Response to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s

           

       Action Agenda for Sustainable Development 2015-2030

                                       By Alan N. Connor

The ten proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are appropriate. They are intended to establish a framework for implementing sustainable development post 2015 when the UN’s Millenium    Development Goals (MDGs) expire. The terminology in some is very broad, general and amorphous and subject to a variety of interpretations. To some extent, that too is appropriate. Because need, ecology, resources and culture vary from community to community---rural agricultural vs. urban industrial, temperate vs. tropical vs. arctic--- different goal definitions and specifics are appropriate for different places. Strategy and tactical action has to vary from place to place to account for those variations.

The report defines problems and barriers to achievement of MDG goals and targets. It sets a general frame for modifying the means to approach some of those targets via the SDGs that are slated to replace the 2000-2015 MDGs.  But specific strategies are often absent.

The authors argue correctly that going back to doing Business As Usual (BAU) prior to the 2008 financial collapse, will not enable sustainable development. They point out that it was a major cause of the failure to reach most MDG targets as well as the cause of the 2008 recession. Nevertheless, they advocate instituting and continuing much of the same global big business investment in developing countries and global institutional control of critical systems—eg: energy, transportation, international relations and trade.

They are for the inclusion of the poor, near poor and workers of the World in global and national policy conversations. A strategy for including them is not discussed. The report mentions, in a number of places, giving them power to participate. Leaders of multi and transnational corporations, international institutions, multi and transnational corporations do not voluntarily share or give up power. It has to be taken. Too often it has been taken or attempted to be taken by violent revolution. We need a strategy of inclusion that by passes that.

There is hope now days that the transfer of some power to the common people, so they can participate in and actually influence the conversations, will be nonviolent. We saw that two years ago in Tunisia. I saw it work in the city of Dayton, Ohio in the 70s. A number of civil societies and NGOs in developing countries are speaking up. Some have written responses to this report and to the High Level Panel’s (HLP) report on the Post 2015 Agenda. Because they may have support of their governments and their sheer numbers, they may be able to defy extant leaders and institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) with immunity .

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) was composed of members of a number of professional, business, academic, scientific and civic organizations. One is the International Society of

Ecological Economics (ISEE) of which I am a member, although I am not an economist.  They mean well. But most have no idea of what the poor and near poor have been up against for centuries. Many, maybe most network members have been indoctrinated in conventional, neo-classical economics and

and cling to those theories and practices.  Although in their report they claim those BAU practices have failed and will continue to do so, thinking of another paradigm is difficult. Some of their proposals are tweaks of that paradigm.

In their draft, they support a global economy and global governance. They give lip service to localization but do not really support it. For those from poor, developing countries or from any country, to participate in policy conversations effectively their power will have to be accepted by those now in power.

(The red print is my thoughts or what I think needs to be included.)         

                                                                                     1

Sustainable development has four dimensions according to the network. They are (1) Economic Development to end extreme poverty, (2) Social Inclusion, (3) Environmental Sustainability and (4) Good Governance. 

Economic Development is not defined or described. I assume that since it is a term in that has been in  wide use by many for a number of years, the network assumed no definition for the purposes of their

discussion was needed. Extreme poverty is defined as household income below $1.25 per day. That is extreme. There are other definitions I won’t mention here.

Social Inclusion is not defined. To me, it means including all people in policy making conversations at all levels of government from local municipal to global. It also means including all people’s access to natural resources, education, work, health care and other community opportunities.

Environmental Sustainability means staying within Earth’s planetary boundaries. That is, do not extract or

harvest Earth’s resources at rates faster than the resources can reproduce or regenerate themselves.

Good Governance is non-corrupt, transparent, socially just and open to participation of all interested and concerned people---i.e. it is inclusive.

                                              The Ten Sustainable Development Goals

1.    Eradicate Extreme Poverty: Poverty that is not extreme is not defined. What they are shooting for by implication is prosperity for all.  The network’s major strategy is “adopt sustainable agricultural methods worldwide, also maintain a clean water supply—no ag chemical or livestock pollutants. Stabilizing population and producing food primarily for local community consumption and sustainability is not mentioned.  Community food and natural resource sovereignty are not mentioned, nor is any means of production other than agriculture. Later in 7, productive cities are discussed.

2.    Development Within Planetary Boundaries: Limit extraction and harvesting of natural resources to the rate at which they can be reproduced. Decouple resource use from income and economic growth. Shift to low carbon energy sources for agriculture, transit, energy generation and construction of buildings and infrastructure. Not included were: reduce discarding goods to rates at which the ecosystem can absorb them. That reduces pollution and helps maintain biodiversity. Also not included --- as all ecological economists do---is coupling resource use with local community ecological, economic and social sustainability and banning the conversion of non-renewable resources to nonessentials.

3.    Effective Learning for All Children and Youth for a Livelihood: Adopt a lifecycle perspective on the learning needs of individuals of all ages. In some communities and cultures, training for many traditional occupations has been shunned or ignored. Starting in early childhood, access to learning those occupations---farming, fishing, forestry--- should be supported in ecologically sound ways .(Italics added for emphasis.) Societies need to (1) promote and support the central role of teacher, especially the innovative teacher, (2) look beyond traditional and formal schools (3) support and implement adult women’s functional literacy. Literate mothers enable early childhood learning. Also vocational education and apprenticeships to connect students with potential employers and jobs. Does not mention that business, particularly multi and transnationals are not in business to create jobs and employment. Local governments and communities must work to develop economically, ecologically and socially sustainable work roles and enable local people to learn to competently perform them and be justly compensated.

2

4.     Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, Human Rights: To me this is one of the very broad and amorphous goals. Human Rights covers a lot of territory. Discrimination of any group undermines sustainable development. The strategy suggested for achieving this goal is instituting legal and administrative reforms---actions---that realize, not guarantee, the economic and social rights, including equal access to basic public services and infrastructure of all members of society. I would add: legally guarantee equal access of all members of the community to the community’s natural and capital resources on the condition that extraction, harvesting and use of such resource increases the probability of community sustainability. Promote peace, eliminate violent civil conflict. Missing is a strategy for promoting peace---within communities, nations, the World---or eliminating violent civil conflict.

5.    Achieve Health and Well Being for All: Well being is not defined, therefore amorphous to me. It could be defined as a minimum quality of life, a life style, standard of living all of which might vary by person, place or culture. Socio-economic status or minimum income level---a lot higher than $1.25 per day---might be used to define it. The suggested strategy includes (1) deploy more community health workers, (2) increase public investment in extension of primary health systems, (3) develop and establish universal health coverage. But a strategy is needed to do that.

6.    Improve Agricultural Systems, Raise Rural Prosperity: Identifies environmental problems in food production including human induced climate change,          inefficient use of water and loss of bio-diversity. It IDs the malfunctioning of the ag-industrial food chain but specifies no particular mal-functions. Points to post harvest waste, which is significant, and spoilage due to poor storage and processing systems. Does not address a worldwide food distribution system that delivers food to the economic elites and bypasses poor and working class communities, nor the export emphasis of industrial agribusiness which prices agriculture labor out of the food market it produces. Strategically, It does support enabling small land holders to produce increased yields for and connect to local and wider markets. Pushing soil too hard usually requires chemicals that feed plants, degrade soil and pollute ground and surface water via runoff. Claims net food production, worldwide, will have to increase 70 percent by 2050 to feed the increasing population. It does not address reducing food waste by 70 percent or more, population control or correcting the maldistribution problem. Bringing more land into production is suggested. They do not consider what types of land should not be converted to agriculture.

7.     Empower Inclusive, Productive, Resilient Cities:  This is another amorphous one. Urban populations and densities are projected to increase. Half the World’s population now is Urban.

Problems are cited. Urban poverty and slums being two major ones. The strategy is to reduce poverty, end slum formation and increase productivity---of what?---and insure universal access to infrastructure and services such as housing, water reticulation, sanitation, waste and insuring such universal access. It does argue for the use of modern technologies, particularly information communication technology (ICT) to ”help improve city governance, energy and resource use efficiency, delivery of services and create employment opportunities.” ICT can underpin smart grids---maybe---for urban power, water, transport, education and health care.

8.    Curb Human Induced Climate Change and Ensure Clean Energy for All: Defines the problem, its seriousness and its various aspects. Strategies include (1) increase energy efficiency, (2) increase urban land use density, (3) intelligent power grids, (4) increase use of renewable energy sources—possibly nuclear---and carbon capture and sequestration, (5) reduce deforestation and emission reduction in agriculture, (6) reduction of industrial GHG emissions. Local community cooperative or municipal ownership of power generating, storage and transmission systems emphasized and encouraged. Development of new technologies to accomplish the above. The network claims that transformation of energy use in the industrial and agricultural systems of the World---I would add developed World---will perhaps be the greatest

3

political, technical and organizational challenge... feat if accomplished humanity will ever face.  Throughout the draft, transfer of technology from.the rich, industrially developed world to the developing world is stressed. Innovative people in    developing countries often develop technologies that are more appropriate to their environment and culture using local materials and resources that are less costly than imported technologies.

9. Secure            Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity and Good management of Natural Resources:

Ensure robust ecosystems—oceans, seas, coastal zones forests, mountains, dry and wetlands. Require polluters to pay. All—government, business, institutions, CSOs—participate in and protect and preserve local, regional ecosystems including environmental commons—fertile ground, rivers, creeks, aquifers, woodland. Have robust, transparent, monitoring, inventory and protective systems in place by 2020. Local communities should have sovereignty over all common natural and capital resources within their jurisdictions. All local and regional governments and businesses/farms commit to transparent management agricultural land, mines, woodlands, water and hydrocarbon resources. All the above are good means and ends to shoot for, but we need to plan strategies to develop and establish them.

10.Transform Governance for Sustainable Development:  “The public sector, business…commit   

 to transparency, accountability and government without corruption.” Committing and following through are two different behaviors. A strong community civil society of common people is needed to ensure non-corruption.  “International rules governing international finance, trade, corporate reporting, technology, and intellectual property should be made constant achieving SDGs.  I’m not sure what that means but international and national rules on those issues should not preempt local and regional mores, customs and laws. The three targets look OK but intellectual property needs redefining and reconsideration as a useful sustainable development construct.

                         Response to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s

           

       Action Agenda for Sustainable Development 2015-2030

                                       By Alan N. Connor

The ten proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are appropriate. They are intended to establish a framework for implementing sustainable development post 2015 when the UN’s Millenium    Development Goals (MDGs) expire. The terminology in some is very broad, general and amorphous and subject to a variety of interpretations. To some extent, that too is appropriate. Because need, ecology, resources and culture vary from community to community---rural agricultural vs. urban industrial, temperate vs. tropical vs. arctic--- different goal definitions and specifics are appropriate for different places. Strategy and tactical action has to vary from place to place to account for those variations.

The report defines problems and barriers to achievement of MDG goals and targets. It sets a general frame for modifying the means to approach some of those targets via the SDGs that are slated to replace the 2000-2015 MDGs.  But specific strategies are often absent.

The authors argue correctly that going back to doing Business As Usual (BAU) prior to the 2008 financial collapse, will not enable sustainable development. They point out that it was a major cause of the failure to reach most MDG targets as well as the cause of the 2008 recession. Nevertheless, they advocate instituting and continuing much of the same global big business investment in developing countries and global institutional control of critical systems—eg: energy, transportation, international relations and trade.

They are for the inclusion of the poor, near poor and workers of the World in global and national policy conversations. A strategy for including them is not discussed. The report mentions, in a number of places, giving them power to participate. Leaders of multi and transnational corporations, international institutions, multi and transnational corporations do not voluntarily share or give up power. It has to be taken. Too often it has been taken or attempted to be taken by violent revolution. We need a strategy of inclusion that by passes that.

There is hope now days that the transfer of some power to the common people, so they can participate in and actually influence the conversations, will be nonviolent. We saw that two years ago in Tunisia. I saw it work in the city of Dayton, Ohio in the 70s. A number of civil societies and NGOs in developing countries are speaking up. Some have written responses to this report and to the High Level Panel’s (HLP) report on the Post 2015 Agenda. Because they may have support of their governments and their sheer numbers, they may be able to defy extant leaders and institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) with immunity .

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) was composed of members of a number of professional, business, academic, scientific and civic organizations. One is the International Society of

Ecological Economics (ISEE) of which I am a member, although I am not an economist.  They mean well. But most have no idea of what the poor and near poor have been up against for centuries. Many, maybe most network members have been indoctrinated in conventional, neo-classical economics and

and cling to those theories and practices.  Although in their report they claim those BAU practices have failed and will continue to do so, thinking of another paradigm is difficult. Some of their proposals are tweaks of that paradigm.

In their draft, they support a global economy and global governance. They give lip service to localization but do not really support it. For those from poor, developing countries or from any country, to participate in policy conversations effectively their power will have to be accepted by those now in power.

(The red print is my thoughts or what I think needs to be included.)         

                                                                                     1

Sustainable development has four dimensions according to the network. They are (1) Economic Development to end extreme poverty, (2) Social Inclusion, (3) Environmental Sustainability and (4) Good Governance. 

Economic Development is not defined or described. I assume that since it is a term in that has been in  wide use by many for a number of years, the network assumed no definition for the purposes of their

discussion was needed. Extreme poverty is defined as household income below $1.25 per day. That is extreme. There are other definitions I won’t mention here.

Social Inclusion is not defined. To me, it means including all people in policy making conversations at all levels of government from local municipal to global. It also means including all people’s access to natural resources, education, work, health care and other community opportunities.

Environmental Sustainability means staying within Earth’s planetary boundaries. That is, do not extract or

harvest Earth’s resources at rates faster than the resources can reproduce or regenerate themselves.

Good Governance is non-corrupt, transparent, socially just and open to participation of all interested and concerned people---i.e. it is inclusive.

                                              The Ten Sustainable Development Goals

1.    Eradicate Extreme Poverty: Poverty that is not extreme is not defined. What they are shooting for by implication is prosperity for all.  The network’s major strategy is “adopt sustainable agricultural methods worldwide, also maintain a clean water supply—no ag chemical or livestock pollutants. Stabilizing population and producing food primarily for local community consumption and sustainability is not mentioned.  Community food and natural resource sovereignty are not mentioned, nor is any means of production other than agriculture. Later in 7, productive cities are discussed.

2.    Development Within Planetary Boundaries: Limit extraction and harvesting of natural resources to the rate at which they can be reproduced. Decouple resource use from income and economic growth. Shift to low carbon energy sources for agriculture, transit, energy generation and construction of buildings and infrastructure. Not included were: reduce discarding goods to rates at which the ecosystem can absorb them. That reduces pollution and helps maintain biodiversity. Also not included --- as all ecological economists do---is coupling resource use with local community ecological, economic and social sustainability and banning the conversion of non-renewable resources to nonessentials.

3.    Effective Learning for All Children and Youth for a Livelihood: Adopt a lifecycle perspective on the learning needs of individuals of all ages. In some communities and cultures, training for many traditional occupations has been shunned or ignored. Starting in early childhood, access to learning those occupations---farming, fishing, forestry--- should be supported in ecologically sound ways .(Italics added for emphasis.) Societies need to (1) promote and support the central role of teacher, especially the innovative teacher, (2) look beyond traditional and formal schools (3) support and implement adult women’s functional literacy. Literate mothers enable early childhood learning. Also vocational education and apprenticeships to connect students with potential employers and jobs. Does not mention that business, particularly multi and transnationals are not in business to create jobs and employment. Local governments and communities must work to develop economically, ecologically and socially sustainable work roles and enable local people to learn to competently perform them and be justly compensated.

2

4.     Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, Human Rights: To me this is one of the very broad and amorphous goals. Human Rights covers a lot of territory. Discrimination of any group undermines sustainable development. The strategy suggested for achieving this goal is instituting legal and administrative reforms---actions---that realize, not guarantee, the economic and social rights, including equal access to basic public services and infrastructure of all members of society. I would add: legally guarantee equal access of all members of the community to the community’s natural and capital resources on the condition that extraction, harvesting and use of such resource increases the probability of community sustainability. Promote peace, eliminate violent civil conflict. Missing is a strategy for promoting peace---within communities, nations, the World---or eliminating violent civil conflict.

5.    Achieve Health and Well Being for All: Well being is not defined, therefore amorphous to me. It could be defined as a minimum quality of life, a life style, standard of living all of which might vary by person, place or culture. Socio-economic status or minimum income level---a lot higher than $1.25 per day---might be used to define it. The suggested strategy includes (1) deploy more community health workers, (2) increase public investment in extension of primary health systems, (3) develop and establish universal health coverage. But a strategy is needed to do that.

6.    Improve Agricultural Systems, Raise Rural Prosperity: Identifies environmental problems in food production including human induced climate change,          inefficient use of water and loss of bio-diversity. It IDs the malfunctioning of the ag-industrial food chain but specifies no particular mal-functions. Points to post harvest waste, which is significant, and spoilage due to poor storage and processing systems. Does not address a worldwide food distribution system that delivers food to the economic elites and bypasses poor and working class communities, nor the export emphasis of industrial agribusiness which prices agriculture labor out of the food market it produces. Strategically, It does support enabling small land holders to produce increased yields for and connect to local and wider markets. Pushing soil too hard usually requires chemicals that feed plants, degrade soil and pollute ground and surface water via runoff. Claims net food production, worldwide, will have to increase 70 percent by 2050 to feed the increasing population. It does not address reducing food waste by 70 percent or more, population control or correcting the maldistribution problem. Bringing more land into production is suggested. They do not consider what types of land should not be converted to agriculture.

7.     Empower Inclusive, Productive, Resilient Cities:  This is another amorphous one. Urban populations and densities are projected to increase. Half the World’s population now is Urban.

Problems are cited. Urban poverty and slums being two major ones. The strategy is to reduce poverty, end slum formation and increase productivity---of what?---and insure universal access to infrastructure and services such as housing, water reticulation, sanitation, waste and insuring such universal access. It does argue for the use of modern technologies, particularly information communication technology (ICT) to ”help improve city governance, energy and resource use efficiency, delivery of services and create employment opportunities.” ICT can underpin smart grids---maybe---for urban power, water, transport, education and health care.

8.    Curb Human Induced Climate Change and Ensure Clean Energy for All: Defines the problem, its seriousness and its various aspects. Strategies include (1) increase energy efficiency, (2) increase urban land use density, (3) intelligent power grids, (4) increase use of renewable energy sources—possibly nuclear---and carbon capture and sequestration, (5) reduce deforestation and emission reduction in agriculture, (6) reduction of industrial GHG emissions. Local community cooperative or municipal ownership of power generating, storage and transmission systems emphasized and encouraged. Development of new technologies to accomplish the above. The network claims that transformation of energy use in the industrial and agricultural systems of the World---I would add developed World---will perhaps be the greatest

3

political, technical and organizational challenge... feat if accomplished humanity will ever face.  Throughout the draft, transfer of technology from.the rich, industrially developed world to the developing world is stressed. Innovative people in    developing countries often develop technologies that are more appropriate to their environment and culture using local materials and resources that are less costly than imported technologies.

9. Secure            Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity and Good management of Natural Resources:

Ensure robust ecosystems—oceans, seas, coastal zones forests, mountains, dry and wetlands. Require polluters to pay. All—government, business, institutions, CSOs—participate in and protect and preserve local, regional ecosystems including environmental commons—fertile ground, rivers, creeks, aquifers, woodland. Have robust, transparent, monitoring, inventory and protective systems in place by 2020. Local communities should have sovereignty over all common natural and capital resources within their jurisdictions. All local and regional governments and businesses/farms commit to transparent management agricultural land, mines, woodlands, water and hydrocarbon resources. All the above are good means and ends to shoot for, but we need to plan strategies to develop and establish them.

10.Transform Governance for Sustainable Development:  “The public sector, business…commit   

 to transparency, accountability and government without corruption.” Committing and following through are two different behaviors. A strong community civil society of common people is needed to ensure non-corruption.  “International rules governing international finance, trade, corporate reporting, technology, and intellectual property should be made constant achieving SDGs.  I’m not sure what that means but international and national rules on those issues should not preempt local and regional mores, customs and laws. The three targets look OK but intellectual property needs redefining and reconsideration as a useful sustainable development construct.

                         Response to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s

           

       Action Agenda for Sustainable Development 2015-2030

                                       By Alan N. Connor

The ten proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are appropriate. They are intended to establish a framework for implementing sustainable development post 2015 when the UN’s Millenium    Development Goals (MDGs) expire. The terminology in some is very broad, general and amorphous and subject to a variety of interpretations. To some extent, that too is appropriate. Because need, ecology, resources and culture vary from community to community---rural agricultural vs. urban industrial, temperate vs. tropical vs. arctic--- different goal definitions and specifics are appropriate for different places. Strategy and tactical action has to vary from place to place to account for those variations.

The report defines problems and barriers to achievement of MDG goals and targets. It sets a general frame for modifying the means to approach some of those targets via the SDGs that are slated to replace the 2000-2015 MDGs.  But specific strategies are often absent.

The authors argue correctly that going back to doing Business As Usual (BAU) prior to the 2008 financial collapse, will not enable sustainable development. They point out that it was a major cause of the failure to reach most MDG targets as well as the cause of the 2008 recession. Nevertheless, they advocate instituting and continuing much of the same global big business investment in developing countries and global institutional control of critical systems—eg: energy, transportation, international relations and trade.

They are for the inclusion of the poor, near poor and workers of the World in global and national policy conversations. A strategy for including them is not discussed. The report mentions, in a number of places, giving them power to participate. Leaders of multi and transnational corporations, international institutions, multi and transnational corporations do not voluntarily share or give up power. It has to be taken. Too often it has been taken or attempted to be taken by violent revolution. We need a strategy of inclusion that by passes that.

There is hope now days that the transfer of some power to the common people, so they can participate in and actually influence the conversations, will be nonviolent. We saw that two years ago in Tunisia. I saw it work in the city of Dayton, Ohio in the 70s. A number of civil societies and NGOs in developing countries are speaking up. Some have written responses to this report and to the High Level Panel’s (HLP) report on the Post 2015 Agenda. Because they may have support of their governments and their sheer numbers, they may be able to defy extant leaders and institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) with immunity .

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) was composed of members of a number of professional, business, academic, scientific and civic organizations. One is the International Society of

Ecological Economics (ISEE) of which I am a member, although I am not an economist.  They mean well. But most have no idea of what the poor and near poor have been up against for centuries. Many, maybe most network members have been indoctrinated in conventional, neo-classical economics and

and cling to those theories and practices.  Although in their report they claim those BAU practices have failed and will continue to do so, thinking of another paradigm is difficult. Some of their proposals are tweaks of that paradigm.

In their draft, they support a global economy and global governance. They give lip service to localization but do not really support it. For those from poor, developing countries or from any country, to participate in policy conversations effectively their power will have to be accepted by those now in power.

(The red print is my thoughts or what I think needs to be included.)         

                                                                                     1

Sustainable development has four dimensions according to the network. They are (1) Economic Development to end extreme poverty, (2) Social Inclusion, (3) Environmental Sustainability and (4) Good Governance. 

Economic Development is not defined or described. I assume that since it is a term in that has been in  wide use by many for a number of years, the network assumed no definition for the purposes of their

discussion was needed. Extreme poverty is defined as household income below $1.25 per day. That is extreme. There are other definitions I won’t mention here.

Social Inclusion is not defined. To me, it means including all people in policy making conversations at all levels of government from local municipal to global. It also means including all people’s access to natural resources, education, work, health care and other community opportunities.

Environmental Sustainability means staying within Earth’s planetary boundaries. That is, do not extract or

harvest Earth’s resources at rates faster than the resources can reproduce or regenerate themselves.

Good Governance is non-corrupt, transparent, socially just and open to participation of all interested and concerned people---i.e. it is inclusive.

                                              The Ten Sustainable Development Goals

1.    Eradicate Extreme Poverty: Poverty that is not extreme is not defined. What they are shooting for by implication is prosperity for all.  The network’s major strategy is “adopt sustainable agricultural methods worldwide, also maintain a clean water supply—no ag chemical or livestock pollutants. Stabilizing population and producing food primarily for local community consumption and sustainability is not mentioned.  Community food and natural resource sovereignty are not mentioned, nor is any means of production other than agriculture. Later in 7, productive cities are discussed.

2.    Development Within Planetary Boundaries: Limit extraction and harvesting of natural resources to the rate at which they can be reproduced. Decouple resource use from income and economic growth. Shift to low carbon energy sources for agriculture, transit, energy generation and construction of buildings and infrastructure. Not included were: reduce discarding goods to rates at which the ecosystem can absorb them. That reduces pollution and helps maintain biodiversity. Also not included --- as all ecological economists do---is coupling resource use with local community ecological, economic and social sustainability and banning the conversion of non-renewable resources to nonessentials.

3.    Effective Learning for All Children and Youth for a Livelihood: Adopt a lifecycle perspective on the learning needs of individuals of all ages. In some communities and cultures, training for many traditional occupations has been shunned or ignored. Starting in early childhood, access to learning those occupations---farming, fishing, forestry--- should be supported in ecologically sound ways .(Italics added for emphasis.) Societies need to (1) promote and support the central role of teacher, especially the innovative teacher, (2) look beyond traditional and formal schools (3) support and implement adult women’s functional literacy. Literate mothers enable early childhood learning. Also vocational education and apprenticeships to connect students with potential employers and jobs. Does not mention that business, particularly multi and transnationals are not in business to create jobs and employment. Local governments and communities must work to develop economically, ecologically and socially sustainable work roles and enable local people to learn to competently perform them and be justly compensated.

2

4.     Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, Human Rights: To me this is one of the very broad and amorphous goals. Human Rights covers a lot of territory. Discrimination of any group undermines sustainable development. The strategy suggested for achieving this goal is instituting legal and administrative reforms---actions---that realize, not guarantee, the economic and social rights, including equal access to basic public services and infrastructure of all members of society. I would add: legally guarantee equal access of all members of the community to the community’s natural and capital resources on the condition that extraction, harvesting and use of such resource increases the probability of community sustainability. Promote peace, eliminate violent civil conflict. Missing is a strategy for promoting peace---within communities, nations, the World---or eliminating violent civil conflict.

5.    Achieve Health and Well Being for All: Well being is not defined, therefore amorphous to me. It could be defined as a minimum quality of life, a life style, standard of living all of which might vary by person, place or culture. Socio-economic status or minimum income level---a lot higher than $1.25 per day---might be used to define it. The suggested strategy includes (1) deploy more community health workers, (2) increase public investment in extension of primary health systems, (3) develop and establish universal health coverage. But a strategy is needed to do that.

6.    Improve Agricultural Systems, Raise Rural Prosperity: Identifies environmental problems in food production including human induced climate change,          inefficient use of water and loss of bio-diversity. It IDs the malfunctioning of the ag-industrial food chain but specifies no particular mal-functions. Points to post harvest waste, which is significant, and spoilage due to poor storage and processing systems. Does not address a worldwide food distribution system that delivers food to the economic elites and bypasses poor and working class communities, nor the export emphasis of industrial agribusiness which prices agriculture labor out of the food market it produces. Strategically, It does support enabling small land holders to produce increased yields for and connect to local and wider markets. Pushing soil too hard usually requires chemicals that feed plants, degrade soil and pollute ground and surface water via runoff. Claims net food production, worldwide, will have to increase 70 percent by 2050 to feed the increasing population. It does not address reducing food waste by 70 percent or more, population control or correcting the maldistribution problem. Bringing more land into production is suggested. They do not consider what types of land should not be converted to agriculture.

7.     Empower Inclusive, Productive, Resilient Cities:  This is another amorphous one. Urban populations and densities are projected to increase. Half the World’s population now is Urban.

Problems are cited. Urban poverty and slums being two major ones. The strategy is to reduce poverty, end slum formation and increase productivity---of what?---and insure universal access to infrastructure and services such as housing, water reticulation, sanitation, waste and insuring such universal access. It does argue for the use of modern technologies, particularly information communication technology (ICT) to ”help improve city governance, energy and resource use efficiency, delivery of services and create employment opportunities.” ICT can underpin smart grids---maybe---for urban power, water, transport, education and health care.

8.    Curb Human Induced Climate Change and Ensure Clean Energy for All: Defines the problem, its seriousness and its various aspects. Strategies include (1) increase energy efficiency, (2) increase urban land use density, (3) intelligent power grids, (4) increase use of renewable energy sources—possibly nuclear---and carbon capture and sequestration, (5) reduce deforestation and emission reduction in agriculture, (6) reduction of industrial GHG emissions. Local community cooperative or municipal ownership of power generating, storage and transmission systems emphasized and encouraged. Development of new technologies to accomplish the above. The network claims that transformation of energy use in the industrial and agricultural systems of the World---I would add developed World---will perhaps be the greatest

3

political, technical and organizational challenge... feat if accomplished humanity will ever face.  Throughout the draft, transfer of technology from.the rich, industrially developed world to the developing world is stressed. Innovative people in    developing countries often develop technologies that are more appropriate to their environment and culture using local materials and resources that are less costly than imported technologies.

9. Secure            Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity and Good management of Natural Resources:

Ensure robust ecosystems—oceans, seas, coastal zones forests, mountains, dry and wetlands. Require polluters to pay. All—government, business, institutions, CSOs—participate in and protect and preserve local, regional ecosystems including environmental commons—fertile ground, rivers, creeks, aquifers, woodland. Have robust, transparent, monitoring, inventory and protective systems in place by 2020. Local communities should have sovereignty over all common natural and capital resources within their jurisdictions. All local and regional governments and businesses/farms commit to transparent management agricultural land, mines, woodlands, water and hydrocarbon resources. All the above are good means and ends to shoot for, but we need to plan strategies to develop and establish them.

10.Transform Governance for Sustainable Development:  “The public sector, business…commit   

 to transparency, accountability and government without corruption.” Committing and following through are two different behaviors. A strong community civil society of common people is needed to ensure non-corruption.  “International rules governing international finance, trade, corporate reporting, technology, and intellectual property should be made constant achieving SDGs.  I’m not sure what that means but international and national rules on those issues should not preempt local and regional mores, customs and laws. The three targets look OK but intellectual property needs redefining and reconsideration as a useful sustainable development construct.

                      Restructuring the Economy      

     By Alan N. Connor

 

                                                                  Introduction                                                      

If nothing else persuades us that we need a new model for the global economy, the present recession should.  A number of people reached that conclusion a few years before the “melt down”  in 2008.  John Cobb and Herman Daly[1] advocated for it before the turn of the century.  David Korten has called for a new economic paradigm in an Agenda for a New Economy[2].

It is obvious to many of us, who are studying and concerned about the present Economy, that the present system of the industrially developed world is not sustainable.  It is based on perpetual economic growth and perpetual supply of natural resources that the Earth does not have. Those resources--fossil fuels, minerals, pure water, fertile top soil, timber--are being used, extracted, converted to goods much faster than nature can reproduce them. And they are discarded at a rate that is faster than nature can absorb them.

Such a system requires ever increasing consumption to maintain ever increasing production by industries simply to continue to maximize profits that are shared by the wealthy investors who own most  of  the shares of stocks. Rather than meet need, it produces goods and services that are not necessary for a good quality of life. It creates demand for non-necessities via advertising that values individual and household opulence rather than the “good life”. It is a system that prices a significant portion of the population out of the market for necessities by limiting supply to keep the effective demand price high. Aggregation of luxurious goods and assets designates the winners in our competitive economic game. 

The wealth gap between winners (investment bankers and corporate executives) and losers (workers) increases inequitably. Costs of essential goods and services, such as healthcare, shelter, transportation, education, food, fuel, utilities, are inflated above their intrinsic value. And necessities are priced at levels many low paid workers, doing work that sustains the community, cannot afford.

In addition, our present economic-industrial system emits gasses and micro particles into the atmosphere and pollutants into our water and soils that degrade them and are hazardous to the publics’ health. There is empirical evidence and consensus among atmospheric and eco-biological scientists that industrial and agricultural emissions and pollutants are changing the Earth’s climate and its ability to sustain existing life.[3]

According to a number of economists a limited or even a no growth economy in which a majority of people prosper is possible.[4]  Some very credible ecological and development economists and atmospheric and biological scientists have claimed that such an economy is necessary for human and most other life forms that inhabit earth today to continue to exist. James Hanson, chief atmospheric scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has said and written that CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere must be limited to 350 parts per million (ppm) to avert a future catastrophe.[5] The latest test indicated 400 ppm CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Given the above information, plus the extreme weather and catastrophic events the Earth and its inhabitants have experienced this decade, designing an economy that is not driven by depleting fossil fuels and other minerals is worth trying.  Hanson and a few other Earth and atmospheric scientists, have said recently that much of the Earth’s altered ecosystems cannot be restored to their original condition and function.  Since we cannot restore them to their original condition, human and other life will have to adapt to the extant ecology and perhaps regenerate the damaged and degraded eco-regions so that they can once again support life as we know it.

Probably many of us have a vision of how a new economy might be structured.  A few have written books and scholarly papers describing their vision or some of the elements of what they believe a viable, sustainable economy include.

There are variations among the visions cited, but there are similarities also. Korten and McKibben envision an economy that is local community based, rather than globally based. Jackson, Daly and Brown and Garver envision global governances and cultures that enable nations, regions and municipalities  to establish and operate institutions, polities and economies in which all citizens participate and have access to the essentials of the “good life”.[6]  All of them see the necessity for an economy that is not reliant on and driven by non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, present state of the art nuclear power, minerals that are converted, used and discarded at rates faster than they can be renewed. In order for an economy to be sustainable, the ecological environment in which it exists and of which it is a subsystem, must be sustainable.  Kenneth Boulding in his seminal paper, “Earth as a Spaceship” wrote that humanity will need to cultivate the well being of all Earth’s ecosystems for it to be sustainable into perpetuity.[7]

                                                              My Vision

My vision of a worldwide social system is one that consists of local communities that are economically, ecologically and socio-culturally sustainable.  They are self organized primarily to increase the probability that the settlement will persist into perpetuity.[8] According to Parsons and Smelser, the original primary function of an economy was to harvest and extract local natural resources and convert them into useful goods and services that enable the local settlement to persist into the future. The goal and purpose or mission of the economy is to sustain the community, not amass individual wealth. They defined the function of the polity--organized politics--as acquisition and control of resources so the inhabitants of the settlement can perform its economic functions. The local community culture then functions to create and promulgate values and behavioral norms that enable its economy and polity to perform community sustaining functions.

                                                           

Communities are social systems that cannot persist very far into the future in isolation. Closed systems become entropic.[9]  For any system to persist, be it social, biological, mechanical or physical, it must put out some utile good into one or more other systems and must input one or more utile good from beyond its boundary--i.e. from one or more neighboring systems. All systems are interdependent. Primitive settlements knew that.

In order for communities to persist into perpetuity, they must be parsimonious in the extraction, harvesting, conversion and output of local natural resources, particularly those resources (which customarily are referred to as nonrenewable) that require centuries to regenerate or renew themselves.[10]  Natural resources, whether renewable or not, are a community‘s natural capital assets. They need to be conserved.  Throughput (extraction, harvesting, conversion, allocation, distribution and consumption of a good) needs to be durable, reusable and recyclable. Renewable resources that are developed as substitutes for nonrenewables should be treated as costs for the use of the materials they replace. Extraction and harvesting should be at a rate that is not faster than the rate at which resources can regenerate and reproduce themselves .[11]

    

                                            Internal Community Systems

For a community to be sustainable for seven generations or longer, its internal systems must function to sustain its inhabitants. A community is a social-ecological system. It is social because it consists of people who settle in a more or less proscribed environment and relate to and interact with one another.  They collectively develop behavioral norms and rules for relating and interacting in ways that do not harm one another and the environment that sustains them.  It is ecological in that these particular people have settled in a place that provides them with natural resources that support and sustain lives.  

We can consider the community or settlement a system of subsystems: the economy, the polity and the socio-culture.[12] Daly maintains that the economic system is a subsystem of the eco-region or ecological system.[13]  For purposes of this discussion, let us consider the community system and its subsystems: economy, socio-culture and polity as subsystems of the local eco-region in which the community is located. Each of those subsystems can also be thought of as composed of a set of subsystems. 

Within a community economy there could be the following subsystems: manufacturing for producing, allocating and distributing goods that are essential for a decent quality of life as defined by the local socio-culture;  food production, allocation and distribution; banking-the allocation and distribution of credit, accounting and managing of local currency and the exchange of goods and services within the community and with external communities. 

The socio-cultural subsystem includes: families and other household forms, religious, service and civic groups and organizations, educational institutions, friendship groups. Those groups and organizations, formal and informal, develop and model the community’s ethic, values, behavioral and social norms and develop informal and formal means to reinforce compliance and punish noncompliance.

The polity consists of the institutions that make or enact community public policy decisions and enact ordinances that conform to the community’s norms and values, and allocate and regulate access to the community’s ecological resources—i.e. natural capital assets.[14] It can enforce compliance to local public policy through such institutions as police, fire, public healthcare, social and legal services, conflict resolution organizations. It can planfor monitor and oversee the commons land use and infrastructure building, management and maintenance.

                                

 A Community Economic System

A community economic system would produce for all the community’s inhabitants such goods as safe, healthy and tasty food; shelter; pure, fresh water for local agricultural, industrial, and household use; tools, energy and technology that enable inhabitants to produce sustaining goods and perform sustaining services. It would include the organizations and institutions that effectively and efficiently allocate and distribute those goods and services to all the community’s inhabitants consistent with their need. Those organizations and institutions form the communities’ polities. Because each inhabitant would function in a social role the community values, a sustainable supply of goods and services would be his/her right.

The goods produced from non-renewable resources or resources that take centuries to regenerate or reproduce themselves, must be long lasting, reusable, recyclable and could pass through a number of users. That would reduce waste, hopefully, to the capacity at which it can be absorbed by the local environment. Tools and technology used in any specific community would be appropriate for the local ecological environment and to the tasks they are to perform. Some materials needed but not found in the local community and its environs may need to be imported from as close as possible. Technology can be designed

that is appropriate to the function it is to perform. The communities involved in the transaction would seek to develop an exchange that would be advantageous to each. They would be cooperators not competitors.

                                                                                               

Means of production would be locally owned and operated. Community businesses that required substantial investment could be owned by local working and consumer investors. Community banks, cooperatively or municipally owned and operated could lend funds to enable start ups stabilize existing businesses.  The bank would be repaid from business’ profits, as would local investors. Much of the banks liquid capital would  come from deposits of community workers and consumers who might invest in local enterprises individually and from local government revenue deposited in locally controlled banks.  Such operations could be cooperatives or locally owned limited liability partnerships or corporations. That would insure that the business’ products and  profits benefit their community and i inhabitants, primarily. If incorporated, the corporation’s mission must be to provide a good or service that is for the community’s common good. If its product or service ceases to benefit the community and its inhabitants, the corporation should be dissolved. Local family and individual entrepreneurial ownership should be encouraged and supported.

                                                                       

Locally owned and operated banks, venture capital funds and business incubators could help provide startup and operating loans to local businesses based on the Grameen micro loan model.[15] Community individuals, families, banks, institutions, mutual insurers and the local government could purchase shares in such funds and incubators. Banks would be owned by community depositors and /or municipal governments. They could be credit unions, cooperatively owned banks and building and loan associations. Wall Street bankers and brokerage houses and equity investors should be prohibited from purchasing shares in community owned financial institutions. They tend to suck wealth from the community and exacerbate local poverty rather than create and spread prosperity.[16]  No matter how the financial system is structured, its policies should be determined by a board of directors consisting of local residents, blue and white collar workers and small business operators as well as lawyers, accountants and local business administrators and financiers.

                                                                                                                                                               

Community government can deposit all its revenue in the municipally owned bank, in the municipality elects to charter its own bank, or one or more of the local depositor owned cooperative banks. Then revenue would be available for community sustainability and development purposes.  Municipal and cooperatively owned community banks would charge interest only the net profit earned on a loan.[17] 

    

Neighboring communities and urban neighborhoods within the same watershed, or a portion of the same large watershed, can organize regional banking and credit systems. They could provide backup to local systems and help establish fair exchange rates between different community currencies. For broader exchanges and transactions, a national currency would be used.

                                                            A Community Polity

Parsons and Smelser define the polity or political subsystem as one that “functions to acquire resources”. [18] For our purposes we can reword that to, “functions to have access and control of natural resources”. In a community where the local socioculture has adopted an ethic that considers all natural resources in the community and its environs public capital assets or commons, those natural resources are controlled by the people of the community through its democratically elected local government. That government allocates access to residents on the basis of benefit to the community’s common good and the applicant’s need and capacity use those natural assets to help sustain the community.

The polity monitors how a community’s natural and human capital resources, including open space, are developed and used. If those uses are not compliant with the rules, ordinances and ethic of the community’s inhabitants, the user can be  deprived of further use of that resource and may be required to compensate the community for any harm or environmental damage.

The polity, via its participatory democratic legislative and administrative subsystems, monitors  the public behavior of the community’s residents and visitors  and enforces compliance to those behavioral norms and values that have become rules and ordinances. It also monitors the public behavior of local businesses, organizations,  institutions and employed members of the local government.  It judges the outcomes of those interactions and  positively sanctions those that benefit the common good of the community and its inhabitants and negatively sanctions interaction and behavior that is not so beneficial.

The polity enacts ordinances and rules that regulate how persons occupying certain community roles should interact with members of the community as well as what behaviors and functions are expected of them. It also monitors interaction with the local ecosystem and enforces compliance to community determined regulations.

        A Socio-cultural Subsystem

A socio-cultural system functions to develop community values and norms by which residents, institutions, businesses and organizations interact with one another, the local and surrounding environment and its natural and human resources. In so doing, the system defines roles that are of value to the community. The performance of those roles that benefit some or all members of the community, the community’s structure and functions, become valued. Some behavioral norms will be legislated by the polity as ordinances or rules. Some will be implied and unwritten--i.e. the community’s mores. Most will be passed down from elder to younger by word of  mouth, written and oral stories and role modeling. That is an expectation of the family, the church, synagogue, mosque, etc. and the school. 

Some of the roles performed in the community are publicly and legally defined, such as mayor and town council, fireman, policeman, public works director and town clerk. Others are defined in contracts as job descriptions--e.g. school principal, teacher, minister, rabbi, imam. Some are defined by employers via contract and in some cases by oral agreement. In all those cases the expected interactive behaviors and role functions are explicated or understood implicitly.  The responsibility and authority of the role occupant are also understood, although implicit expectations are not always clear.

For many roles, there may not be a clearly written or explicit definition. The roles of parent, child, neighbor and employer are seldom explicated. Nevertheless, compliance with role expectations is positively reinforced and there are penalties if persons assuming those roles perform them in ways that harm one or more community members.

Local socio-cultures also can establish norms regarding the allocation of access to and control of the natural and human resources of the community and environs. Now days, how individuals, local governments, institutions, local and transnational businesses harvest, extract and utilize local resources is determined by state and national legislatures and agencies that often have little knowledge of how their decisions and policies affect communities and the eco-regions in which they exist.  Since those resources are the communities’ common property, decisions determining who has access to them for what use should be determined by the communities in which those resources are located. 

   Integrating Community Systems with Regional, National and Global  Governance

Neighboring municipalities within a relatively proscribed area can cooperate and collaborate with regard to certain functions, thus forming a region.  A logical proscribed area is a watershed or sub watershed.  Each watershed forms an ecological region (eco-region). It has a unique set of ecological resources--i.e. natural capital: water, timber, minerals, soil, wetlands, topography, flora, wild life.

Each municipal community with its unique polity, economy and culture, determines to whom access to land within its political boundaries is to be allocated and how it is to be used. Some municipal lands will remain common--publicly owned.  Access to and use of that land and its resources will be determined and monitored by the local polity. Each municipal community will need to monitor use of privately held land to insure that the holder does not use it in ways that harm neighbors and other members of the community. However, control of access to and location and use of land in the region not within any municipality’s boundaries, could be the joint responsibility of the polities of all the municipalities in the region.  So a regional polity or governance would need to be formed. Preferably, all governances would be democratic, impartial and operate in the best interests of all persons and institutions within their jurisdictions.

Such regions already exist as counties in the United States.  Their boundaries are usually determined by survey lines and surface waterways.  Those determined by waterways divide eco-regions. Those divided by surveys into sections and townships often include parts of watersheds and eco-regions. Where watersheds and eco-regions are split among municipalities and counties, some form of joint governance seems logical. In making public policy regarding allocation and access to and uses of eco-region resources, knowledge and consideration of regional social-culture is a requisite.

Within a region, even a small municipality such as village or rural township, there are likely to be conflicting social cultures.  Different socio-economic, ethnic, religious and age groups may value community and eco-region resources differently. Those value conflicts need to be negotiated so that regional resource policy for the common good is established. There are three ways to resolve such conflict without third party intervention: contest, compromise and consensus.[19]  In conquest, one side wins and all others lose. In compromise all give up something, thus all sides lose some, but less than they might in a contest. In consensus or synthesis a new solution is developed and all sides win, at least no one loses. Other functions that would benefit by inter-community planning, and policy-making, are ordnance monitoring and enforcement, public transportation, power generation and distribution, banking and trade and tertiary healthy care.

             Municipal and Regional Healthcare Systems

Primary and much secondary healthcare, are for the most part, local community concerns.  That is especially true for disease and injury prevention. Geology, geography, topography and climate vary from community to community.  Thus the prevalence of disease and injury varies from community to community.  Local health service providers and consumers are most knowledgeable about the diseases and injuries that are most prevalent in their communities. They also tend to be most knowledgeable about treatments that are most effective in their communities.

So the mission and functions of a community based and controlled healthcare system would be to assure that the highest quality care is accessible to all residents of and visitors to the community as promptly as possible.

The system also is to assure that the most effective treatments are available when needed. To assure that all members of and visitors to the community have access to top quality care from the local system when needed, the system probably would need a significant amount of local public funding. A source of funds for such a system could be local taxes on real property or other taxes that fund other necessary local services such as police, firefighters, infrastructure construction and maintenance, waste pickup and disposal, snow removal and other forms of emergency assistance that may be needed from time to time. If such a service were administered and delivered by the community’s regional health department or a community agency established specifically to deliver healthcare services, a progressive premium payment system could be designed to operate a prepaid healthcare delivery service. Or a community might opt for a combination of local tax and premium payment funding.

Policy regarding where and by whom treatment and support services should be delivered should be made by a democratic body of local service providers and knowledgeable local consumers. Policy regarding funding such a local community system and costs of treatment and support and ancillary services also would be determined and monitored by such a body.  A local body authorized to oversee ethical practices of local providers will need to be established. Such a body could also determine how local health service providers would be paid and how much they would be paid.

Not every municipality has a population large enough to support a secondary or tertiary care medical facility with state-of-the-art diagnostic and treatment technology. A group of neighboring communities with well administered primary care facilities could form a network to jointly fund, develop policy for and oversee a secondary and tertiary regional health care service.  An entity consisting of  representatives of local community health care delivery agencies and knowledgeable consumer advocates could oversee and administer such a system.

  Municipal, Regional and Interregional Public Transit

Efficient, convenient, inter-municipality, region wide public transit can have a lot of payoffs for all the people in the region and its communities. It reduces private auto use which:

• Reduces commuting costs to households
• Reduces the need for acres and acres of impervious parking lots and expensive multi-story and underground parking structures thus reducing polluting storm water runoff.
• Makes more space available for residential and commercial use of in-town land thus supporting non-motor and pedestrian scale development.
• Reduces the amount of impervious roadway needed which further reduces polluting storm water runoff and the cost of street, road and highway construction and maintenance.
• Reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted to the atmosphere, which  improves the quality of local air and the threat to local and regional public health and the rate of global climate change.
• Reduces costs to municipalities and regions that are external to transportation  operations.

Transportation systems, including public right-of-way for private vehicles, are not self supporting.  They require taxpayer support.  Public transit requires less subsidy than streets, roads, highways and bridges for millions of private vehicles. As use of public transit increases and private vehicle use decreases, costs for infrastructure and maintenance are reduced. External costs are also reduced.  Inter-region and inter-urban public transit systems can have the same positive consequences as region-wide public transit systems. They need an inter-regional governing and planning institution with authority to match their responsibility and that understands the socio-cultural and ecological values and ethos of the regions involved so they can make transportation policy consistent with those values and ethos.

     Municipal and Regional Power Generation and Transmission

To the extent space permits, each community or neighborhood within a city can have its own electric generating and transmission system.  On site generation combined with net metering, should be encouraged, particularly for public facilities. Solar, wind and low-head, hydro-electric generation and combinations thereof could be used where practicable. Using local renewable energy to produce energy for local industrial, commercial, municipal and household use increases energy efficiency, reduces cost and the local carbon footprint. It also reduces external costs such as mitigation of environmental degradation and healthcare.

Non-profit municipal and cooperatively owned systems can reduce the cost of power to consumers and  increase generation and transmission efficiency.  Efficiency is increased because transmission distances from local generation plants to local consumers are less than distances from monopolistic. corporation owned, centrally controlled power generation plants that transmit electricity over long distances. Much of that electricity is lost as stray voltage. Costs to consumers are reduced because of increased efficiency and small local systems’ mission is to provide a local service rather than maximize profits and enable its executives and principal shareholders to amass wealth.

Local community electric power generation systems can inter-connect to one smart grid and set of batteries to store electricity that will be available when demand in one or more communities exceeds normal peak usage and in emergencies. Two way net metering can enable costs to be accurately accounted for and assessed.

                                                                Conclusion

My vision of a restructured economy is one in which local community citizens cooperatively make decisions that effect their community’s environment, its unincorporated environs and the social lives of its residents. Community is defined as a self-organizing settlement consisting of families and individuals living in households that interact with one another for the purpose of sustaining that settlement and its inhabitants into perpetuity. Members of the community—i.e. citizens--perceive their community as a subsystem within a naturall, ecological system that contains the natural assets/resources that provide the necessities that support lives. And the community in turn organizes a number of interactive subsystems that need to function collaboratively to increase the probability that the community and its inhabitants are sustained into perpetuity.

           

The three major community systems are the socio-culture, the economy and the polity. The socio-cultural system develops values and interactive norms that, when adhered to, enable community residents to occupy and perform community and eco-system sustaining roles. The economic system produces and manufactures goods from locally grown and extracted renewable and nonrenewable (on a human life cycle time span) natural assets that help sustain the community.  It also imports needed resources that are not available locally from other communities in exchange for local resources and goods other communities may need to sustain themselves. The economy  develops means for local investment, establishing credit and intra-community exchange. The polity’s functions include: controlling access to the community’s common natural assets, organizing entities consisting of local citizens that monitor access to and use of such assets, in compliance with interactive socio-cultural norms.                                                                        

 Examples of functions of community services, considered here as subsystems of the of the above three are discussed briefly.  We also try to show how each of those subsystem’s needs to develop networks with systems of neighbor communities for local community subsystems to function with optimum effectiveness and efficiency—i.e. sustainability.

We argue that local community systems designed and operated by community residents, owned in common can operate to sustain communities and their environs into the distant future. In such communities valued social roles can develop for each resident. Those roles enable them to contribute to the welfare and sustainability of their communities.  We maintain that cooperation among neighboring communities is more sustainable than community competition.

                                                                                              

          Notes

1.     Daly (1996) and (1973) and Daly and Cobb (1989.)

2.    Korten (2008)

3.    IPCC report (2007), Ehrlich

4.    Daly (1996), Daly and Cobb, Jackson (2009), Korten (2008), McKibben (2007), Robertson (1999).

5.    Hansen

6.    Jackson (2009), Peter Brown and Garver (2009), J. W. Smith (2009), Korten (2008), Lester Brown (2008) McKibben (2007), Daly (1973).

7.    Boulding, in Daly, (1973)

8.    Parsons and Smelser (1956)

9.    Von Bertalantfy. (1968)

10. Daly (2003, 1996), Lester Brown (2008), McKibben (2007)

11. Daly (Ibid)

12. Parsons and Smelser Op. cit

13. Daly (1996) 

14. Parsons & Smelser Op. cit.

15. Foley, (2011)

16. Brown Ellen (2004)

17. Ibid.

18. Parsons and Smelser Op. Cit

19. Dunham (1970) pp. 241-243