental soundness’, the mainstream conception of SD has perversely
narrowed the basis of environmentalism itself. In the post-Brundtland era, the
environment appears to matter because, and only to the extent, that it sustains
certain set of economic processes or lifestyles. Thus, for instance,
conservationists are now forced to emphasize the ‘services’ that biodiversity
provides, because the intrinsic value of biodiversity is not easy to relate to the
idea of development.
A fourth limitation is that by focusing on “sustaining” something, which by
default becomes the ‘current, already perilous state of the environment’,
developing countries and the poor within them are unconsciously condemned
to remain where they are Sustainability is equated with ‘no further
transformations of the natural landscape’, a frozen concept with no room for
transformative social action on nature and society itself. However, poverty
eradication across the developing world and sharp and rapid increase in
human well-being, both fundamental aspects of equity, would require
transformative action, on a large scale that is entirely non-equilibrium in
character.
Even as the operationalisation of the SD concept has suffered from these
weaknesses, another major shortcoming in practice has been the restriction of
considerations of SD to developing countries. In the context of developed
nations, sustainability has been limited to an aspirational goal, or limited
strictly to local environmental considerations, or reduced to purely an
individual lifestyle question. Sustainability as a global goal, for the developed
as well as developing nations has been in the main ignored, and a key
component of the issue, viz., the natural resource footprint of the developed
nations, has been largely sidelined.
Some of this is undoubtedly due to the origins of the sustainability perspective
(in a pure resource constraint sense) in the idea of the “limits to growth”. In
this perspective, that in any case downgrades equity concerns and whose
conceptual signature is alarm at the prospects of the drive of the world's poor
to achieve material well-being, clearly the onus is on the late-comer to make
do with such resources as are available without little responsibility on those
who consumed it in an earlier era.
Thus, there is a clear need to re-iterate and clarify the links between equity
and justice on the one hand and sustainability, SD, and environmentalism on
the other. We argue in this paper that, firstly, equity and justice are an integral
part of many kinds of environmentalist thinking, and need to become more so.
Secondly, even with a broad commitment to SD and poverty alleviation, the
question of sustainability cannot be engaged with meaningfully, without the
clarification of issues related to distribution and access to resources. We begin
by briefly defining equity and justice, then outline conceptually the links
between equity and sustainability. We then examine these links in the specific
context of common pool resources, first using Hardin’s pasture as a simple

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local-level common-pool resource, and then examining the implications for a
more complex global common-pool resource such as the climate system.
2. DEFINING EQUITY AND JUSTICE
The idea of equity is a complicated one and the discourse on equity is vast. The
terms ‘equity’, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ are often used interchangeably (Konow,
2003), although they involve subtle differences. For the purposes of this
paper, we use the term equity to encompass a range of ideas:
• At the very least, an equality of opportunity to achieve one’s potential
• Equal share of benefits for relevant stakeholders in specific contexts
(equity of outcomes)
• At the macro-level, reduced disparities in income and wealth.
• More generally, a ‘fair’ distribution of benefits and costs of a particular
public policy, or a fair allocation of public funds, resources, spaces,
including natural resources.
• Positive discrimination and redistribution to right historic wrongs or in
favour of systematically disadvantaged groups, including disadvantages
of economic, social, gender and other positions in society.
• Equity of process, i.e., empowerment to enable access to information,
fair representation, meaningful participation in decision-making,
bargaining and effective remedy
• Equity between nations, or international equity that operates in the
realm of inter-societal relations
• Global equity on the basis of identities that transcend national
boundaries, such as gender, membership of an indigenous community
or the particularly vulnerabile in some form.
It is intuitively clear that a one-sided emphasis on any single one of these
aspects considerably distorts the meaning of equity, though there is a
significant literature that often privileges one of these aspects to the exclusion
of the others. All of these dimensions come into play when we consider the
links between equity/justice and sustainability/SD.
In general, an emphasis on equity highlights the importance of good
governance, redistribution of income and wealth, empowerment,
participation, transparency and accountability. Thus, while different groups
will often have different ideas about what constitutes ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’,
equity enables diverse groups to have their voices heard in these debates in
specific contexts. Equity – of opportunity, outcome and process – therefore
underpins the capacity of people (and especially marginalized groups) to gain
control over resources and institutions that affect their lives,

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3. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUSTAINABILITY/SD AND
EQUITY/JUSTICE
Conventionally, equity and justice are seen as ‘social’ issues, as ‘red’ issues,
while the environment is characterised as distinct from these, as a ‘green’
issue, thereby suggesting that they are disconnected, separate realms. Even in
the SD debate, the tendency is to introduce equity as an separate concern, as
in talk about the “triple-bottom line” of the ‘economic, social and
environmental’ or in terms of ‘productivity, equity, sustainability’ (see, e.g.,
PANNA, 2009; IWMI, 2005).
But this characterization is misleading in many ways. Environmental concerns
overlap with equity and justice on both normative and instrumental grounds.
Sustainability itself has a shade of justice, while environmentalism historically
has had an even closer nexus with equity and justice than sustainability-ism
(Lélé, 1994; Agyeman et al., 2002).
The questions of equity and sustainability are closely linked in a number of
ways.
a) If SD is “development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs”, then in effect it is a plea for inter-generational equity. (Pezzey,
1989; Howarth and Norgaard, 1993).
b) For many people, environmentalism also includes fair treatment or
respecting the rights of non-human living organisms, those who are
sentient but do not have a voice. These include not just the Deep
Ecologists (Naess, 1973), but many other groups. While there is a
tendency amongst some animal rights activists and deep ecologists to
focus on the rights of non-humans at the cost of social justice (Guha,
1989), most would agree that fairness to non-humans follows fairness
within humanity.
c) Most important and obvious, environmental issues include situations
where the current actions of one actor negatively affect the current well-
being of someone else. These are the typical ‘externalities’, or more
specifically, unidirectional spatial externalities, of air or water pollution
going downwind or downstream. The central issue is not the loss of
some ‘aggregate benefit’ to society (inefficiency) as the economists
would frame it (Fisher, 1981) or the inability to continue this activity
into the future (unsustainability). The central issue here is the
unfairness of such a situation — it is not fair that one person, even while
pursuing a legitimate livelihood, should negatively affect the health of
another person (Lélé, 1998;1994).2 Many of the battles in developing
countries today are over such negative externalities of developmental
activities, whether it is mining, dams, or factories. While some of these
2 And it really does not matter what the social positions of the polluter and pollutee are, although in
practice it is often the case that the polluters are also from the socially and economically more powerful segments
of society, which is why they are able to get away with the polluting activity.

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protests are cast in ‘sustainability’ terms, such as the sustainability of a
dam in the face of heavy soil erosion and siltation, and others highlight
the likelihood of a net loss to society if a proper benefit-cost analysis is
done, the core issue is still one of the fairness — how fairly are benefits
and costs of such projects distributed.
d) This environmental (un)fairness also often overlaps with pre-existing
socio-economic inequities. Very often, the polluters are better off than
the pollutees: such as industries polluting rivers whose waters are
consumed by poor farmers, or dams destroying livelihoods of poor
fisherman downstream. In such situations, one would say that the social
justice question overlaps with the environmental unfairness — instead
of giving special consideration to poorer sections, the policy to go ahead
with such projects would lead to a double disadvantage. The
‘environmental justice’ movement in the USA for instance has
highlighted the double-disadvantage problem in the preferential siting
of hazardous industries in the neighbourhoods where socially and
economically marginalized groups reside. (Bullard, 1990).
e) Environmentalism also highlights the need for equitable access to
natural resources and environmental sinks. This is an area in which
environmental and social concerns overlap fully, because the equitable
distribution of the socio-economic benefits from the use of natural
resources depends critically on how initial rights to resource use are
granted.3 Equally efficient distributions of rights to resources may lead
to very different outcomes in terms of equity.
f) Environmental degradation aggravates poverty, and thereby accentuates
inequity in society. Where the poor are directly dependent on natural
resources such as forests for firewood, pastures for grazing or scarce
water resources for survival, the degradation or destruction of these
ecosystems hurts the poor the most. The rich are likely to have moved
away from such direct dependence on ecosystems to the use of fossil
fuels. The rich can also offer to purchase technologies or to access
resources from further away (Pearce, 1988; Nadkarni, 2000).
g) Finally, in many cases, equity may enhance sustainable resource use.
Several analysts have argued that a fair allocation of resource rights is
more likely to result in individuals and communities cooperating in the
collective management of the resource (e.g., Gadgil, 1987). More recent
literature, however, suggests that this relationship may be more
complex (Baland and Platteau, 2002); in some situations, inequality can
still ensure collective action.
3 Note that equitable access may take different shapes and nuances depending upon the context. For a
local resource such as a pasture, this might be equal access to all users, i.e., all graziers. But those with
historical rights of use might claim precedence over those who came later. Those with more cows may say they
“need” a larger area to graze in. In the case of water rights, many nations give rights as per prior beneficial use.

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In short, the links between sustainability and equity are multi-dimensional
and mutually reinforcing. Sustainability itself means justice to future
generations. And it is impossible to imagine a situation where a case is made
for inter-generational equity while underplaying intra-generational equity
(Anand and Sen, 2000).
As we have noted earlier, environmental soundness or environmentalism as a
concept is broader than sustainability, because it explicitly includes
environmental fairness—both in distribution of impacts of resource use and in
the access to resources, even if the dimension of inter-temporal equity had not
always been explicitly incorporated. And of course there is the oft-highlighted
practical dimension that a more equitable allocation of resource rights is more
likely to generate the cooperation necessary for sustainable management of
common pool resources.
Social justice and equity go one step beyond this concept—they explicitly
demand additional attention for instance to historical inequities and the
current socio-economic positions and abilities of both pollutees and polluters.
In general, they demand attention to historical inequities and discrimination,
and also to the initial allocation of resource rights and opportunities. Thus,
bringing together sustainability and equity also infers the need for
transformation of social relations, redistribution of rights and resources, and
policy approaches which address social, economic and environmental
concerns simultaneously and holistically
4. EQUITY, SUSTAINABILITY AND COMMON POOL
RESOURCES
At the core of environmental problems lies the problem of externality:
decisions taken with a narrow, short-term self-interest in mind have adverse
consequences over space, time and sectors. A subset of such problems can be
classified as “common pool resource” problems, where the externalities are
symmetrical4 and resources are can be depleted (Stevenson, 1991). Multiple
actors can use a ‘resource’, each user affects others through such use, and
unregulated self-interested use by each actor can lead to depletion for all.
Garrett Hardin highlighted this problem as the ‘tragedy of the commons’,
subsequently more accurately characterised as the tragedy of open access to
common pool resources. He used the example of a pasture and a group of
shepherds who graze their sheep in the pasture, and pointed out that ‘rational
economic decisions’ by each shepherd would lead to overgrazing of the
pasture. While Hardin’s solution was either privatization or state control,
others have pointed out to the need for a more nuanced approach, given truly
common-pool resources cannot be privatized. Collective agreement and
enforcement by the resource users themselves through well-designed
4 When externalities are asymmetrical, they result in the standard ‘pollution’ problem, where upstream
polluters affect downstream pollutees.

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institutional arrangements could be another approach (Ostrom et al., 1999),
leading to sustainable use (what economists call inter-temporal efficiency). In
the pasture example, shepherds could agree to limit the number of sheep they
graze to a level that represents a win-win for all.
But characterizing the pastoral commons simply as a common-pool
sustainability problem hides several important dimensions of the problem.
Knowing the ‘carrying capacity’ of the pasture in terms of the total number of
sheep that can be sustainably grazed is only one dimension. Who should graze
how many of these sheep, i.e., what should be the initial allocation of grazing
rights across shepherds? Who qualifies as a user in the first place? What
happens if a household not historically involved in grazing wants to start now?
If overgrazing is occurring and cutbacks are required, who should cut back
how much? Is past grazing and therefore past contribution to degradation
relevant to how costs of pasture restoration should be allocated? Is the wealth
of the shepherd relevant to this?
In most analyses of the commons that start with Hardin’s formulation, there
seems to be an implicit assumption that all shepherds are identical, all have
equal flock sizes and each can contribute equally to degradation or restoration.
Hardin’s formulation also sidesteps the question of who is a legitimate rights-
holder in the commons. The analytical focus is on efficiency, not equity. But
given that the solution, even within this framework, involves the conversion of
an open-access resource into a common property resource, the initial
assignment of rights becomes absolutely critical.
Moreover, in real-world situations, decisions about allocations of rights and
responsibilities, of benefits and costs have to be taken at every step: who
protects, who invests in technology to regenerate, how is heterogeneity in the
resource (e.g., variations in quality of the pasture) to be addressed, etc. And
clearly, initial disparities in wealth, power, and prestige of the users
significantly influence the way the institutions of common pool resource
management are structured and function.
The role that economic considerations exert in critically re-dimensioning
concerns of equity in the context of sustainability, or more generally the
environment, is worth remarking upon. Law, for instance, is not a powerful a
force in diluting equity and if anything legal studies appear to offer greater
purchase in pursuing equity (see, e.g., ILA, 2002).
5. THE CLIMATE COMMONS AND EQUITY
All these issues are relevant to climate change, that is in some sense a
``perfect storm'' in sustainable development. In many ways, climate change is
the archetype of a global common-pool resource management problem. The
global climate system is non-excludable because it is well-mixed and nobody
can put up walls and protect ‘their’ atmosphere from being ‘dirtied’ by
someone else’s emissions. And it is depletable in that any CO2 entering the

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atmosphere (or more precisely the atmosphere-oceans-land system) reduces
its ability to absorb additional CO2. ‘Sustainability’ in this context is defined as
maintaining the total quantum of CO2 in the atmosphere below some
threshold, which in turn requires limiting the total global quantum of CO2
emissions below a certain level. Equity here seems orthogonal to
sustainability: whichever way one shares the permissible level of emissions
across different countries or emitters, the total is what matters for
sustainability. But closer examination reveals complexities.
Firstly, the impacts of crossing the sustainable climate threshold (or even
approaching it) are not as evenly distributed, even if the greenhouse gases are
well-mixed globally. Small island states will suffer devastation from sea-level
rise, whereas larger nations might suffer relatively much less damage, and
landlocked nations even less.
Secondly, there is a question of unequal present emissions, and subsistence
versus luxury emissions. Thirdly, there is a question of who contributed to
degrading the global commons by past emissions. Fourthly, there is a question
of inequality in other endowments (technology, financial capital,
infrastructure, institutions) and current stage of development. Not
surprisingly then, the idea of equal cutbacks across all nations has hardly
found favour.
Does this mean that equity is a necessary or sufficient condition for a
sustainable climate treaty? In a purely environmental sense it may not seem
so. After all, it is quite possible for better endowed players to use their power
to impose an unequal treaty that is still climate effective. However it is evident
that in a wider reading of sustainability, inclusive of political and economic
considerations, such a climate regime would be unsustainable and is unlikely
to be even effective.
It is also possible that an equitable treaty can be climate ineffective: an
equitable sharing of the mitigation burden may be agreed upon, but the overall
mitigation is simply inadequate to prevent CO2 concentrations crossing the
threshold.
But clearly, if one is committed to sustainable and equitable development, to
poverty alleviation, and to fairness as a general principle, then from all these
perspectives a fair allocation of the mitigation burden, of rights and
responsibilities is essential. And it is possible that a fair treaty may lead to a
broadly acceptable and enforceable treaty.
Note that in the case of climate change, full equity in the sense of a fair
allocation of the global atmospheric commons cannot be attained at all, since
the earlier degradation of the resource has rendered equity impossible to
achieve without sacrificing sustainability. It is clearly important that the
unfairness of this situation be acknowledged. Without this first step, it is
unlikely that those who will suffer the consequences of this unfairness will be
prepared to undertake any further action.

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6. GLOBAL JUSTICE AND INTERNATIONAL EQUITY:
The climate question brings to the fore another dimension of equity that is the
source of some tension even among those who are agreed in the significance of
equity. And this tension emerges directly from the local aspect of sustainability
that has dominated thinking on SD prior to the era of climate change. The
equity and sustainability perspective undoubtedly contributes positively to the
work on vulnerability and adaptation, especially in the way it draws attention
to the rights of those who are not responsible for the problem but are
nevertheless profoundly affected by it. It is also unexceptionable that such
equity concerns are grounded in the specific analysis of the potential harm
that is caused to communities in their specific ecological and socio-economic
setting, and such analyses undoubtedly strengthen an important aspect of the
equity-sustainability nexus.
However, a potential source of confusion arises when analogous concerns of
equity are echoed by nations themselves in the pursuit of a fair international
climate treaty. Where do the rights of individuals or collectives at the local
level stand in relation to the rights of nations?
To many it may look as if climate change would require, as in an earlier era
when the nuclear issue was growing into the world's most intractable political
issue, limiting national sovereignty so as to ensure justice to those vulnerable
to climate change. In this view, global justice trumps the issue of justice at the
inter-societal level. Superficially, it appears that all societies have carbon
profligates as well as those whose emissions are limited and who are not
responsible for the problem, though the exact proportions of the two may vary.
At the same time, equity between nations is undeniably an issue. There is a
clear divide between those whose responsibility (even in purely physical
terms) is far greater than those whose responsibility is far less and the divide
is precisely on the basis of nation states. The number of those
The implicit tension between global justice and international equity is also
evident in the process aspect. International equity is clearly privileged since by
the very nature of the negotiating process nations have a key role to play, Yet
increasingly as the weight of the climate issue bears down, global equity must
also be addressed. No nation can afford to ignore either, but nor are the two in
any way entirely fungible.
Global justice and international equity are distinct (see Sen 1999 for an
illuminating discussion ) and it is clear that on the climate question both
aspects have their own distinctive roles to play. Not the least of the reasons is
that global action for climate change mitigation and adaptation will be
inseparable from national action on climate change, and that both national
institutions as well as institutions that cut across national boundaries need to
be involved to successfully tackle the problem.

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7. CONCLUSION
It is the argument of this note that in the context of the human-environment
nexus the relationship between equity and sustainability is inseparable from
the individual nature of either of the two. Historically it is the relationship
with equity, justice and fairness that has driven the undoubted appeal of the
slogan of environmental protection and later sustainable development.
And yet in practice there has been a weakening of resolve in keeping equity at
the centre of considerations of the environment. Sustainable development has
been in danger of lapsing into a slogan for all seasons while in operational
terms there has been a narrowing of vision in the substantive content of
sustainability, precisely by displacing or conflating equity criteria with other
narrower views of efficiency or feasibility.
Almost twenty-five years after the first invitation to consider the fashioning of
our common future in our common home, the issue of climate change in
particular, and other such global challenges, offer another opportunity to
renew this vision. The melding of equity and sustainability needs to be an
integral part of this renewal.

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