The idea of sustainable development currently underpins the core development agenda built by the United Nations around the 15 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They aim to mobilize action within all countries and globally, targeting issues from poverty eradication and gender equality to climate change, clean energy, and economic growth. The SDGs are arguably the culmination of more than 40 years of struggle to integrate environmental concerns into the social and economic development agenda. Yet critics worry that the SDGs institutionalize an overextended and unwieldy agenda that, in failing to set priorities, undermines the ability to address the world’s most pressing environmental and developmental problems. Meanwhile, the association of “sustainability” with development still makes some governments uneasy. Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian governments only relented in the final round of negotiations to opposing the term’s inclusion in the title of the 2015 UN “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” a document that includes the SDGs.
Stephen Macekura’s richly textured history tells the political backstory of this contested concept, presaging many of the battles that continued to play out in operationalizing sustainable development in the 2030 Agenda. It focuses on the political and policy tensions that the first two generations of international environmental protection proponents encountered as they sought to reconcile their goals with development imperatives. Strong archival-based research undergirds Macekura’s narrative device of focusing on leaders of major environmental organizations and their networks with, and often movement in and out of influential roles in, government and UN organizations. Such research makes Of Limits and Growth an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the evolution of international environmentalism up to the 1990s, the personalities who drove it, and the interplay of leading organizations and the broader global politics of development.
Concerns that decolonization and the global push for economic growth would destroy wildlife and nature initially motivated first-generation environmental leaders. Macekura particularly highlights the colonial, and sometimes racially tinged, mentality of Julian Huxley and Russell E. Train, key figures who helped found and lead the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These organizations originally focused on preserving “wild” spaces and wildlife and “educating” populations in newly independent countries on the value of conservation for the broader global good. In one of many telling anecdotes, Macekura quotes Train who, upon returning from East Africa in 1958, told friends that “the ever-increasing native population, always hungry for more land and seemingly indifferent to the fate of the wildlife [was] the main problem” (p. 43).
This early focus, especially in East Africa, quickly came up against nationalist leaders and donor agencies (Macekura focuses primarily on USAID and the World Bank) influenced by modernization theory and new ideas about “development.” Their policies promoted industrialization, economic growth, and urbanization in order to transform living standards. While leaders of nongovernmental organizations early on recognized the need to reconcile environment and development, the chasm between these positions meant few concrete attempts to do so. Against this backdrop, Macekura juxtaposes the instrumental ways in which political leaders, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, first allied with and then moved away from environmental groups based on their usefulness for achieving nationalist goals and navigating donor relationships.
A second narrative concerns the origins and transformation of environmental ideas in their interaction with development and growth-oriented goals. The WWF, for example, promoted the idea of “valuing” wild spaces to generate tourist dollars, which translated later into such ideas as debt-for-nature swaps and contemporary discourses around “payment for ecosystem services” (PES). Macekura resists drawing direct lines between the progression of these policies (his narrative ends prior to the current enamorment with PES). Instead, he focuses on the interplay of evolving trends in economic thinking and policies of aid organizations with NGO efforts to recalibrate their messages and goals.
“Alternative” development ideas (Chapter 4) especially attracted environmentalists in the 1970s, as articulated in books like E. F. Schumacher’s (1973) Small is Beautiful, in related ideas of “appropriate technologies,” and, later, in decentralized community development and micro-financing. Environmental leaders also sought to fit these ideas with shifts in development thinking toward poverty reduction and addressing “basic needs.” Prominent development economists such as Barbara Ward, founder of the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development, figure prominently in this narrative. Among other international roles, Ward was a key advisor to and influence on Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, as they marshaled expertise among development economists to bring development onto the Stockholm agenda.
Chapters 3, on Stockholm, and 6, on the IUCN’s 1980 World Conservation Strategy, which first articulated sustainable development as a motivating policy idea, demonstrate how the interplay of personalities moving in and out of governments, NGOs, and UN circles struggled to incorporate the latest development thinking in ways that could lead to concrete, and politically acceptable, policies that would also mobilize resources. In both cases, Macekura depicts how success in bringing these ideas into broad programmatic statements did little to resolve underlying political conflicts or mobilize significant new resources, undermining attempts to implement these ideas in development planning.
While detailed and nuanced, these histories do not always bear out the central role ascribed to NGOs in giving rise to sustainable development ideas and policy. The strongest case for direct NGO leverage is in Chapter 5, where Macekura details the strategies, networks, and policy battles that led to environmental impact assessments in USAID and World Bank project approvals, and new accountability mechanisms such as the World Bank’s Inspection Panel. He also provides the important context of those strategies rooted in the U.S. “mandate and sue” style of governance empowered by the National Environmental Policy Act and a new brand of environmental group to leverage that power (e.g., the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund).
The “inside” account of NGO leaders and networks also leads to some significant omissions, however, including inattention to the role of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and World Bank in formulating and articulating the most politically palatable understandings of sustainable development popularized by the 1987 Brundtland Commission. They emphasized “win-win” policies that promised environmental protection and economic growth, which had little to do with NGO influence. Although Macekura references trends in environmental policy thinking in the North—including deregulation and shifts to market- and incentive-based policies—driving this agenda, they fall into the background of the story. Inattention to the OECD’s influence is especially curious since Gro Harlem Brundtland picked Jim MacNeill to be the Commission’s secretary-general because of his work as head of the OECD Environment Directorate, from which he brought ideas around market and growth-oriented policies to address environmental problems. Indeed, a central feature of the report—which arguably accounts for both its popularity and contestation—is the growth imperative as its starting point.
Chapter 7, on the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, shifts focus to foreground North–South politics that buffeted its outcomes, including the lack of major commitments of new resources, acknowledging that NGO influence waned in this process. Political scientists interested in why particular outcomes or linkages between environment and development prevailed may thus be slightly disappointed in a mode of analysis built around one set of actors (NGOs), when the evidence presented highlights the equal importance of the politics of economic and development institutions, the rise of neoliberalism, and North–South politics. Similarly, while Macekura says that his analysis draws on American political development literature and international relations scholarship on institutional change and advocacy networks (p. 7), their influence is subtle, leaving readers to draw linkages and make their own inferences about mutual influences among NGOs, institutions, and policies over time. The author deserves credit for presenting evidence of these interactions, but often in terms of countervailing forces acting on or limiting NGOs.
Of Limits and Growth’s conclusion reflects on the broader positive and negative impacts of NGOs and their legacy in the evolution of sustainable development. It raises provocative questions about how aggrandizing their influence within international institutions may have come at the expense of the more holistic reforms they supported. Meanwhile, by the 1990s, divisions had emerged among more “radical” NGOs concerned about the close relationships of traditional well-funded and professionalized organizations, such as WWF and IUCN, more willing to work with governments and industry (p. 308). This discussion presages contestation among the greater diversity of NGOs today, many increasingly focused on global justice and from the Global South, taken up in recent works like Jennifer Hadden’s (2015) Networks in Contention.
Meanwhile, deeper and persistent political and economic conflicts around poverty, inequality, and justice, Macekura argues, remain the most important and challenging to address in ongoing efforts to better reconcile environment and development. This conclusion at once solidifies his trenchant analysis of the limits of NGO influence and suggests that a slightly wider lens could be useful in order to fully understand the prospects for change, especially in the current context of the SDGs.
