394 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
change. The assessments by the American Council for the United Nations University
(ACUNU) in the Millennium Project (Glenn and Gordon, 1999; State of the Future,
1997, 1998, 1999) show important gaps to be filled.
This hesitation to engage social issues is perhaps understandable – ecology and
economy alone are complicated enough (Daly, 1999); the social and political
aspects, as emphasized throughout this volume, are often regarded as intractable
and politically touchy; however, the price of ignoring them is high. Social issues are
central to problems of environment and development, and are, in any case, worthy
of attention in their own right.
Social concerns are critical to environment and development issues in several
ways. First, a number of authors, working on an array of environmental-degrada-
tion problems, have argued that these issues are fundamentally social in nature.
For example, a ‘downward spiral’ linking poverty and environment is widely rec-
ognized (e.g. Durning, 1989; Kates, 2000; Kates and Haarmann, 1992; Leonard,
1989; Mellor, 1988); Blaikie (1985), Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), and Blaikie et
al (1994) argue that land degradation is a social problem, related to a ‘simple
reproduction squeeze’ (e.g. Bernstein, 1979). Hunger can be viewed as a distribu-
tion rather than a production problem (e.g. Lappé and Collins, 1978; Lappé et al,
1998), as an entitlement problem (Sen, 1981), or as an outcome of political con-
flicts (Chen, 1990); a few decades ago, it was viewed as a population-control prob-
lem (e.g. Ehrlich, 1968). To the extent that any of these observations are accurate,
social as well as economic and environmental factors will determine whether
clashes of environment and economy can be resolved.
Second, leaving aside momentarily the thorny problem of implementation, if
policy makers do attempt directly to reconcile environment and economy, they
still face the task of anticipating or identifying institutions, political structures,
value systems and lifestyles that are consistent with the desired or necessary condi-
tions. What kinds of social structures, belief systems, families, activity patterns,
geographies and aspirations will be compatible with the environment/economy
system they recommend?
It is clear that merely making and attempting to implement policy does not
necessarily result in actual social change, particularly given the tendency of the
policy makers to take existing social structures and institutions for granted. Any
changes in resource use, in the structure of the economy or in nature/society rela-
tions must all be implemented through the existing social system and will require
major changes in that system. Relatively little is really known, however, about the
sources and dynamics of social change, and even less under such conditions as
global scale of impacts, rapid change, large populations, complex technologies,
diverse and interacting cultures, and responses to subtle and systemic problems
with long lag times. It is clear that societal initiatives or responses that work in
some cultures do not work in others.
These three concerns – global change as a social phenomenon, identification of
social systems compatible with ecological and economic sustainability and the dynam-
ics of social change – all point to the need for an integral social science engagement in