New Thinking on Sustainability: Conference Summary (Part 4)

This is the final in a series of four posts summarising the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and Victoria University’s ‘New Thinking on Sustainability’ conference, and focuses on some ways in which we might achieve change.

The call for new models of governance (resulting from the demonstrable environmental and social failures of centralisation) was taken up by Ben Gussen and his call for a shift towards local decision-making, reflecting the principle of subsidiarity (that local communities should have a say in their own governance – discussed more in part two).

Gussen’s contention is that our issue is one of scale, not only in the impact our population has, but in the cumbersome political models that now fail to act on our behalf. Gussen emphasised that humans are inherently political – our interdependence demands it – and suggested that current voter apathy is merely a problem of institutional design. Our adherence to the concept of a unitary state blocks the very diversity and plurality that might help better align us with the biosphere.

Neoclassical economics continues to model the world as a machine; under this paradigm it needs design, and can only function from the top-down. However new thinking focuses on the power of spontenaiety and self organisation: the emerge of governance from the bottom-up. This is captured in the metaphor of flocking starlings, where each individual follows local rules (turn left if the bird next to you turns left, right if it turns right and so on) to produce a global effect (the mesmerising dance of the flock) – what form might our dance take, if we were given the chance to self-organise?

New Thinking on Sustainability: Conference Summary (Part 2)

The following is part two of my summary of “New Thinking on Sustainability”, the law conference hosted at Victoria University of Wellington from 14-16 February 2014. You can read part one here.

Following Linda Sheehan’s presentation, we were treated to another lecture from Professor Klaus Bosselmann, following up on his keynote speech of the preceding evening.

Bosselmann’s talk built on his identification of property rights as the key bar towards adopting the limits inherent in sustainability. His contention was that, while useful, the reference to rights for Mother Earth has the risk of coming across as too “hippy” – continuing the individual discourse of entitlement (“my right”) while alienating those with historical antipathy towards the environmental movement. Several members of audience echoed this in the various question sessions, although it was pointed out that rights for nature are just one tool working towards sustainability, and that the attendant nature of our problems requires multifaceted efforts.

Instead Bosselmann’s suggestion was that it is better for New Zealand to tackle property rights up front via the inclusion of duties. No property exists in isolation from its social context, and Bosselmann spent some time talking about what he called “onion theory”: the idea that all action is contained within a social and ecological context – building towards a dynamic concept of property and human rights. New Zealand has no explicitly recognised right to property in our existing Bill of Rights, suggesting that such a shift might be easier in New Zealand than in other countries.