Standing up for ourselves

While rejecting ideas of a privileged position in nature for humanity, sustainability appeals to the humanitarian aspiration for a more equitable world.

Advocates use these environmental and social justifications for introducing constraints on development practice.

Meanwhile experts have lost professional self-confidence, and rely on interminable and inconclusive public consultation exercises. Environmentally sensitive designers are careful to avoid the charge of arrogance, believing that daring is reckless and that artistic expression is incompatible with industry.

It is a truism that we need popular backing for policy measures to do with sustainability, because they are likely to upset embedded trends of consumption and production

There seems to be a terrible presumption that bureaucratic mechanisms are going to be the way in which we can encourage public support and popular identification.

This is a problem of trust. Scepticism follows a break down of trust from people's negative experience of official institutions, both the national and local government and various corporations.

Initiatives encouraging participation with government, with business, with the RIBA or other institutes you may be involved with are often met with scepticism.

Click to go to the next presentation in this session by Miffa Salter

Does environmentalism turn humanism on its head?

James Heartfield (chairman) (Following Paul Hyett) The next speaker is Phil Macnaghten, from the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University, and the co-author of Contested Natures. This is one of the more fascinating analyses of environmentalism today.

Phil Macnaghten I must say that it is a pleasure to talk with architects and it is a pleasure to talk about sustainability, which probably like many of you I have been thinking about a lot. I am not an architect, but I am a social scientist, and I work at a university where we have been very involved in questions of sustainability from a cultural and social perspective. Our interest concerns the conditions in which people are likely to get involved, or to identify with such worthy aims. I hope it connects with Paul's talk, where he has told us he does not think a duty of care is an appropriate statutory response.

I will be talking about how we should embrace sustainability, how we should understand the role of the human and civic society in these questions. I will be talking about the formal understanding of sustainability and why there are serious gaps between formal configurations of sustainable development and lay understanding. We talk a lot with members of the public who represent nobody other than themselves. I will then develop a critique, and will suggest there is a gravitational pull towards bureaucratic top down understandings of the public. I will try to indicate where that view is coming from and how it gets in the way of understanding sustainability in human terms, and misses the real opportunities. I will reflect on the world of building and construction very naively.

In regard to public opinion it is a truism that we need popular backing for policy measures to do with sustainability, because they are likely to upset embedded trends of consumption and production. Whether this is in transport, housing and construction policies are going to require large-scale identification or public support. How do we create an ethos in which measures to do with sustainability become palatable? What are the conditions for public identification?

It is worth thinking about the hypothesis of sustainability as it tends to be conceived of in a formal discourse. The conventional understanding is the present unsustainable situation has been caused by policies for a quality of life that harms the environment. The aspiration for a sustainable future is where quality of life needs are met within environmental constraints. Of course this presumes that policies aimed at improving the quality of life no longer need to be an expense of the environment.

This requires a different kind temporal thinking, where we need to think about the long term and future generations. We also need to think in a different spatial way. We think global, but act local. This was the dictum that Friends of the Earth started in the early 1970s, requiring a reconfiguration of responsibilities within institutions. There seem to be conventions in sustainability, not just a sense of where we are now and where we want to go, but in the mechanism of getting from the current to the future state. The public is expected to participate with government and business through these common policies of sustainable development, to move from the current unsustainable situation to the sustainable future.

Within the institutions attempting to change there is a huge impetus towards indicators, towards quantification, towards figures which will tell us how well we are doing so we can turn these ideals into practical action. Duties of care, standards and performance indicators are used to characterise sustainability in numerical, objective and instrumental terms. These are considered to provide measures of accountability. There seems to be a terrible presumption that bureaucratic mechanisms are going to be the way in which we can encourage public support and popular identification.

The drive towards quantification may be having adverse effects on the public capacity to identify creatively with sustainable development. We looked at public perceptions of sustainability five years ago, but I think the experience is still quite relevant in today. We found a chronic difference between most people's scepticism about the vocabulary of sustainability compared to the understanding of committed local and central government officials. What we found was a surprising degree of awareness and sympathy with the values within the ideal of sustainability, a willingness to think about the long term future, but scepticism about official formulations.

This is a problem of trust. Scepticism follows a break down of trust from people's negative experience of official institutions, both the national and local government and various corporations. They are seen as unresponsive to everyday quality of life needs and the idea that these institutions really would look after the planet long-term is considered incredible.

This contradicts previous assumptions that what was required was public education. The mistaken idea that the public needs to be informed, that we need to tell the public what to do so that when they are informed they will act in the common interest. What we suggested at the time, or what was required, were new forms of relationship and communication between promoting agencies and the wider public. There is a deeper systemic problem of a lack of trust which sustainability was a part.

In a European study we looked at different ways of valuing the environment. We compared conventional valuation approaches to responses from citizen's juries. Not that one approach is better or more truthful, but they emphasise different dimensions of human experience. The techniques that are more digestible to bureaucracies typically tend to be those least suited to engaging public interest and creating a sense of agency or public involvement.

We were involved in a government project aimed at trying to encourage people to develop more sustainable lifestyles. The project set-up as one of the government's responses to Rio in the post 1992 euphoria, as an attempt to popularise sustainability at local community level. We became tremendously aware that there was a national initiative and community level activity. The national strategy sought to create a dynamic public profile by promoting a green code, by adopting a simple model of how you could go green. Like the Green-Cross Code for traffic safety, there was an attempt at a Green Code to reduce waste, save energy and other exaltations for being green. Attention on the code and the quantifiable measure of success largely misrepresented and obscured what was occurring on the ground.

At a national level there was a call for measurable results and at local levels things were much messier and more contingent. There were social and cultural problems influenced by complex realities. What was required was sensitive human interaction aimed at building local confidence. Instead there were quantifiable measures, so officials could go back to the treasury and talk percentages.

One typical comment was "…they only tell us what they want us to know". This is an intelligent response and shows how institutional problems of trust are completely linked in to the use of indicators. If you provide an indicator, people's first response is to question the interest of the agency in those measures. The way people read figures are quite sophisticated. Initiatives encouraging participation with government, with business, with the RIBA or other institutes you may be involved with are often met with scepticism. People often think "…it's actually these institutions which got us into the problem in the first place."

Social conditions force sustainability. What we have been trying to point out is that if institutions are serious about wanting to engage people in sustainability, we need to engage people as they are. There is a loss of trust. People are fundamentally alienated from formal politics today. There is a plurality of social identities, and as people are becoming more and more different you can not think one model will work across all communities.

Globalisation suggests very complex ways in which people are able to be part of, or to influence their life world. Power now works in different ways than it used to. The pace of technological change is a reality, alongside scientific ignorance about the implications for life, as we know it today. If you think of an instance like genetically modified foods, people ask "…who is responsible?", "…who is making the decision?", or "…how accountable are they?" The formal institutions should look at where the new civic spaces are emerging in the world today. Whether with non-governmental organisations, community groups or consumer boycotts, where is popular identification happening? How can we work with the grain of change in today's world, and with those resisting the unsustainable logic of the new global order? Where are the fault lines, and where are the cracks appearing? The simple assertions of sustainability are otherwise likely to go down like a lead balloon.

In construction, how are we framing and involving people in the debate? Do we see this purely as a technical issue or as involving wider sets of relationships? How should we become more socially attuned? Where should we look for the opportunity for a more sustainable society? So here are some tentative questions which might be addressed throughout the discussion. Thank you very much.

James Heartfield Our last speaker is Miffa Salter who is Head of Regeneration at the Office for Public Management. Miffa will be talking on the business of consultation.

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