10. The Context for Sustainable development Extension
10.1 Sustainable development as an operational concept
Attempts to utilise the concept of ‘sustainability’ through legislation, policy, and community development initiatives have converged on seeing sustainable development as ‘process’ rather than any defined ‘end-state’ (more information on this is provided at . Such a process has aspects that distinguish it from traditional economic and social development paradigms. These include extending time frames beyond the immediate generation, the raised importance of monitoring and feedback systems, and the necessity for determining goals and measuring success from the three interlinked spheres of social, economic and ecological functionality.
As a theoretical proposition, sustainable development might have little to distinguish it from what might be considered good farm planning. Property owners wishing to sustain their lifestyles for the duration of their own lives and for those of their descendants (as many do) naturally strive to maintain the long-term viability of their land, and to contribute to the communities that provide for their needs and development. However, in practice, even when rural land owners are able to withstand the pressures of short-term economic need and can afford to take into account intergenerational time horizons, their capacity to assess cumulative or threshold effects in the environment is limited because the information about such effects is limited.
Over the past two decades, the challenges facing land owners and resource managers have multiplied. Where once rural agricultural and horticultural environments were viewed as single-sector-oriented productive landscapes, they now face the pressures of demands by new players – for instance those interested in voicing their views on landscape, recreation, conservation, tourism, and expecting to be heard. Furthermore sustainable development operates at a range of scales involving decisions made at grassroots, local, regional and national levels. While landowners may make the ultimate decisions ‘on-the-ground’, others play an active role in creating the context (positive or negative) that enables sustainable development to happen.
Policy makers, landowners, and other interest groups who are to make decisions within a framework of sustainable development clearly need new types of information, as well as a capacity to think in new ways. This includes information about the interaction between various aspects of productivity and ecosystem processes, new processes of monitoring, creating learning-based feedback loops (adaptive management processes) to detect unsustainable practices and respond appropriately, and the ability to forecast and manage for the uncertainty that extended time horizons create.
Science alone is unable to deliver complete answers to many of the complex questions of interaction between ecology and production, and land managers and policy makers cannot rely on a unidirectional information system to provide answers to their management questions. Managers therefore need a learning process that involves finding out about complex and dynamic situations, followed by taking action to improve them, and evaluating the results of this action. How sustainable a system is ultimately becomes a measure of the learning capacity of the community in relation to its environment.
10.2 How sustainability has come to be an issue for rural industries
While the widespread introduction of sustainable development practices may appear a daunting task, we should remember that land management change is something that has long been happening in response to different societal concerns and aspirations. So marked are these changes in many rural areas that Bawden (1991) proposes several different eras of land management. Each era is dominated by a different popular perception of land use, and the way it is practised. Figure 1 shows how these different eras relate to New Zealand agriculture over the past century.
During the early years farming was in an establishment or pioneering phase, with the focus on survival (Fig. 1). As Wells et al. (1998) observed about the dairy industry, this was no ‘get rich quick’ enterprise; early records portray a fledgling industry whose constraints were a critical shortage of labour and capital, and whose revenue and future prospects were clouded in doubt and uncertainty due to fluctuating market returns (ibid.).
Figure 1 Different eras of land management as they relate to New Zealand agriculture (Adapted from Bawden 1987)
However, following World War 2, improved market conditions accompanied by the development and uptake of new technologies – artificial breeding, fertilisers, trace elements – ushered in a new era of agricultural production. The emphasis was no longer on land clearance and development, but rather on using the results of science to improve different elements of farm production. In response to rising costs and declining terms of trade from the late 1960s, farmers increasingly concentrated on maximising resource efficiency as well as production effectiveness. Within both research and management, more consideration was given to optimising the farm system as a whole. In both these production and productivity eras, the success of land management efforts was judged almost solely in terms of simple production and economic measures, and not just by farmers. Indeed, during the 1970s and early 1980s farmers were actively encouraged to take advantage of production technology by considerable public support in the form of incentives and subsidies.
This process of change is more complicated than it may first appear because each emerging perspective (or world view) complements rather than replaces its predecessors. Thus we can see today simultaneous phases of pioneering as dairy farmers move south with ongoing management competency exhibited in terms of both high production and productivity, all of which must meet the requirements of increasingly stringent environmental regulations. At the same time, more and more interest groups are demanding a role in how the land should be managed (Bawden 1991).
Contact for Enquiries
Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
Contact this person
