The Global Environment as Life-worlds: On the Senses of Sustainable Development

Abstract

Environmental political arena was once dominated by two opposing forces. On the one hand, environmentalists demanded unconditional conservation of the environment; and on the other, developmentalists promoted economic development by exploiting the environment. The normalization of the concept of sustainable development at the end of the 1980s opened a new policy space in this arena, in which expert policy-makers began to emphasize the importance of ‘natural resource management’. Yet, this emphasis on ‘management’ has not sufficiently taken account of social and cultural meanings attached to the environment, generating policy contestations furthermore. This article argues that the current contestations stem from the persisting assumption that the environment as a set of ‘natural resources’ to be managed is detachable from human activities. Two examples illustrate this argument: the first example shows the emergence of social development concerns in the Amazon; and the second example shows intensifying cultural politics of whaling. Both instances demonstrate that the assumption of the environment at stake (rainforest and whale) to be managed relies on a clear conceptual division between nature and society concerning the environment, whereas this division has been continuously blurred in the process of political negotiations over time. Drawing on the phenomenology and some aspects of science studies, this article proposes to discard the nature-society division and consider the environment as a re-assemblage of human and non-human elements embedded within the involved actors’ life-worlds.