Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T10:03:37.764Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - How Should We Make an Impact?

from Part I - Our World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Daniel Scott Souleles
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Johan Gersel
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Morten Sørensen Thaning
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Get access

Summary

Sustainability has become the privileged way businesses, NGOs, and governments think about actions they might take to remediate environmental problems and be good actors vis-à-vis natural resources and our shared climate. In turn, the way that sustainable actions are accounted for is in the language of “impacts” in which various accounting schemes seek to tabulate and communicate the degree to which some sustainable action has an effect in the world. The purpose of generating a quantifiable, representable impact is so that consumers might decide that it makes a company or product more worthwhile and more deserving of a consumer’s money on a market. On a market, a consumer has the ability to decide that other qualities (price, brand, convenience, etc.) could potentially outweigh good environmental action. The purpose of explaining all this is to show just how limited a utilitarian approach (one in which goods are measured, weighed, and seen as interchangeable) to fixing environmental problems is. What Archer demonstrates is that by tracking environmental action in terms of comparable, fungible impacts, one allows corporate actors to count their pollution or bad action, and continue to do it anyway, both masking it behind impact measures and abdicating any final responsibility to consumers. At the close of the paper, Archer offers a different way of thinking about sustainable environmental action, one that draws on various strands of indigenous thinking to illustrate what it would look like and how much more effective things would be if we understood good environmental action in terms of nonnegotiable values (in philosophy language, a “deontological” approach).

Type
Chapter
Information
People before Markets
An Alternative Casebook
, pp. 204 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdelnour, Samer, and Moghli, Mai Abu. 2021. “Researching violent contexts: A call for political reflexivity.” Organization 00 (0): 124, https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211030646Google Scholar
Archer, Matthew, and Elliott, Hannah. 2021. “‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain.” Critique of Anthropology 41 (3): 227246.Google Scholar
Archer, Matthew. 2020. “Navigating the sustainability landscape: Impact pathways and the sustainability ethic as moral compass.” Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2020.07200Google Scholar
Cashore, Benjamin. 2002. “Legitimacy and the privatization of environmental governance: How non-state market-driven (NSMD) governance systems gain rule-making authority.” Governance 15 (4): 503529.Google Scholar
Clarkin, Catherine M., Sawyer, Melissa, and Levin, Joshua L.. 2020. “The rise of standardized ESG disclosure frameworks in the United States.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Accessed October 5, 2021. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/06/22/the-rise-of-standardized-esg-disclosure-frameworks-in-the-united-statesGoogle Scholar
Davis, Heather, and Todd, Zoe. 2017. “On the importance of a date, or, decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (4): 761780.Google Scholar
Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gómez-Baggethun, Erik, and Ruiz-Pérez, Manuel. 2011. “Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services.” Progress in Physical Geography 35 (5): 613628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guthman, Julie. 2007. “The Polanyian way? Voluntary food labels as neoliberal governance.” Antipode 39 (3): 456478.Google Scholar
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally E. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Oswald, W. Wyatt, Foster, David R., Shuman, Bryan N., Chilton, Elizabeth S., Doucette, Dianna L., and Duranleau, Deena L.. 2020. “Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England.” Nature Sustainability 3 (3): 241246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. 2020. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Miles A. 2014. “‘Pesteredwith inhabitants’: Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and more trouble with wilderness.” Pacific Historical Review 84 (2): 195226Google Scholar
Roos, Christopher I. 2020Scale in the study of Indigenous burning.” Nature Sustainability 3: 898899.Google Scholar
Sultana, Farhana. 2018. “The false equivalence of academic freedom and free speech.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 17 (2): 228257.Google Scholar
Tuck, Eve, and Wayne Yang, K.. 2012. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 140.Google Scholar
Vaughn, Sarah E. 2017. “Disappearing mangroves: The epistemic politics of climate adaptation in Guyana.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 242268.Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle Powys, Caldwell, Chris, and Schaefer, Marie. 2018. “Indigenous lessons about sustainability are not just for ‘all humanity’.” In Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, edited by Sze, Julie. New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2014. “Indigenous women, climate change impacts, and collective action.” Hypatia 29 (3): 599616.Google Scholar
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×