Transcript Urban Social Sustainability in Southeast Asia [1]

Urban Social Sustainability in
Southeast Asia
Presentation FAU CONFERENCE 2008, Cities, Climate Change and Development: Is Urban
Change for Sustainability possible? Workshop 4: Urban Ecosystems and Environmental
Change, 14-15 May, 2008, Copenhagen Business School, Foreningen af Udviklingsforskere
(FAU) - The Association of Development Researchers in Denmark
Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt
Associate Professor, Global Development Studies, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 2, 9220 Aalborg East,
Denmark. Tel. +45 99408404, Fax. +45 98153298 Email. [email protected], Website. www.ihis.aau.dk/gds
Success of progressive environmental
management in Southeast Asia - profound
implications for regional economic, political and
social stability
Asia Development Bank estimates environmental
degradation and climate change could cut
economic growth by 10 per cent over the coming
decades
This will not only affect the quality of life of the
region’s inhabitants but also has implications for
international economic stability and geopolitical
relations
Thus, the familiar tension between continued
economic growth and effective environmental
protection is central
A growing literature about the burgeoning
problems of the region’s urban spaces
Bringing together the ideas of social and
environmental equity, some literatures now
focus on the possibility of creating ‘social
sustainable cities’
Overall, such debates bring into question the
efficacy of prevailing urban management and
planning paradigms in the region
Such a focus is timely given the increasing list of
environmental problems which include poor air
quality, unsound waste management,
encroachment into agricultural and forest lands,
and over-exploitation of groundwater
These problems are coupled with both rapid, and
often unplanned, urban expansion and creeping
social inequality, wherein unstable job markets
contain few social ‘safety net’ livelihood options
The major argument here is that although there
are multiple dimensions to sustainable urban
development, it doesn't make much sense trying
to solve the problems - be they ecological or
distributional - if the majority of the population is
kept outside the decision-making process and
excluded from the political arena
This is where the concept of “social sustainability”
becomes important and why I attempt to
emphasize issues of labour and welfare which
are pivotal in the development of other and
additional aspects of urban sustainability – it is
basically an attempt to bring in the social actors
Here it is suggested that for the management of
the city to be successful, policies need to be
conducive to "social sustainability“
This concept is defined as development
compatible with the emergence of a social
contract, fostering an environment conducive to
the harmonization of relations between culturally
and socially diverse groups while at the same
time encouraging social integration and
improvement in the quality of life of all segments
of the population and the physical surroundings
• A preliminary framework for analysis of the
urban can perhaps best be viewed as the
loci of a number of social processes
interacting with one another in different
ways
• First of all and most fundamentally, the city
is viewed as a focus of production
• Second, the city is the locus of money,
finance and credit, in short, of the
manipulation of money and power
• A third and related way in which the city
can be viewed is as a locus of
consumption
• Fourth, the city is a locus of the
reproduction of subjects
• Lastly, the city can be seen as a locus of
meaning, as a means of representation,
as a source of understanding, as an
anchor of culture
One example is to turn the focus on urban social
movements and the way they inscribe the city
with their presence, and the city inscribes them
Such an analysis will need to take in elements of
each parameters outlined above in one way or
another in order to reach a judgement on the
ways in which people have been able to
experience social identity formation and how it
intermingles with other social relations like
gender, and the extent to which the social
emerges as a primary force in political,
environmental and distributional struggles
• Equity, social tensions and environmental
problems - caused by among other
factors, the migration of polluting
industries from the NICs, Japan and the
West
• Probably the most serious problems in
ASEAN are related to the environment, but
the reasons why these problems have
grown out of control are not only the lack
of political will, but a supportive or
oppositional citizenry (a social contract),
and appropriate implementation structures
The major problem with regard to obtaining a
minimum level of social sustainability in urban
Southeast Asia depends on the often
contradictory process of attempts by organized,
disorganized and during particular historical and
structural circumstances oppressed labor
movements to establish autonomous types of
organization
Another is that there is widespread resentment of
a perceived 'wealth gap' between the plutocratic
few who have made fortunes and the
disadvantaged many who have not. To some
extent, the fact that everybody was getting richer
eased these tensions but this is no longer the
case
Future Risk & Conflict in SEA
• • Rising inequality and declining state performance and legitimacy is
• the most serious risk in SEA
• • Resource conflict over land, water and energy resources are
• expected to intensify
• • Climate change is expected to intensify this
• • The slow process of democratisation, national and sub-national
• political settlement and addressing questions of identity and
• representation
• • Global and regional geo-political conflict has and could
increasingly
• spill-over in the region
• • A core unaddressed endogenous silent conflict zone across much
• of SEA is Social exclusion
A few impacts of Social Exclusion
Socio-Economic
• • Income and asset poverty and chronic debt
• • Livelihood insecurity
• • Inhuman working and living conditions
• • Poor access to public services: high coping
costs
Political
• • Dis-entitlement and disenfranchisement
• • Violation of human, economic, cultural and
political rights
• • Involuntary displacement
• • Insecurity, violence, injury and loss of life
• Potential Social Inclusion ‘Change
agents’
• 1. Economic change agents
• 2. State development-led agents
• 3. Civil-society agents
• 4. Faith tradition-based agents
• 5. Subaltern Political and People’s
movements
• 6. Insurgencies and revolutionary
movements
Appendix –Note on Conference
Theme
• Climate Change (ethical or political issue)!
• Increasingly a security issue
• What are the links to other types of crises
and is it possible to identify it as a
systemic failure?
Horizontal links to depletion and price of oil
and other natural resources
• Scarcity of water- already a security issue
(together with oil)
• Food crisis/price of food
• Links to the global financial crisisspeculative capital – has now reached the
real economy
• Combined with the global shift of
economic gravity from West to East
• Historical experience – war or a multipolar
world order!