COURSE ID: 2101

COURSE NAME: THE MAKING OF DEVELOPMENT. HISTORIES, THEORIES, AND

PRACTICES.

LECTURER: WENDY HARCOURT ET AL.

TITLE OF PAPER:

Pawning the future or earning the present. Sustainable Development and Socio-
territorial movements in the era of the Green Economy.

STUDENT ID ERNA # (NOT E-MAIL ADDRESS): 462415

Introduction
We have become impoverished. We have given up one
portion of the human heritage after another, and have
often left it at the pawnbrokers for a hundredth of its
true value, in exchange for the small change of the
contemporary. The economic crisis is at the door, and
behind it is the shadow of the approaching war.
Walter Benjamin.
The spokesmen of the ruling class have told us that everything that they are doing is for the
economic benefit of us. Everyone is going to receive its portion, they tell us. Some earlier,
some later. Two things are true. The first one is that when the ruling class speaks about
economic benefit we should ask: the economic benefit of whom? The second one is that
even in their close understanding of what economic benefit is, they are making a stupid
movement: they are pawning the complete future for a minimal actual profit. The paradise
they promise will never come. As that popular proverb says: it will arrive the day when we
realize that we cannot eat the money we are so crazy to produce.
This essay will present two important concepts for the making and the unmaking of
development: sustainable development and socio-territorial movement. Our main thesis is
that sustainable development will continue being the beautiful oxymoron of the ruling class
to disguise the capitalist rapine as green economy if there is not a counter-hegemony (in the
Gramscian sense) that can sharpen their fighting tools with a territorial anchorage, that give
their claims not only a relevant space in the political struggle, but also a space in the struggle
for the survival of the human kind in the Earth. To develop this thesis first I will present the
history and the main characteristics of the term Sustainable Development to then elaborate
a critique of it, using the tools that the characteristics of the term socio-territorial movement
give to me.
Sustainable development in the end of the times
There seems to be a consensus that we are now living in the middle of an intersection of
multiple crisis: the climate crisis, the energetic crisis, the food crisis and, why not, the crisis
of meaning (including here of course, the culture) of our century. Where there is not a
consensus is in the way to address these multiple crises. All these crises didnt appear from
one day to the other. These ones are long term ones. Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael
Watts talking about the environmental crisis say: [t]he centrality of environment and
sustainability talk in the new millennium, () immediately draws us back to the late 1960s,
and the explosion of books predicting environmental collapse and systemic crisis, and the
emergence of varied green politics legislation, social movement, transnational institutions
focused on a new awareness of planet earth (Peet et Al. 2011: 12). Are we living that
collapse? Are we living in the end of times?
A short genealogy of the concept Sustainable Development allows to locate its first use in
1987, when it began to be used in the policy circles just after the publication of the report
on the global environment and development, made by the Brundtland Comission (Redclift
2005: 212). After this, the concept started influencing the principal discourses around the
development issue, from laws in the global south to international summits with the
participation of the most important countries of the world. Even though, as Ian Scoones
(2010) documented it, the term sustainability arrived to this weird union called Sustainable
Development after a long journey that began in 1712 when the German forester Hans Carl
von Carlowitz coined it in his text Sylvicultura Oeconomica, prescribing with it the way the
forests should be manage in long periods of time (Scoones 2010: 154).
The so called modern definition of sustainable development given by the Brundtland
commission in the report entitled Our Common Future, define it as following: [s]ustainable
development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (WCED 1987: 43). But, it is important
to elaborate again here the main questions of the political economy (Bernstein 2010) in
relation to these needs: it is possible to ask who define these needs, who has which needs
and how have been these needs being addressed. After asking us these questions and
analyzing the consequences in the practices of the development discourse related to the
environment issues (in documents produced and conferences made by the UN, the OECD
and the EU), one can notice that it has been the market in the process of accumulation of
capital the one who has defined which are the needs that have to be meet, who deserves to
have its needs being fulfilled and in which way. From the conclusions of the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to the resolution adopted by the General Assembly of United Nations
in 2012 called The future we want, growth guide by a green economy that puts the human
in the center and the environment just as a space where our specie develops, has been the
main guidelines of the agenda of Sustainable Development.
This lead us to a definition of the needs a society has in relation to the environmental impact
of them as ones that are not fixed, and that are produced in a constant struggle of power
relations. In the same dialectical exchange human-nature, in which the latter is produced
(Peet et al. 2011: 39) and not given as something static, the needs are also produced to
guarantee the statu-quo or the hegemonic social order in capitalism. This is the reason the
term Sustainable Development ended as the perfect justification of a process of
accumulation of capital in the name of the needs of the present and future generations, that
hides the process of unequal distribution of these needs in a context in which the nature or
the environment is something that can be buy or sell. Christa Wichterich summarizes the
consequences of this commodification of nature (Peet et al. 2011: 24) this have by saying:
[s]ince the first Rio conference in, as much as development has been economized, nature
has been increasingly privatized, commodified and marketized by fixing a monetary value to
its parts and its functions that have been called by neoclassical economics environmental
services (Wichterich 2015: 73).
Territory and socio-territorial movements
To understand what the term socio-territorial movement stands for, it is important to do a
brief detour around the concept of territory. For Fernanda Torres (Torres 2013) as it is for
other geographers, the first uses of the concept territory can be found in the German
geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who as Torres says despite introducing the analysis of the role
of the Human beings and societies in geography, remains within the Darwinian parameters
and develops a certain natural determinism (Torres 2013: 2). Ratzel is a key thinker to
understand the development of the human geography as a discipline that not only focus its
attention in the physical space but also in the interaction between the societies that inhabit
that space, and the way these interactions make and unmake the mentioned space. After
Ratzel, in the beginning of the XX century, the geographic school known as possibilisme, with
Paul Vidal de la Blache at the head, abandoned the concept territory to talk more about the
concept region (Torres 2013:2). In the seventies of the last century, the territory concept
returned to the scene of the hand of Jean Gottman, who like Friedrich Ratzel, put the
emphasis on the process of elaboration of this concept as a product of the state apparatus
in the exercise of its sovereignty (Torres 2013: 2).
In 1980, the swiss Claude Raffestin published his book Pour une gographie du pouvoir. In
this book Raffestin explains in a clear and very beautiful way how to distinguish in the
geographic discipline the differences between space and territory. This distinction is
important, explains Raffestin, because this are not equivalent concepts, but unfortunately
geographers have been using them with any distinction. Raffestin says: it is essential to
understand that the space is prior to the territory, that this one has been generated from the
former and that it is the result of the action of a syntagmatic actor (the one that realizes a
program) in some level () From this perspective, the territory is a space in which work,
energy and information have been projected and, consequently, reveals relationships
marked by power. Space is the original prison; Territory is the prison that men give
themselves (Raffestin 2011: 102). This distinction is important because not only identifies
that the territory is produced, as Ratzel also said, but that territory as the political space par
excellence (Raffestin 2011: 45) is produced in between the development of relationships of
power.
The category socioterritoral movement have been coined by the brasilian geographer
Bernardo Manano and discussed in some articles as Movimiento Social como Categora
Geogrfica (Fernandes 2000) and Movimentos socioterritoriais e movimentos
socioespaciais: contribuio terica para uma leitura geogrfica dos movimentos sociais
(Fernandes 2005). In the last one, the brazilian autor explains how the social movements
transform spaces in territories and how this transformation is made involving permanent
conflicts in the confrontation between political forces who try to create, conquer and
control their territories (Fernandes 2000: 30). Later, Fernandes points: The socio-territorial
movements have territory not only as an object, but this is essential to their existence.
Peasant movements, indigenous peoples () can be constructed in socio-territorial and
socio-spatial movements because they create social relations to directly address their
interests and thus produce their own spaces and territories (Fernandes 2000: 31).
According to this geographer, a social movement that not only uses a particular repertory of
action in a space, but also include that space and the possibility to construct it as a territory
that is part of their political agenda, is a socio-territorial movement.
One example of a socio-territorial movement is a peasant organization in Colombia called
the National Association of Peasant Reserve Zones (ANZORC, for its initials in Spanish). This
peasant association promotes the creation of Peasants Reserve Zones, which is a tool to
organize the territory, in all the country through more than 60 local associations. A Peasant
Reserve Zone is a territoriality figure because it enables peasant associations to delimit an
area (mainly in wasteland spaces), access to land to develop there a peasant economy and
decide, through a plan called Sustainable Development Plan, which type of relations human-
nature they want to promote there. At present, there are 6 of this zones in Colombia, and 7
are waiting for the approval of the government to be constituted.
One of the Peasant Reserve Zones that is waiting to be formally constituted1 is the Peasant
Reserve Zone of El Catatumbo. El Catatumbo is a zone in the northeast of Colombia, in the
boarder with Venezuela, where all the armed actors (legal and illegal ones) are present and
in which there are strong disputes around the constitution of territories in that space. The
main dispute is between the constitution of territories for the extractives enterprises and the
constitution of peasant territories that promote an economy and a way of live completely
different to the one the mining and oil companies are promoting. This is the zone with the
Environmental Manage Plan, included in his Sustainable Development Plan (with almost 600
hundred pages), most complete. In this Plan the Peasants identify the possible impacts of the
constitution of their Peasant Reserve Zone, develop strategies to prevent, mitigate or restore
the territory environmentally affected, generate a proposal of environmental management
and zoning of the territory that is guided by the social dynamics of conservation of the
peasant economy and the formulation of all the projects and programs through the
strengthening of the organizational and political peasant movement of El Catatumbo.
Conclusions: when socio-territorial movements meets Sustainable Development.
Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts points out the importance of admitting that
nature is produced by saying that this recognition opens the space to think about the political
opportunities of creating alternative natures based in other economic and social logics, that
can be more sustainable and more democratic (Peet et al. 2011: 30). The production of this
nature is something that is always linked to particular spaces, and what is more important,

1
Some of the zones that havent been recognized by the government have declared themselves as Peasant
Reserve Zones in fact. The formal recognition of the state enables the peasant social movement to adquire
some important rights as the access to land and the formalization of it.
to particular territories in which the different classes are fighting for the possibility to decide
over its production. This place-based notion guide us, as Arturo Escobar has also highlighted,
to think about subaltern places as the ones that gives a particular and a significant ground
for the resistance (Escobar 2007: 199-200).
The nature the hegemonic sustainable development discourse is producing is grounded in
two main pillars: the ecologization of the economy and the economization of nature
(Wichterich 2015: 71-72). This production allows the Sustainable Development managers to
claim, as they have done in reports as the one of the OECD and the EU Commissions for
strategies for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth that declare a departure from
business as usual but still set growth as the overall goal for the greening of investments and
industries (Wichterich 2015: 71). In contrast to this, the nature the socio-territorial
movement discourses are producing is one where the goal is to produce a fair and an
appropriate exchange between the rights of the earth and the right of the people. The
Peasant Association of El Catatumbo in his Environmental Management Plan put it in this
way: from a systemic environmental perspective of integrality and interdependence, the
Sustainable Development Plan of the Peasant Reserve Zone of El Catatumbo [seeks] the
potentialization of the peasant economy as a way of integral production, exchange and
consume with permanence and conservation of the territory (Ascamcat 2012: 410).
While the green economy, to be able to commodify the nature, should understood it as
merely a space for taking resources and a space for intervention, socio-territorial movements
elaborate their proposals by unveiling the complex plots involved in the production of nature,
and therefore identify, construct and ponder systemic proposals for its development and
conservation. The time of the crisis is a time for simple questions with short but difficult
answers. We can then ask a simple question: should we pawn the future or should we earn
the present?
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