Breakout Session

Title:  Public and Private Sustainability Policy: Is a Green Economy Sustainable and How Would One Know?

Organizer:  Dr. John V. Stone, Associate Director & Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards, Michigan State University

Discussants:

1.  Dr. Sandra S. Batie , Elton R. Smith Chair in Food and Agricultural Policy, Department of Agricultural, Food & Resource Economics, Michigan State University
2.  Dr. Paul B. Thompson , W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University
3.  Dr. H. Chris Peterson , Nowlin Chair of Consumer-Responsive Agriculture and Co-director, MSU Product Center for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Michigan State University
4.  Dr. Richard Bawden , Adjunct Professor, Michigan State University, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Sydney, and Fellow and Director, Systemic Development Institute of Australia
5.  Jan Urban-Lurain, President, Spectra Data and Research, Inc.

Session Goals:

The overarching goal of this session is to foster institutional transformation informed by emerging concept of ‘sustain-abilities’ – diverse approaches to promoting a common goal of sustainability. Such transformation will require an increased appreciation for diversity of thought surrounding the concept of sustainability. Therefore, this session is as much about a process of engagement and changed thinking as it is about resultant standards and associated measurable outcomes. As a result there is a need not only for knowledge generation, but also for a forward thinking, informed debate and dialogue that leads toward a sustainable and green economy. Thus, associated goals will pertain to recommendations for culturally and socially appropriate systems of engagement, the explication of values underlying diverse standards trajectories that represent the breadth of interests embedded within the multi-dimensional concept of ‘sustainability.’

Summary:

It is too easily assumed by many that a new green economy will be more sustainable economically, environmentally, and socially than the existing petroleum/fossil fuel economy.  This breakout session will analyze this assumption’s validity through the opening remarks from a panel of endowed and distinguished professors representing the Sustainable Michigan Endowed Project (SMEP) and the Associate Director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards (IFAS), respectively, at Michigan State University.  The recommendations that will then be discussed by session participants will focus on the “what” and “how” of identifying and engaging sustainability stakeholder perspectives (business, government, civil society organizations and knowledge institutions) in the formation of effective public and private policies that have potential to more closely align science, education and markets for the new green economy with diverse and potentially conflicting stakeholder conceptions of and standards for sustainability.

In the opening remarks, four brief presentations will be made to set the stage for the discussion.  These presentations will explore several critical myths and fallacies that surround the concept of sustainability and create barriers and missed opportunities for making progress toward sustainability.  In particular, a combination of four myths and fallacies will be highlighted and interrelationships among them explored:

• Myth 1:  Sustainability can be achieved (or, the fallacy of a tame problem).  Implications of sustainability as a ‘wicked problem,’ that is, a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.

• Myth 2:  Sustainability is about tradeoffs (or, the fallacy of existing paradigms).  The role of tradeoffs, complements and paradigms in managing the 3P’s (people, prosperity, and planet) of sustainability.

• Myth 3:  Sustainability can be measured (or, the fallacy of stationary standards).  The dynamic nature of evaluation in monitoring progress toward multiple and potentially conflicting standards of sustainability.

• Myth 4:  Sustainability arises from good science (or, the fallacy of linear science).  The need for engaged sustainability scholarship reflecting empirical research conducted in partnership with public and private stakeholders, with the goal of addressing critical social issues and contributing to public goods.

SMEP in particular has been pursuing the issue of engaged sustainability scholarship for five years, using an executive committee composed of endowed chairs and distinguished faculty representing multiple disciplines across 11 academic departments, including Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics; Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies; Geography; Animal Science; Journalism; Sociology; Crop and Soil Science; Food Science and Human Nutrition; Fisheries and Wildlife; Philosophy; Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; and Economics. SMEP also partners with TransForum, a public/private sustainability consortium in the Netherlands providing insight to sustainability initiatives throughout Western Europe. For its part, IFAS has been involved for more than a decade with research and education on standards issues, promoting multi-stakeholder dialogue with respect to equity, fairness and transparency of both public and private standards at the local, national and international levels.

To assure engaged discussion at our breakout session, following the panel presentations there will be 1.5 to two hours for facilitated participant discussion. These discussions will consider policy recommendations that address the identified myths and have potential to move the new green economy toward sustainability. For example, in their work, both SMEP and IFAS have underscored the need to explicate the values that underlie the sustainability standards being promulgated. One idea to be explored in this breakout session is that diverse stakeholder interests will likely emphasize different values in the standards they advocate, so that the discussion can be expected to move away from 'standardization' and toward the development of 'value-driven standards trajectories’ such as, for example, rights-based (e.g., equity) trajectories, utility-based (e.g., efficiency) trajectories, and consequence-based (material outcomes) trajectories. So the question posed by the session title – “Is a green economy sustainable, and how would one know” – presupposes a standard or benchmark against which such evaluations could be made. Our prior work on sustainability standards suggests that different stakeholder values will likely coalesce into 'standards constellations' -- groupings of stakeholders promulgating standards as benchmarks for the particular value(s) they seek to promote through 'sustainability.' The sustainability of a green economy would in large measure be relative to the values being advanced through diverse value-driven standards trajectories. Thus, evaluating sustainability defined as a rights- or equity-based standard by a utility- or efficiency-based standard would miss the point entirely, or at best give grossly misleading results.

In this respect, this proposed session is as much about processes of engagement as it is about resultant standards and associated measurable outcomes. The role of engagement will be addressed not only as a mechanism for educating diverse publics about ‘sustainability’ however defined, but more importantly as a vehicle for explicating the value systems driving diverse standards trajectories, leading perhaps to multiple constellations of sustainability standards and moving us toward a notion of heterogeneous 'sustain-abilities' that reflect the breadth of interests and approaches represented by this multi-dimensional concept. Cooperative Extension is one model of engagement to be explored in this session, for example, harnessing the considerable federal investment in and institutional experience of extension to promote stakeholder dialogue around sustainability and develop socially appropriate indicators to measure progress toward “value driven standards trajectories.”

Using an open space format, session participants will also generate additional topics for discussion and then self-select into the discussion group of their choice. We will invite participation in the session from TransForum and USDA/CSREES professionals, for whom we already have well-established contacts, and we will invite as many of the SMEP- and IFAS-affiliated personnel as are able to join in the discussion (e.g., dispersing them amongst the discussion groups to further encourage rich dialogue and debate). During the small group discussions, participants will engage in a three step process that expands the pool of information/ideas; narrows these options; and reaches closure on a set of recommendations related to the specific discussion group topic. These will be compiled into a broader set of recommendations to inform socially responsive development and implementation of sustainability standards in green economy governance.