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CHAPTER 12: CRITICAL OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS

Introduction

12.1 A critical evaluation of the literature and policy approaches review in this report has served to identify where there are:

• gaps in the knowledge base;
• inconsistencies in the delivery pathways;
• no policies in place, or policies exist but no action is being taken.

These gaps and areas of challenge are outlined in the first section of this chapter. It then goes on to present key points for consideration by the makers and deliverers of sustainable development policy in Scotland.

Critical overview of the evidence-base

Gaps in knowledge

12.2 The table at Annex A provides an overview of the scope and coverage of the literature which has been reviewed for this report, highlighting where there are gaps in the evidence-base. A critical examination of the evidence suggests where there is a knowledge gap or a shortage of evidence, which is relevant for sustainable development policy and practice in Scotland, whether viewed from a national or international level. In summary, the three main areas are:

• where there is insufficient evidence of the problem or of knowledge about whether or how a policy or action could contribute to more sustainable forms of development;
• where the problem for sustainable development is recognised and polices are in place, but there is a lack of evaluation of the success or adequacy of current practices;
• where there is a reasonable body of evidence about the nature of a problem, and what works to alleviate it outside of the Scotland, but little or no evidence of how this might be adapted to the Scottish context.

Insufficient evidence

12.3 For example, in the education literature at the international level, the debate is primarily focused on meeting only two of the three requirements of the Millennium Development Agreement goals and objectives, those of delivering universal primary education and promoting wider literacy. The third aim to reorient education curricula, globally and within nation states to create a more sustainable world, is largely absent from the current debate. Essentially, there appears to be a conceptual gap in terms of what might constitute policies to encourage and support education for sustainable development at the level of the United Nations and by other international institutions. However, the UK literature illustrates a healthier debate on this issue.

Insufficient evaluation

12.4 In other areas of policy delivery, such as sustainable procurement, for example, there appears to be a general acceptance within the policy literature that more sustainable practices will make a significant contribution to reduced resource use and more sustainable futures. Due to the absence of systematic monitoring and evaluation of sustainable procurement practices at either the European or UK level, however, there is little actual evidence that this is indeed the case. Similarly, at the European level there was a previous weakness in measuring the success of environmental legislation. This has been solved in part by the adoption of Directive 91/692, which imposes standardised reporting obligations on member states in relation to a range of environmental legislation and the establishment of the European Environment Agency.

Knowledge transfer

12.5 Both the UK Government and the Scottish Executive appear reluctant to impose mandatory measures to promote more sustainable behaviour, even where these have proved highly effective elsewhere, suggesting that relevant knowledge transfer opportunities have not been realised or acted upon. For example, the carrier bag levy introduced in Ireland, waste separation in France and Germany and London's Congestion Charge have all delivered significant changes in people's behaviour without necessarily provoking a shift in their attitudes. This may be due in part to the UK's liberal democratic tradition and the concomitant concept of consumer sovereignty, but is often due to a lack of applied and practical research about how successful schemes can be transferred to other contexts.

Inconsistencies in policy delivery

12.6 A second theme to emerge from the review has been the inconsistencies that exist between different aspects and levels of policy delivery which serve to significantly undermine a move towards more sustainable futures. Three different inconsistencies are evident:

• institutional inconsistencies leading to fragmentation and failure to integrate sustainable development with governance;
• vertical inconsistencies between policy intentions or actual practices between all or some of the Scottish, UK, European and international levels;
• horizontal inconsistencies between different aspects of policy delivery either between or within the different sectors.

Institutional inconsistencies

12.7 Institutional differences between Scotland and England are important. There is no separate Scottish Sustainable Development Commission (although a strengthening of the role of the SDC in Scotland is being pursued) and the absence of a duty on the Scottish Executive to promote or contribute to sustainable development contrasts with the situation for the National Assembly for Wales - although this may be due to the broad scope of powers which are devolved to Scotland. There is also no dedicated Scottish Parliamentary Committee to scrutinise the Executive's performance in this respect, in contrast to the Environment Audit Committee in the Westminster Parliament.

Vertical inconsistencies

12.8 The UK Government appears to be placing less emphasis on efficient use of resources (including recycling) and job opportunities that can be created by renewables than Scotland (highlighted in the green jobs strategy). The Scottish Environment Protection Agency ( SEPA) seems to be more advanced in recognising and addressing environmental justice concerns than the Environment Agency in England and Wales and FoE Scotland has also been far more proactive in making the links between environmental and social justice than its English counterpart. In this respect it has greater resonance with the US model, adopting a 'bottom-up' and much more grass roots approach to the environmental concerns of low-income populations.

12.9 At the European level, there is a lack of vertical integration of sustainable development and environmental issues into other policy areas like the Common Agricultural Policy ( CAP). EU subsidies are still very much a problem. Despite the European Environmental Agency encouraging the removal of environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, there appears to be little shift from the EU: subsidies to energy in the EU-15 were EUR 29 billion in 2001, 73 % oriented towards the support of fossil fuels.

12.10 At the global level, there is a problematic relationship between initiatives from international organisations and their implementation on the ground. Nation-states are given responsibility for initiatives such as those laid out in the UN Habitat Agenda, but are encouraged to carry them out with little room for adaptation to their own cultural contexts and act under pressure from continuing economic globalisation, a process which is in turn encouraged by international institutions. This also causes problems regarding the legitimacy of those institutions.

Horizontal inconsistencies

12.11 Horizontal inconsistencies can be noted at the UK level in the debate on food miles, which only counts distances accumulated through the transportation of goods within the UK. Similarly, air transport is the greatest contributor to rising CO2 emissions, but is not counted within the UK Climate Change Programme. A Scottish example of horizontal policy inconsistency is apparent in a focus on rail projects being concurrent with a considerable road-building programme and planned airport expansion which may cancel out the sustainability gains of the rail projects.

12.12 The European Union is inconsistent in its approach to agriculture, despite considerable reform of the CAP and a new emphasis on land stewardship. Subsidies still favour large-scale producers, despite a growing body of opinion suggesting the future of European farming lies in small and medium-scale producers. This is also counter to the need for diversification in production. Given that food production accounts for a considerable amount of greenhouse gas emissions, there seems to be little integration between policies such as the CAP and the EU's Sixth Environmental Action Plan.

12.13 At the international level, there is clearly a conflict between policies that promote globalisation and further liberalise global markets and policies that attempt to encourage sustainable development. While international institutions look to promote environmental or social procurement policies and create a culture of corporate social responsibility, they also continue to encourage economic liberalisation, either as a condition of a loan, for instance, or by encouraging developing states to rely more on private finance and their respective private sectors.

12.14 The OECD (reflecting environmental concerns) and the World Bank (in pursuit of transparency) have both adopted a more sustainable approach to their procurement policies. It would seem, however, that the World Trade Organisation has adopted a less prescriptive regulatory approach to the developed world than to the developing world (Arrowsmith and Trybus, 2002), and that its approach to licensing in the GATS agreement, looking to prevent licensing from being a restriction to the supply of services, is contradictory to the stated aim of encouraging more accountability. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development has stated that practical measures to create a more sustainable built environment must be nationally owned, at the same time as it encourages public-private partnerships for financing and developing infrastructure, creating potential friction between the role of markets and state intervention.

An absence of policies or no evidence of policy action

12.15 The areas of human activity where there appears to be an absence of policy or no evidence of policy taking place are numerous. Air travel deserves to be singled out here as the most obvious example of this worldwide. There is ample evidence of the negative environmental impacts of emissions from air transport, but airport expansion is high on the agendas of almost all developed societies and governments are not only failing to regulate air travel, but are rather promoting it. A Scottish example of where policy rhetoric exists but there is a lack of adequate action is in terms of greening the curriculum where very little has been achieved in Higher and Further Education.

Conclusions

12.16 A review of this nature is not intended to generate independent recommendations for policy action on sustainable development. However, it can, valuably, identify key messages emerging from the evidence which should be considered in policy and strategy-formulation and delivery. Clearly, if Scottish policy is to be properly informed by evidence then more applied and systematic research and analysis of the issues, organisational and institutional systems, delivery pathways and behavioural responses will be needed. As lessons about what works in the relation to sustainable development practice is often highly context specific, it is essential that such work should be done in relation to the Scottish situation.

12.17 With this last point in mind, some general suggestions and aspirations, emerging from the literature, have been singled out, by way of conclusion to this report.

• To achieve sustainable development in Scotland all its economic activity should aspire to be bent towards social progress and this should be achieved within both Scottish and global environmental limits. A systematic and transparent sustainable development audit of all policies and government-funded programmes would go a long way towards providing a basis for achieving this.
• Vertical and horizontal environmental policy integration and delivery, although not representing successful sustainable development themselves, are essential and indispensable requirements of it. For a policy to be integrated it must be comprehensive, aggregated and consistent and policy priorities must be decided democratically.
• Sustainable development policy should reflect local values and be capable of delivery through existing national and local decision-making frameworks. To achieve this better understanding is needed of the scale, level, magnitude and spatial dimensions of both the problem of unsustainable activities in Scotland and their solutions.
• In the areas of policy which the Executive cannot directly influence, for example, reserved matters or global issues, the Executive should act as a lobbyist to encourage the relevant agencies to enact the necessary changes.
• The institutional framework within which Scottish sustainable development policy should be located must help and support devolved decision-making. Negotiation must be recognised as particularly important when setting decentralised targets.
• Strategy actions should reflect risk and uncertainty based on the precautionary, polluter and user-pays principles, intergenerational equity, intra-generational equity, free prior and informed consent and helping (involuntary) risk-bearers to participate in decisions as well as risk-takers (such as government and investors).
• The biggest gains for sustainability are most likely to result from legislative and institutional changes rather than from individual or household behaviour change. The Executive should consider separate areas of policy delivery (such as waste, transport, and energy) and decide whether institutional, legislative or public behaviour change is the most appropriate and effective route for advancing a given sustainability goal.
• Where public behaviour change is considered the most fruitful way forward, a step-by-step approach is needed, in which external barriers are removed before psychological or attitudinal factors are addressed. It is much easier to change behaviour through automatic responses to changes in opportunity than to challenge ingrained attitudes and perceptions. Provision of practical information is a key element in behaviour change, but campaigns need to be well targeted and co-ordinated with other measures.
• There should be better integration between social and green procurement to create a more holistic sustainable procurement approach. There is a pressing need to introduce mechanisms whereby assessment and evaluation of sustainable procurement can be undertaken and to harmonize sustainable public procurement with trade policies.
• Awareness-raising to enable consumers to understand the implications of their food purchasing decisions and the way goods and services are used after purchase should be key priorities.
• Making evident the links between obesity, nutrition and the sustainability of people's daily lifestyle is likely to be one of the most effective ways of promoting more sustainable levels of consumption and encouraging people to consume and waste less. In tandem with such information campaigns, people need to be offered the opportunity to buy more eco-friendly products and to adopt less environmentally damaging lifestyles.
• A lack of clear guidance has allegedly hampered reform of more sustainable business practices and the spread of corporate social responsibility. The Scottish green jobs and enterprise strategy should help to address this, but there is a need for increased financial incentives and more streamlined funding mechanisms to help encourage the business sector to adopt more sustainable business practices.
• There is a need for a systematic approach to strategic infrastructure provision through a national spatial perspective to replace competitive bidding for infrastructure resources. Community planning needs to more directly recognise sustainable development and proactively aim to promote this through all planning decisions. Strategic Environmental Assessment in relation to plans and programmes, and Environmental Impact Assessment, in relation to particular development applications, may be suitable mechanisms for this.
• The planning system has a key role to play in furthering the substantive or distributive elements of environmental justice, but community planning needs to directly recognise the disproportionate negative impacts of planning decisions and their positive potential to address social injustices arising from the environment. Introduction of a social equity audit or community impact assessment as part of SEA and EIA would go a long way to promote this.
• SEPA needs to participate more fully in planning processes to ensure that environmental justice concerns are properly considered (Poustie 2004). The establishment of evaluative structures to measure the success of information and participation mechanisms against stated objectives would also be a welcome step forward, as would the evaluation of successes or otherwise of recent developments in enforcement.
• A need and considerable opportunities exist for better integration of sustainable development throughout the education curriculum in Scotland. School campus-greening needs to be rolled out into the Further and Higher Education sectors.

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