Just Transitions : Explorations of Sustainability in an Unfair World

Current economic growth strategies are rapidly depleting the natural resources and eco-system services that we depend on. As many developing countries strive to eradicate poverty via economic growth, they are all encountering the consequences of global warming and dwindling levels of cheap oil, productive soils, metals, clean water supplies and forest products. If the fast-developing large-scale countries (China, India, Brazil) and small-scale countries (South Africa, Mexico, Venezuela, Poland) want to develop in the same way and to the same level as currently developed economies, they will simply be unable to find the natural resources they require to make this happen. For these developing countries, very different solutions are required. In addition, the world's population is expected to grow by three billion by 2050 and most of these people will be living in cities in Africa and Asia. Put all this together and it is clear that some radical changes are on the way. Just transitions provides a comprehensive overview of these global challenges from the perspective of a southern, developing country. Informed by the extremely difficult task of reconciling the need to eradicate poverty with the need to rebuild our eco-system services and natural resources, this book provides us with a way of thinking about the global challenges we face and the kinds of solutions that are emerging, in particular in developing economies in the Global South. To this end, the literature and case studies the book draws on are mainly from developing country contexts, although the book discusses these and the South African challenges as part of a set of global trends. None of the recent publications on sustainable development in Africa deal with eco-system services and natural resources. This is the first book that integrates development thinking and ecological concerns. What also makes the book unique is that it is not confined to a particular field of study or discipline. The conceptual language used to tell this story is drawn from complexity theory. The authors argue that complexity theory opens up the space that is needed to develop a more trans-disciplinary understanding of a set of challenges that cannot be grasped if we remain locked into traditional disciplinary modes of thinking and they thus introduce a range of topics that are rarely discussed together in a single text. There is an obvious need for a book on sustainable development that is informed primarily by the concerns, institutional settings, literatures and dynamics that prevail in the least-developed and middle-developing economies, with special reference to Africa. This book is it.