158 Poverty and Hunger
those who are more affluent and putting them beyond the reach of communities
and people who are less well off.
Third, non-renewable natural capital resources, like rocks, minerals, oil or gas,
are not normally given intrinsic value in economic assessments. When they are
irreversibly exploited they appear in themselves costless. To be sure, there are the
costs of land, licences and royalties, and of extraction, processing and bringing into
use; and sometimes costs are attributed to loss of amenity and physical and eco-
logical damage. But non-renewable natural resources are not given an inherent
capital value. So they come out on the wrong side of the ledger as benefits when,
unless recycled, they are more strictly costs in the form of irreversible losses.
Fourth, the cultural, aesthetic, ecological, recreational and spiritual values
threatened or diminished by irreversible ‘development’ cannot be measured in
money; yet they are deep elements in the quality of human life and experience.
Attempts to measure some of them in cash equivalents appear crude. What is the
dollar value of being able to watch a bird or climb a rock, now and for future gen-
erations? Some may justify giving these a cash value as a short-term expedient in
order to talk to hard-core economists in their own terms. In my view, responsible
imagination and reflection on stewardship of the heritage of countless future gen-
erations will always be better and should carry more weight.
The effects of these biases and neglect are pervasive. Take even the report of the
World Commission on Dams (WCD, 2000). Though a remarkable achievement
and tour de force, it does not give irreversibility as much prominence as the concept
would seem to merit. For irreversibility applies both to structures and their impacts
and to decision processes. Despite siltation, earthquakes and other hazards, dam
structures and their immediate impacts are large and irreversible. As for decision
making, the central values that run through the report are equity, efficiency, par-
ticipatory decision making, sustainability and accountability. Irreversibility is
mainly addressed indirectly, by presenting five key decision points in planning and
project development. Although the last of its seven criticisms of cost–benefit anal-
ysis is ignoring ‘the effect of uncertainty and irreversibility of investment’, the report
does not make irreversibility a central issue (WCD, 2000, ppxxiii, 181, 263).
Over the past decade, and offsetting such biases and neglect, some economists
have given more attention to irreversibility and related concepts. Faucheux and
Froger (1995), for example, examine decision making in the conditions of uncer-
tainty, irreversibility and complexity, which they say characterize most environ-
mental problems. Zhao and Zilberman (1999) distinguish between technical
irreversibility, when technologies to mitigate negative impacts do not exist, and
economic irreversibility, when ‘it is not optimal to restore the development even
though technologies exist to do so’ (ibid, p560). This is because of the level of what
they call irreversibility costs or restoration costs. Faucheux and Hue (2001) in their
article ‘From irreversibility to participation: Towards a participatory foresight for
the governance of collective environmental risks’ move the discussion into the
social realm, stressing the need for vigilance and describing experiments with forms
of participatory ‘social foresights’ – which articulate ‘demand’ as signalled in the