Sunita Narain: 'The ecology of the poor is my hope'

For over thirty years, Sunita Narain has been studying the relation between environment and development. She started as co-author of regular reports on The State of India’s Environment, praised in 1982 by publications including The Economist. One of her most influential publications was Dying Wisdom (1997), co-authored by her former mentor Anil Agarwal, in which she described the water crisis in India and assessed the possibility of concrete and feasible alternatives in cities and the countryside. This year, she published Excreta Matters on the terrible situation of sanitation facilities in India and its impact on drinking water and health.

Narain is also the director of the Indian Centre for Science and Environment and is constantly travelling in and outside India, when she is not in a meeting or planning or researching or giving interviews. She managed to spare an hour for MO* magazine in mid-October. The first question we asked her was the same question we asked our readers on the website for MO*’s 10th anniversary: what would she do if she ruled the world?

Sunita Narain: I would deal with climate change, the United States, and the United States. The world is interconnected in so many ways that we became dependent of each other. This is why we need global rules to be applied by everyone, meant to protect and support the weak and powerless. That is the challenge since the Earth Summit of 1992 and world leaders have failed collectively. Beyond any doubt, the US bears the main responsibility for this failure. The US government refused to take its responsibility.

Would it not also be true to say that capitalism refuses to think of solutions for the problems it creates?

Sunita Narain: I don’t know whether the problem is inherent to capitalism. I would rather say that it is linked to the specific economic and political system applied in the US, increasingly copied by the rest of the world. Everyone wants to be America: India, China and even Europe think that the American way of organising economy and society is a key to success despite of the fact that this model proved to be disastrous for global cooperation and ecologic safety.  

Is global ecologic safety the sole responsibility of the US or ‘the West’?

Sunita Narain: The basic idea that was developed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, started from a common, but different responsibility. That larger efforts were asked of rich countries had an economic reason: first, the rich and polluting economies. If that principle had been anchored in a set of enforceable international rules, and if the West would have kept its promises, countries like India and China would have no choice today but to comply with the obligations for developing countries. Instead, twenty years later we are still fighting over who will take the first step to save the planet. All because the US refused – and still refuses — to deliver its part of the efforts.

Europe sees itself as a leader in the climate discussions.

Sunita Narain: Sorry, but the EU does not lead the debate. Germany and Sweden perhaps. In Copenhagen, the EU gave Obama way too much space to put on a show and at the same time undermine the entire summit. Before that, the EU had a leading role because it managed to integrate the basic principles of international governance – equality, justice, sustainability – so fundamentally in its own functioning. Today, however, the Union is a confused club of nations in search of a way out of crises, unable to trust in its own strengths.

Is the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South-Africa) a positive development?

Sunita Narain: It can be positive, íf these growing powers profile themselves as the spokesmen of those who have no voice on the international forums. But if the BRICS will just claim the right to pollute as much as the old industrial powers, we will face disaster. For now I do not declare myself. Things can still move the right way. What became clear at the new Earth Summit in Rio this year, is that the developing countries expect to be seen as equals at the negotiation table. The old powers still don’t realize this. Europe keeps on preaching as if it was the only green prophet concerned about the future, while the US does exactly what it wants to do. In the meantime it is ignored that countries like Mexico, Indonesia, India and China developed their own ecological consciousness and are able to make a constructive contribution to the global agreements.

Do you think that millions of poor people are willing to accept slower growth as a consequence of global environment and climate regulations?

Sunita Narain: That is an impossible question to answer. But both in India and China, you can see how protests grow in thousands of places against the way in which the developing state is dealing with land and water, the main sources to provide a living for the poor. Their resistance to pollution is not romantic, it’s economic. The ecology of the poor requires an economy that respects the natural resources as a source of income for the current and future poor generations. This is different from the ecological movement as it is known in the West, where production and consumption are disregarded, because there is enough of a budget to send some garbage men to clean the mess up.

Has this ecology of the poor been translated already into a functioning economic model?

Sunita Narain: No, and this makes us vulnerable. We know that the current approach is wrong, but when it comes to alternatives, there is not much more than some inspiring stories about a small village here and a remote community there. And that is not enough in the true world of power politics. We need a larger scale.

In conclusion of this rather negative analysis, where do you see hope for the future?

Sunita Narain: With the people, with the democracy which enables people to defend their interests. As long as the industrial and financial lobbyists do not succeed in completely undermining the democracy, people can at the same time ask for electricity and environmental protection, mining industry and the preservation of agriculture and rivers. The cry for sustainable growth for the poor is no longer a helpless whisper in the South. It is an increasingly loud and clear shout. Today its noise might still be somewhat chaotic, but with some efforts to structure the organization from below, its voice can evolve in a call for real plans towards a sustainable and fair world.  

Sunita Narain will visit Belgium for two MO*-lectures in Ghent on 23 May 2013 and in Antwerp on 24 May 2013.