Preamble for the first column of the series
This weekly column published between April 2009 - April 2012 in Sri Lanka's 'Daily News' newspaper addressed core issues regarding sustainability, critically examining the current concepts, thoughts, strategies and actions adopted by us in the context of both the global and local economy.
This blog will make a collection of selected columns (of the 146 published) with a view to saving trees as publishing them in the real domain would be a venture that would place additional burden on Mother Nature.
This blog will make a collection of selected columns (of the 146 published) with a view to saving trees as publishing them in the real domain would be a venture that would place additional burden on Mother Nature.
Within some of the earlier columns focus was placed on providing information and useful tips and generating dialogue on mitigating the causes for climate change and global warming.
Readers are kindly invited to engage the columnist to create a healthy dialogue on the issues raised.
I plan to try add an article a day to keep the content of the Blog vibrant.
Creating Sustainable businesses
We are today in the midst of a global economic crisis of unprecedented levels. The prime cause for the current crisis is identified as the scant disregard for the age old value of thriftiness and the driving of corporate businesses on the basis of generating excessive greed. In that context, small was in no way beautiful.
Big was always better. Living beyond ones means became fashionable. Promissory notes, plastic cards and other non existent assets formed the basis of wealth. Smart speculators, financial wizards and middleperson agents ruled the day. Honest hard work, creativity and innovation took a back seat to glitzy reports, elitist networks, pats on each other’s backs and flashy showbiz media events.
Full blow
While Sri Lanka
Within the global business environment, issues such as increasing poverty levels, aging of population, rapid spread of internationalised terrorist activities, degradation of the environment and our natural resource bases and the resultant causes of climate change and global warming are all forcing us, the citizens of mother earth to re-examine the institutions, structures and the value systems that we have been working with, for sometime now.
Business models
Like never before, the sustainability of the socio-economic, cultural and business models we use, come under close scrutiny today.
In that context, it is important for us to define and understand what sustainable development (SD) means, at the national and/or individual business enterprise levels. The Rio Summit on the Global Environment of 1992, the landmark event in the sustainable development agenda, adopted the following definition of SD; “the ability of humanity to ensure that it meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
It also had the post-script that “Sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather, a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional changes are made consistent, with future as well as present needs”.
Resource exploitation
This was then seen by many activists as a definite carving of space, to manoeuvre the exploitation of resources, where the 80:20 equation of who owns and consumes it, goes on regardless.
The dichotomy of the environment and development equation is this very imbalance. Whether it is at the level of the global economy or at the level of local economies, the current predominant model of development is based on the 80:20 equation. At the global level, dealing with natural and other environmental resources happens, with the first world determining, what is good for the world at large.
Elite models
At the local level, the elite play leader with the rest of the populace, determining the shape of the models and the agenda for their development. We often apply inapt models we have ourselves borrowed, from the first world or the predominant culture.
This columnist will venture to take on these core development and business related issues in the context of the various sectors of the economy with the objective of generating well-informed discussion and dialogue.
With each column a few key web addresses relevant to the issue at hand will be presented to enable further exploration of it on the worldwide web of the Internet.
Useful web addresses:
World Business Council for Sustainable Development - www.wbcsd.org Business and Sustainable Development -www.iisd.org/business/ Institute for Sustainable Development in Business -www.susdev.co.uk/ Earthscan Publications - www.earthscan.co.uk/ Sufficiency Economy - www.sufficiencyeconomy.org/en/ End Poverty 2015 -www.endpoverty2015.org/
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