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Growth and Consequence:

Rethinking our economic future

There’s a growing sense that the kind of debt-driven economic growth that brought the global economy to the edge of the precipice is no longer viable. But politicians are desperate to get back to that ever-so-reassuring paradigm of conventional economic growth. So what is going to resolve this chronic impasse?
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Resourcing SD in DEFRA

Forgive the extended blog yesterday – a bit over the top. So I just wanted to reassure Mrs Spelman and Mr Huhne that they now have two weeks respite as I’m away on holiday.

Which also means that I’ve kept Test Number 4 just about as simple as possible.

On July 27th, in response to a Parliamentary Question from Green MP Caroline Lucas, junior DEFRA Minister Jim Paice made the following commitment: “DEFRA will establish an enhanced departmental capability and presence on sustainable development”.

To put that one to the test, all we have to do is compare DEFRA’s “SD capability” on May 5th 2010 with its capability on May 6th 2011.

In the interests of proper transparency, it would therefore be very helpful if Mrs Spelman could publish what DEFRA’s total resource looked like when they entered government. I’m sure her officials should be able to help her (and possibly me too!) in unearthing those baseline figures in terms of core staff resources and other financial commitments. Including the Sustainable Development Dialogues and so on.

If that sounds just a little bit too easy, don’t forget that we’re starting from a low baseline in terms of ministerial capability. In his answer to that Parliamentary Question, he made the following statement: “While Government has made progress, we need to take more concerted action on the carbon agenda led by DECC, and also on the wider sustainability agenda including waste, water, biodiversity, resource efficiency and other areas which DEFRA leads on.

Unfortunately, Mr Paice, that’s not the same thing as sustainable development. You seem to have omitted vast chunks of what falls within this territory, as you would probably have spotted had you had a chance as yet to look at ‘Securing the Future’. There’s no reference here to anything to do with health, education, economic policy, international development, social services, governance and so on. Oh dear!

In my blog yesterday, I referred to the paper from Andrea Ross, and there’s a very helpful paragraph in there that I think will help you to understand why sustainable development is so much more than the sum of its constituent parts – including straight environmental issues and climate change.

“As a ‘whole systems’ concept, sustainable development must not be too closely linked to one particular concern, including environmental protection, human rights or climate change. Consequently, sustainable development cannot be an effective champion for any of its component parts on their own. These concerns need their own champions. Instead, sustainable development is most appropriately viewed as providing the forum or ‘table’ to which important and more concrete objectives and values can be brought. Used in this way, sustainable development can offer a framework for decision-making which ensures that these objectives and values have influence in the decision-making process.”

In other words, “whole systems” not disaggregated bits of greenery.

Posted on August 18, 2010 5:55 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mainstreaming Sustainable Development

This year’s CEO Study 2010, ‘A New Era of Sustainability’, carried out by Accenture on behalf of the UN’s Global Compact initiative, came out with some fascinating insights into the state of mind of around a thousand CEOs all around the world. It’s actually hugely encouraging - especially at a time when our politicians are still all at sea on sustainability.

But one finding had me hooting with laughter: 81% of CEOs – compared to just 50% in 2007 – were of the opinion that sustainability was now “fully embedded into the strategy and operations of their company”. Really?!

Don’t get me wrong. Lots of companies are doing lots of things to address today’s most pressing sustainability challenges, and many of them are already making a real difference. But that’s not the same thing as “fully embedded”. Of all the companies that I have come into contact with over the last twenty years, through both Forum for the Future and The Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, I would say that less than 5% could make any sort of claim to sustainability being “fully embedded”.

That may sound like a low level, but it’s no mean feat “fully embedding” sustainability in any organisation. Which is why my incredulity went into overdrive on hearing Mrs Spelman (DEFRA Secretary of State) claim that one of her reasons for axing the Sustainable Development Commission was the fact that sustainable development was now “mainstreamed across the whole of Government”.

In case you feel left out at having missed such a momentous mainstreaming moment, let me reassure you that this is just a figment of Mrs Spelman’s virgin imagination – that’s her SD virginity of course.

In reality, there is not one single part of government – or the whole of the public sector, for that matter – anywhere in the UK where sustainable development has as yet been properly mainstreamed. And by properly mainstreamed, I suggest DEFRA continues to use the old Sustainable Development Commission definition as in “sustainable development becoming the central organising principle for everything that Government does”.

That judgement is powerfully reinforced in a very interesting new paper from Andrea Ross (Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee), with the compelling title: “It’s Time to Get Serious – Why Legislation is Needed to Make Sustainable Development a Reality in the UK”. http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

Whilst acknowledging that good progress have been made over the last few years (particularly in terms of the ‘architecture’ of SD and rigorous watchdog interventions), Andrea Ross argues that the current framework is still not delivering in three critical areas: “improving understanding, providing a comprehensive framework to integrate potential conflicting priorities, and proving an operational toolkit”. Her paper highlights better progress in Wales (where SD was statutorily ‘embedded’ in the Government of Wales Act 2006) and (to a lesser extent) in Scotland. But it reveals continuing inconsistencies across the whole of the UK in terms of both interpretation and the use of SD. She concludes:

“The UK is now at a stage where specific legislation is required to drive the implementation of sustainable development further forward. Legislation directed at the implementation of sustainable development could potentially address many of the current shortcomings by increasing the priority, support and protection afforded to sustainable development across government(s) as a long-term policy objective.”

That should go down well with Mrs Spelman and Mr Huhne!

I did consider, briefly, setting that as my third Spelman-Huhne Test to give them a chance to put their professed enthusiasm for sustainable development into practice. But that would be unfair given the total indifference of the rest of their Cabinet colleagues.

So let’s set the bar much, much lower from a mainstreaming point of view. The Government’s own sustainable development strategy (‘Securing the Future’) was produced in 2005 and is now ‘out of time’. So it’s now incumbent on Mrs Spelman (with Mr Huhne’s loyal support) to prepare a new strategy which will give them a chance to show what effective ‘mainstreaming’ looks like across the whole of government – without the Sustainable Development Commission to help them out.

And it would, I think, be entirely reasonable to set a deadline for a new strategy to appear before May 6th 2011.

Posted on August 16, 2010 4:48 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Spelman-Huhne Tests

I have decided it is probably unreasonable to keep imposing my ‘SD Tests’ on Mrs Spelman all on her own. Given her inexperience in government, and her total ignorance of anything to do with sustainable development, that’s just not fair.

Test Number 1 was to see if Mrs Spelman could persuade Michael Gove to reverse his utterly idiotic decision to get rid of the Department of Education’s world-renowned Sustainable Schools initiative. Test Number 2 was to persuade Eric Pickles and George Osborne to impose a sustainable development duty on the new Local Enterprise Partnerships as and when they emerge from the Department of Communities and Local Government’s fevered imagination.

Anyone would need help with these – let alone some of the humdingers to come that I am currently storing up for Mrs Spelman and her colleagues. She clearly needs help.
In her Press statement announcing the axing of the Sustainable Development Commission (on the grounds that sustainable development was now mainstreamed across the whole of government!), Mrs Spelman indicated that she and Chris Huhne (Secretary of State in the Department of Energy and Climate Change – DECC) would jointly share responsibility for promoting sustainable development across Government.

So step forward Mr Huhne to share the burden of responsibility for sustainable development with your DEFRA colleagues.

Mr Huhne is, of course, more than a little preoccupied with a host of different issues inside his own Department. In fact, in this regard, he bears an uncanny resemblance to his predecessor, Ed Miliband, maintaining a very high level of activity in promoting the Government’s low-carbon agenda, whilst all around him his Cabinet colleagues seem to be pursuing a completely different agenda. Ed Miliband made a pretty good job of it when he was in post – whilst acknowledging in retrospect that the success of DECC depends at least on Treasury and other key Departments as it does on its own resources.

And Mr Huhne has already taken his share of hits. Substantial reductions (of more than £30 million) in some of the grant schemes for renewable energy; the deferment until 2013 of the much-hyped ‘Pay-as-you-Save Green Deal’ for retrofitting existing housing; and Treasury gearing up to make it impossible for Mr Huhne to bring in the critically important Renewable Heat Initiative in April next year.

But the tone in DECC is still right. It’s an excellent Ministerial line-up, and they have lots of good people working away diligently to do the right things. Chris Huhne’s joint statement with his opposite numbers in France and Germany, calling on the EU to cut its emissions by 30% by 2020 instead of the current target of 20%, was bang on the nail.

But come the Comprehensive Spending Review later in the year, I suspect things are going to get a lot tougher for DECC – let alone for those still intent on keeping sustainable development alive and well across the whole of the public sector. Testing times, you might say, for that dynamic SD duo of Spelman and Huhne.

Posted on August 11, 2010 10:47 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

FROM RDAs to LOCAL ENTERPRISE PARTNERSHIPS – Where’s the Sustainable Development?

“Dogma-driven iconoclasts” is just about the politest way of describing what the Coalition Government is up to on sustainable development. There’s a Picklesian mixture of delight and spite in sweeping away anything that might once have informed
policy-making under the old ‘regime’. It won’t necessarily have been everybody’s image of the week last week, but shots of the recycling bins outside the former offices of the South East England Regional Assembly stuffed to the gunwales with copies of its now redundant South East Plan were deeply depressing.

Coping with the problem of overheating in the South East is a compellingly complex problem. Juggling economic development with community cohesion, quality of life, biophysical sustainability and shortages in land, infrastructure, housing and water is a sophisticated business. The South East Plan was just that – a sophisticated, inclusive way of managing the all but unmanageable.

But regions – and all the institutional arrangements that went with them – are now no more. When it came to determining the fate of the Regional Development Agencies, for instance, the pro-RDA Vince Cable and a handful of stutteringly inadequate Lib Dems elsewhere in Government were easily trumped by Pickles and the Treasury.

There was no review; no assessment of the economic benefits which will be lost (with RDAs leveraging at least £4.50 for every £1 they laid out; and no attempt made to work out how best to transition the skills, networks and deep knowledge of the RDAs into alternative arrangements. Done with spite. Done with crass, precipitate indifference.

Civil servants across Whitehall are contemplating the carnage with growing ill-ease. It’s relatively easy to get rid of thing you don’t like. It’s a damn sight harder to bring forward better in their place.

Eric Pickles has announced that the Regional Development Agencies will be replaced with Local Enterprise Partnerships. These Partnerships will, apparently, be much more attuned to local needs. Much better able to leverage community resources. Much more business-friendly – not least because they will be chaired by business people. The reality, however, is that nobody knows how they’ll work, how they will handle public money (if there is any to be handled), and how they will be held to account.

Least of all, nobody knows how they will promote genuine sustainable development in their localities. One of the great strengths of the RDAs was the fact that they had a statutory duty “to contribute to sustainable development” in everything they did. Performance in delivering on that sustainable development duty was, of course, patchy, but they achieved far more in this area than they would ever have done without having such a duty imposed upon them.

So here’s my next test for Caroline Spelman as she starts living up to her claim to be the champion of sustainable development across the whole of Government: persuade Eric Pickles and George Osborne to impose a similar (or even better) sustainable development duty on all Local Enterprise Partnerships, in whatever form they eventually emerge.

Don’t let them bully you with their predictable protestations that it should be up to each individual Local Enterprise Partnership to decide for itself: that’s not how sustainable development works – not yet, at any rate. Either you mandate them to put sustainable development and the low carbon economy at the heart of what they do, or it simply won’t get done.

And if Mrs Spelman needs any help with how best to frame such a duty, there’s some very good guidance lying around somewhere in DEFRA’s Sustainable Development Unit – drafted with the help of the Sustainable Development Commission. Or at least there used to be.

Posted on August 10, 2010 11:48 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nailing the Lib Dems

Thanks to everyone for those empathetic responses on the government pulling the plug on the SDC. Crass, unfounded, self-defeating, ideologically-motivated – that just about sums it up!

Which brings me to the role of the Lib Dems in this wretched business. And what one detects here is a combination of indifference and supine deference to their coalition partners. Not so much as a puppy-dog whimper of dissent.

For Lib Dem MPs and voters, this has sent out a very worrying signal. Whatever the Party’s internal rationale may have been for throwing in its lot with the Tories, the external perception is that the Lib Dems have four things they have to deliver on if they are going to come out of this the other end with any credibility: electoral reform; civil liberties enhanced; environment and sustainable development on the up; and the Lib Dems need to have exercised a restraining, moderating and civilising influence on their coalition partners.

Sticking to the environment / SD bit for now, Lib Dem performance to date has been poor to very poor. Not having a Liberal Democrat Minister inside Defra is proving particularly problematic. Claims that Defra will be enhancing its capability to promote sustainable development are, as yet, entirely unsubstantiated, and the likely outcome of further cuts in Defra is that SD capability will be even further hammered come the Comprehensive Spending Review this Autumn.

If the SDC was still there, that probably wouldn’t have mattered that much. Defra always struggled with its cross-government remit in this regard. But without the SDC, other Departments will just get on and do what they want to do without any SD oversight.

So this may well be the time to create the first test for Caroline Spelman in her self-declared role as ‘personal lead’ on promoting SD across government. Right now, she has a wonderful opportunity to prove her championing skills with the Department of Education.

I won’t bore you with the details, but for the last four or five years, the Department of Education has done an increasingly good job in ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development, quietly and intelligently, across the whole educational system. Michael Gove, as the new Secretary of State, has now decided that he wants to get rid of the department’s Sustainable Schools Strategy – and will no longer be actively involved in promoting sustainable schools.

A small thing in itself – relative to the systematic slash and burn underway on every other front – but fairly disastrous in terms of engaging young people in building a low-carbon sustainable future.

Again, this is straight ideology. The cost associated with the department’s leadership in this has been minimal.

Plenty of scope, therefore, for Caroline Spelman to pick up the phone to persuade Michael Gove to withdraw those proposals, and start championing SD even more enthusiastically than his Labour predecessor.

If Mrs Spelman is too busy, then perhaps some of her greener Lib Dem colleagues could weigh in with Mr Gove.

As I said earlier, it’s too early to come to any definitive conclusion here. Maybe what we’re seeing is a series of one-off, heedless decisions – taken simply because they don’t know any better. Alternatively, it could be a pattern emerging along the lines of ‘slash the deficit, sod the environment’.

In which case, suggestions that we should be targeting Lib Dem MPs now, before the pattern is established, becomes all the more important.

And the parallel idea that we might set up some independent, web-enabled scrutiny function (under the compelling title of ‘ GreenestGovEverYeahRight.com!’) is beginning to sound more and more attractive.


Posted on July 28, 2010 3:38 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The Government's First Green Betrayal

As the former Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000-2009, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the Government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the Commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision. They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money
The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which come from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government.
Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the Government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the Commission, no doubt because both Countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication
This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises Ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective. It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that. And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body
It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of Government Ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the Department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of it’s own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the Government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the Green agenda will fare under the Coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.


Posted on July 23, 2010 11:20 AM | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)