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Sufficiency and Efficiency:
Putting Need above Greed

Ashok Khosla, April 1997

The goals of conservation clearly cannot be reached with today’s urban-industrial lifestyles. Nor with the existing disparities within or between countries. Sustainable development implies not only efficient and ecologically sound management of resources, but also the need to establish social equity and political empowerment. What hope is there for this planet if the countries of the South start to consume resources as the North does today? Or if the vast numbers of poor in our country demand what the rich few already have? They are not only entitled to do so under any concept of fairness and justice, but are also being encouraged to by the forces of the global market. What will be the demographic, economic and environmental impact in the longer term if poverty and marginalisation in our economy further delays the stabilisation of our population?

Among the perennial questions of northern consumption patterns and southern population growth, the central issues are, of course, sufficiency and efficiency. How much is enough, and how little do we have to use to get it? This means that conservation goals also require us to reorient the way we produce the goods and services that we consume. The sustainability equation inexorably brings together sufficiency of consumption and efficiency of production. And this means that conservationists will necessarily have to work more closely with the private sector, not only helping them become more resource efficient, but also helping redefine the role they play in society and the economy.

The central goals of our production systems have to be not only the generation of goods and services, but equally the creation of jobs and the efficient use of natural resources. For the poorer half of the world’s people, this translates into satisfaction of basic needs, income (and purchasing power), and maintaining the productivity of the resource base. We now need to show how all these factors can be operationally linked together to get a better strategy for sustainable development.

Today’s industrial methods are no good. They involve too much capital. They waste too many resources. They cause too much pollution. And they disrupt too many life support systems - the material flows generated today by mankind are estimated to be already comparable to geological flows. Large scale industry causes large scale disruption, both ecologically and socially.

We need new technologies and also a new science of economics. We need to create work places - jobs - at one hundredth the cost of the ones we are creating today in our globalised economy. And we need to increase the productivity of material resource use by at least 10 times what it is today. Sustainable industrialisation will unquestionably have to be more decentralised, efficient and responsive than it is today. And it must be based on a better understanding of resource pricing, environmental accounting, scales of production, financing systems and the many other factors that are in need of fundamental change. Conservationists have a central contribution to make in the design of such an industry.

A synthesising concept that might offer some clues is that of sustainable livelihoods. A sustainable livelihood is one that gives dignity and meaning to life, provides adequate remuneration and thus creates purchasing power, and produces goods and services that people need. Above all, it does not destroy the resource base. Sustainable livelihoods tend to strengthen local economies, empower women and regenerate the environment. Large scale generation of sustainable livelihoods, both in the North and the South, may well be the surest way to attain our conservation goals. What do we do now to move in that direction? What are the first steps?

Sustainable livelihoods not only contribute to conservation but also enable people to benefit from it. And this brings us to the need for conservationists to strengthen their understanding of governance. A fundamental issue of conservation concerns how people make decisions that affect their - and everyone else’s - resource base. This means that conservation is inextricably linked to the question of empowerment, participation of people in decision making, the transparency of government processes and the whole basis of planning.

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