Historians may well conclude that one of the great myths of the second half of the 20th century was that prosperity could only be found in an economic system built on constant growth. In the last 25 years, our industrialised global society without apparent limits has seen the world’s economy double. It is no coincidence that this period has also seen the degradation of an estimated 60 per cent of ecosystems, along with a 40 per cent increase in carbon emissions since 1990 (Kyoto base levels).
We are only just beginning to understand, in principle at least, if not yet in practice, that a system that encourages a perpetual increase in consumption cannot continue in a bounded world. Lord Mandelson, for instance, has argued: “The transition to a low-carbon economy is an environmental and economic imperative.” And speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that a key to tackling the economic crisis was to “lay down now the infrastructure and hardware to support a low-carbon recovery and the green economy of the future”. However, what many are seemingly failing to grasp is that a low-carbon future relies on systems of sustainable resource use that can only be achieved in an economic model that works on balance rather than growth. When Ed Miliband talked of the transformation needed to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent he referred to a situation where “we’ll have 20 per cent of current emissions, with an economy that we want to be three times bigger”.

Professor Tim Jackson’s work as Economics Commissioner for the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) seeks to advise the government on the scale of change needed. His recent report, Prosperity Without Growth, went as far as detailing a 12-point programme for governments to instigate major economic change. His latest work for the SDC, A Sustainable New Deal, explains that by delivering green economic stimulus packages, you can transform society through economic recovery, rather than bailing out and propping up a faulty system. “There’s lots of rhetoric around less consumerist and less materialistic lives,” he points out. “But the biggest single message that you get ?in the recession is that it’s almost our duty to go out and ?kick-start the economy by buying more things on the high street.” Faced with the failure of the dominant global economic model of continual growth coupled with the realities of climate change, resource shortages and large-scale ecosystem degradation, Jackson states that it simply isn’t a choice to aim for a return to a system that believes prosperity is to be found in ever-expanding economies.

Despite the SDC’s work, the UK’s actual commitment to a green stimulus programme is amongst the smallest (6.9 per cent of the total economic stimulus package) in the developed world. “There’s a lot of talk around creating a more prudent financial sector, and that’s all very good, but if the result of that is really just a way of shoring up the same economic paradigm, which it is mostly at the moment, then we are still quite a long way away from a serious consideration of big structural changes,” Jackson notes.

In fact, the SDC envisions a dematerialised society, which will involve a huge change in the way we think about and use materials. Yet Jackson considers that society is beginning to show that it is ready to change. “Business can actually be quite good at achieving a forced target once they have the right framework,” he says, and his research also shows that amongst consumers there already seems to be “some latent discontent with wasteful resource use”. He believes change can be achieved through a system of positive feedback: The government will act if the public gives them a sense that action is needed, and businesses will act if the government gives them the framework to do so, whereas consumers can act most effectively when businesses have provided the opportunities to do so.

However, it is with the consumers that Jackson feels we may have the most ground to cover. Jackson holds that lower income groups are reusing and recycling in an instinctive way, which has nothing to do with the environment, but rather to do with saving the pennies. Despite this, he suggests that “there’s still stigma attached to the reuse or use of secondhand clothing” and it’s these kinds of social indicators that show him that “resource efficiency in anything broader than just recycling has still got quite a long way to go”.

Jackson also states that we cannot expect the population to pick up the baton of sustainable resource use without the clear and accessible messages and systems to do so. This is an area he believes the government could improve on, certainly in relation to waste management. “I still think it’s absolutely astonishing that there’s no consistency across local authorities in relation to what’s recycled and how it’s recycled.” The answer to the recycling issue is a simple one in Jackson’s eyes though: “Having said ‘you guys go and fix this, sort it out how you like,’ let’s now see which ones are working best and set that as a standard. Assess what they’re doing and figure out how they’re making it work and roll that out.” He concedes that there could be a place in society ?for pay-as-you-throw style systems, ?but adds the large caveat that “by offering payments for what people believe to be good behaviour you undermine the moral imperative to engage in the behaviour”.
It is clear, however, that to achieve social change we need to radically transform the “culture of consumption that is propagated in all sorts of ways through lifestyle magazines, through media, through advertising, through celebrity status”, which is driven wholly by the macroeconomics of a society fixated with constant growth and novelty. “It’s not about a complete overhaul of everything and every institution that we have in hand; it is about a systematic approach to transformation,” says Jackson. “Fix the economics, change the social logics and establish the limits.”

Prosperity Without Growth concludes that you need to be able to establish proper limits so that there are real targets for resource use reduction. These then need to be integrated into new economic models that are based around something other than a work, spend and consume culture. “We have to know how that works. At the moment we have floor loads of treasury economists trying to get the same thing we’ve done for the past fifty years up and running again. Just give me half a floor of those people and set them working on a sensible economic model.

“They couldn’t necessarily do it first thing on Monday morning, but they could certainly set [a sustainable economy] in train by Wednesday or Thursday by the very latest.”