416 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
greater sharing of power and fundamental social change transforms governments
and institutions. In a separate effort, Costanza (1999) identifies four ‘future histo-
ries’ – ‘Star Trek’, a vision of technological optimism, free competition and unlim-
ited resources; ‘Mad Max’, the technological scepticist nightmare come true, when
technology and consumption go bad; ‘Big Government’, in which protective gov-
ernment policies override the free market; and ‘Ecotopia’, the low-consumption,
sustainability vision.
The PoleStar Project of the Stockholm Environment Institute, referred to
above, has also sought a broader framework that includes the conventional IPAT
(impacts = population × affluence × technology) drivers of change but also a
broader array of social variables (international equity, national equity, welfare, con-
flict, poverty and political instability), designed to capture the ‘interlocking crises’
of concern in the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987). PoleStar identifies and anal-
yses three archetypal scenarios of the future – conventional worlds, a class of sce-
narios that assumes that current global trends play out without major discontinuity
or surprise in the evolution of institutions, environmental systems, and human
values; barbarization, scenarios in which fundamental social change occurs but
brings great human misery and collapse of civilized norms; and great transitions, in
which fundamental social transformation occurs but a new and higher stage of
human civilization is achieved (Gallopin et al, 1997). Events with the capability to
redirect beliefs, behaviours and institutions away from some visions of the future
and toward others are posited, as are sideswipes, major surprises (e.g. world wars,
miracle technologies, pandemics) that greatly alter trends toward particular out-
comes (Gallopin and Raskin, 1998; Raskin et al, 1998).
Although these and other efforts of the 1980s and 1990s have come a long way
in improving on the earlier models, mostly they are still bound by their focus on a
limited set of traditional (if important) variables. It seems fair to conclude that the
models have unduly set the terms of social and political debate, defining a sustain-
able global future largely in terms of population, resource and economic relation-
ships. In other words, the debate and the ongoing work in integrated assessment,
with several notable exceptions, remain unduly limited in social content and
visions. In this regard, the explicit attention by Robinson in chapter 15 [of Global
Environmental Risk, Earthscan, 2001] to identify social principles of sustainabil-
ity is a step in the right direction, as are the use of differing cultural perspectives
by the RIVM group in The Netherlands to enrich the underlying assumptions
of integrated assessment (Asselt and Rotmans, 1996) and the efforts of the US
Interagency Working Group on Sustainable Development Indicators (1998). In
envisioning alternative futures, in short, the net needs to be cast to include a larger
array of ideologies, religions and cultures but also historians, anthropologists and
humanists; of course, some of these will generate dark views of the future (Kaplan,
1994).