402 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
sake of manageability, this wide sweep of characteristics was pared down to a lim-
ited set of variables that could be used to construct a comparative matrix. In the
interests of ‘getting a handle’ on what we viewed as the multidimensional nature of
social visions, however, we narrowed these wide-ranging themes to a set of some-
what conventional attributes (cf. Jessen, 1981, pp114–116), as well as several that
are less conventional. Finding a balance – between having criteria that structure
the analysis without overly structuring it – proved difficult. For the limited pur-
pose of reviewing the global models, however, they proved useful in dealing with
complexity.
The models
We examined the reports of six global modelling efforts and one related environ-
mentalist tract in an attempt to extract the social visions, if any, contained therein.
The models are the two Club of Rome efforts, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al,
1972) and the update, Mankind at the Turning Point (Mesarovic and Pestel, 1974);
Kahn and colleagues’ Hudson Institute rebuttal from the right, The Next 200 Years
(Kahn et al, 1976); the Latin American rebuttal from the left, the Latin American
World Model or LAWM (Bruckmann, 1976; Herrera et al, 1976), also known as
the Bariloche model (Gallopin, 2001); Leontief ’s economic model for the UN
(Leontief et al, 1977), and the Carter administration’s compilation of US govern-
ment models in the Global 2000 report (USCEQ, 1980). The environmentalist
report is Blueprint for Survival by Edward Goldsmith and the other editors of the
Ecologist (1972).
None of these models is explicitly social; they examine neither social structure
nor the lived experience of people. All focus primarily on the economic and envi-
ronmental implications of global development (Leontief et al, 1977), on the com-
patibility of economics and natural resources, and on demography as an input
governing economics. The variables used are primarily those for which numerical
data were relatively readily available. They all use basically the same variables –
population growth, production, income, materials/energy consumption and some-
times pollution. Each model or report was created for a specific and limited
purpose.
In no case was the primary purpose of a model the elaboration of a social
vision. The Latin American and UN (Leontief et al, 1977) reports make no claim
to be anything other than economic models; the input–output structure of the
Leontief model treats society as a ‘black box’. Other model reports specifically state
that they do not address social issues, claiming, for example, to be explicitly ‘con-
cerned with biophysical matters, as opposed to social, political, and economic
developments’ (USCEQ, 1980, pp2, 275), and noting that ‘no formal model of
social conditions’ is offered (Meadows et al, 1972, p174).
Even Blueprint for Survival, which claims to offer a vision for a radically differ-
ent and stable society, offers few specifics beyond a call for decentralization; its
main emphasis is on resource conservation and a steady-state economy. Its section