Masters of Degrowth : Ecological Economics (w.2.1) Human needs and wellbeing

Class 3: Human needs and wellbeing 

Fanning, A.L., O’Neill, D.W., Hickel, J., Roux, N. 2021. The social shortfall and ecological overshoot of nations. Nature Sustainability, https: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00799-z 

At the global scale, we find that billions of people currently live in countries that do not achieve most of the social thresholds in our analysis, and yet humanity is collectively overshooting six of the seven global biophysical boundaries.

We find that humanity is closer to reaching the social thresholds than it was in the early The 1990s (with the notable exceptions of equality and democratic quality), but notable shortfalls remain. At the same time, global resource use has overshot two additional boundaries (material footprint and blue water) and extended substantially further beyond the ecological ceiling over the 1992–2015 period, especially concerning material footprint and CO2 emissions.

The average country has achieved one additional social threshold at the cost of transgressing one more biophysical boundary over the 1992–2015 period.

Taken together, these historical results show poor progress from the perspective of the doughnut’s safe and just space, especially given that the achievement of social thresholds cannot be substituted for the transgression of biophysical boundaries in this framework.

Moreover, countries tend to transgress most (or all) of the biophysical boundaries before achieving a substantial number of social thresholds:

If current trends continue, more than 100 countries (out of 147) will overshoot their share of the cumulative CO2 emissions boundary by 2050, which is more than twice the number of countries in climate overshoot compared with the early 1990s.

For the social indicators, the business-as-usual projections suggest that the number of social thresholds achieved by at least 50% of countries would probably increase from 4 out of 11 in 2015 to 7 out of 11 by 2050, judging from historical trends (Fig. 4b). However, we find that less than one-third of countries would be likely to achieve the remaining four social thresholds (life satisfaction, social support, democratic quality, and equality).

The projections may still be optimistic as they are based on within-country historical trends, which do not consider the potential social disruption from the negative impacts of ecological overshoot.

Despite decades of sustainable development rhetoric, countries with high levels of social achievement have levels of resource use far beyond anything that could be sustainably extended to all people, and their extent of ecological overshoot has generally been increasing. Although low-income countries have shown progress in reducing social shortfalls, they have generally been transgressing biophysical boundaries faster than they have been achieving social thresholds.

For wealthy countries with high ecological overshoot, resource use needs to be dramatically reduced to get within fair shares of biophysical boundaries—a transition that is unlikely to be accomplished with efficiency improvements alone. It may also require post-growth and Degrowth policies that redesign current growth-dependent economic systems and reduce the overconsumption of resources directly. Simulation models have shown that wealthy countries can improve social outcomes without growth by reducing inequality and prioritizing social provisioning.

For countries with high social shortfalls, a focus on meeting basic needs is required, with an emphasis on capacity-building and sovereign economic development. Nutrition, sanitation, and income poverty deserve priority.

A small shift in the flow of global income from rich to poor, such as ensuring fairer wages and prices for producers, could alleviate extreme poverty without the need for additional global growth.

• What are the key findings of Fanning et al?  

I think the most relevant finding in this paper is the fact that no single country has been able to provide sufficient around the social indicators defined while not trespassing planetary boundaries. This is a good call because we are all developing countries.

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• What reasons could you imagine why countries are either doing relatively well in social or ecological terms, but not in both? 

Countries that do well in social indicators have strong public policies and safety nets, but they are financed as a proportion of GDP full of unsustainable and polluting activities. As there is a wide misunderstanding that inequality and social provisioning require growth to be financed, public policies are designed to boost growth to later provide socially. The problem is that we do not organize capital, labor, and in general resources for provisioning of needs, but rather let capitalism take over production decisions and later the state tries to pull up a part to reduce growing inequalities. A different way of organizing, together with the end of colonial relations will enable countries and nations to do well socially within planetary boundaries.

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• Feel free to explore more here: https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/

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Gough, I. 2015. Climate change and sustainable welfare: the centrality of human needs. Cambridge Journal of Economics 2015, 39, 1191–1214. https://doi:10.1093/cje/bev039  

Abstract:

Since climate change threatens human well-being across the globe and into the future, we require a concept of well-being that encompasses an equivalent ambit. This article argues that only a concept of human need can do the work required. It compares the need theory with three alternative approaches. Preference satisfaction

theory is criticized on the grounds of subjectivity, epistemic irrationality, endogenous and adaptive preferences, the limitlessness of wants, the absence of moral evaluation, and the non-specificity of future preferences. The happiness approach is found equally wanting. The main section shows how these deficiencies can be addressed by a coherent theory of need. Human needs are necessary pre-conditions to avoid serious harm and are universalisable, objective, empirically grounded, non-substitutable, and satiable. They are broader than 'material’ needs since a need for personal autonomy figures in all theoretical accounts. Whilst needs are universal, need satisfiers are most often contextual and relative to institutions and cultures. Finally, it is argued that human needs provide an indispensable foundation for many current ethical arguments for global and inter-generational justice in the face of threats from climate change

One problem with advancing human needs as an alternative measure of welfare in the past has been the relative paucity of theoretical work on the concept.

On one hand, the field of welfare economics invented by the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou defined welfare in terms of the subjective value to individuals of different bundles of goods. On the other hand, welfare came to be associated with the assessment of and provision for needs in the ‘welfare state’, and acquired an increasingly objective, external interpretation. Later in the twentieth century, discourses on agency, participation, and multi-dimensional views of poverty paved the way for the reinvention of the older idea of well-being, which can be traced back to Aristotle and the Buddha

Orthodox welfare economics rests on two fundamental principles. The first is that individuals are the best judges of their own interests, or more narrowly, their preferences or wants. Following this, the second is the principle of consumer sovereignty: that what is produced and consumed should be determined by the private consumption and work preferences of individuals. This is problematic due to limits in knowledge and rationality. Not only that, preferences can be adaptable, increasing the expectations of what is necessary to achieve certain satisfaction. There are no limits to preferences and desires according to neoclassical theory. Finally, preference satisfaction theory is particularly unsuited to consider the well-being of future generations, contributing to a narrow view of sustainability. The preferences of future generations cannot be revealed through their choices or behavior. The conclusion is that preference satisfaction cannot provide a logical, ethical, or practical conception and measure of human well-being—especially when we must consider well-being on a global and inter-generational scale.

A theory of human need

‘Need’ refers to a particular category of goals which are believed to be universalisable. The universality of need rests on the belief that if needs are not satisfied then serious harm of some objective kind will result.

• basic health and autonomy: . Thus whatever a person’s goals, whatever the cultural practices and values within which she lives, she will require certain prerequisites to strive towards those goals. In this way we identify physical survival/health and personal autonomy as the most basic human needs. We define basic autonomy as the ability to make competent informed choices about what should be done and how to go about doing it.
• biological constraints: There are numerous examples where choices of reasons and actions may challenge genetic predispositions, even if the latter can be objectively established. For this reason we reject what is probably still the most famous analysis of human needs: that of Abraham Maslow (1970). This is a theory of motivations or drivers of human action, whereas ours is a theory of universalisable goals. One result is that the pursuit of universal human needs will not necessarily be internally motivated; one may desire things harmful to need satisfaction and not desire essential need satisfiers. Most need theories ‘lack a behavioral motor behind them’, in Gasper’s words (2007, p 66). There will be many times when motives, and the preferences they support, will drive the meeting of basic needs, but that cannot be assumed.
• differences between needs and wants:  needs are objective, whereas preferences are subjective. The truth of the claim that a person needs clean water depends on the objective physiological requirements of human beings and the nature of the satisfier, including its capacity to contribute to the health of the person. It is quite possible to need something that you do not want; indeed you may need it without even knowing of its existence.

Climate change and human needs: further theoretical issues

Unlike preferences, human needs are not additive ( More education is of no help to someone who is starving).

Human needs are irreducibly plural. This is quite different from preferences where continuity is the default assumption. Need is a threshold concept or, put another way, basic needs and intermediate needs (USCs) are satiable. Given the vast differences in socio-economic resources between nations and peoples, a ‘constrained optimum’ threshold is more realistic when assessing low- and low-middle-income countries.

Climate change and a diminishing environmental space impose a further aggregate constraint. If this closes down the opportunity to permit high standards of sustainable need satisfaction across people now and in the future, so be it. ‘Ought’ always implies ‘can’. The goal will then be to negotiate a constrained global optimum level of need satisfaction, one as high and as equal across peoples as possible, but still constrained compared with what was potentially achievable, say, 50 years ago.

The needs of future generations

To begin with, the basic needs of future generations of humans will be the same as those of present humans. To avoid serious harm and to participate and act within future human societies, people will require the same logical pre-conditions: not just survival but health and critical autonomy. The epistemology of reasoning about needs remains extensional, not intentional, and thus avoids the indeterminacy of reasoning about future preferences.

At this level, we remain ignorant about the detailed nature and quantum of need satisfiers that future peoples in future contexts will require to achieve USC thresholds.

Societal preconditions for sustainable well-being

 All economic systems would need to be assessed according to their ability to identify and produce enough appropriate need satisfiers .

Finally, in the spirit of Dewey’s social intelligence and collective deliberation, need theory implies a requirement for cross-generational dialogue. In place of either total ignorance about future well-being or the imposition of current views about well-being on future generations, we need to recognize that there can be ‘an ongoing dialogue about the nature of the good life that crosses generations’.

Climate change and ethical arguments for respecting universal need satisfaction

‘claims of need make moral demands on agents that preferences do not’ (O’Neill, 2011)

The universal nature of human needs leads to universal moral obligations transcending space and time.

It is inconsistent for a social group to lay responsibilities on some person without ensuring she has the wherewithal to discharge those responsibilities. At a more collective level it implies combatting poverty and social exclusion and the implementation of a wide range of social programmes to enhance health and critical autonomy.

In a closely integrated world economic system with global threats to human well-being stemming from climate change and environmental degradation, there are clear ethical issues facing individuals, in particular affluent consumers.

Consequently, much of what follows regards institutions as the main bearers of the duties stemming from climate change:

1. To drastically curtail future emissions: to set a planetary emissions ceiling 

2. To allocate this quantum of emissions fairly between nations and peoples 

3. In the face of unpreventable ongoing climate change, to fund adaptation and compensation programs for the groups affected

• Shue’s (1993) argument that people should have inalienable rights to subsistence emissions: the minimum emissions necessary to their survival or to some minimal quality of life.
• Caney (2012)  The fundamental point is that poor people want energy, not emissions, and the link between the two depends on technical and institutional factors. They are ‘substitutable in a narrow sense’: it is perfectly possible to achieve improving energy with falling emissions, by shifting to renewable energy, reducing deforestation, changing agricultural practices, increasing energy efficiency, shifting consumption patterns, and so on.
• Wolf (2009) ‘meeting people’s basic needs should be the first priority of justice’.

By this stage, the goal of securing well-being in the face of climate change has resulted in two ethical demands: sustainability (in the form of the emissions envelope) and equality (in the form of prioritizing the satisfaction of human needs, present and future, over surplus wants)

This still leaves the third ethical question: in the face of unavoidable ongoing climate change, and the enduring hardships it will impose, who has the obligation to fund adaptation and compensation programmes for the groups affected? Here also there is considerable agreement. There are basically three answers to this question: those who have enjoyed the fruits of energy consumption in the past and imposed the global burdens of emissions up to the present; those who have the greater ability to pay; and those least likely to be plunged into deprivation and unmet basic needs as a result. These are distinct moral arguments, but they all converge in practice when considering international justice: in today’s egregiously unequal world the costs should be borne by the rich countries of the North (and by the rich in middle- and low-income countries—see later discussion)

Intra-national inequality is exploding as a new affluent middle class emerges alongside persisting poverty. By 2030 one half of ‘high emitters’ will live outside the OECD (Chakravarty et al., 2009). At the same time, rising numbers in the North will suffer deprivation and energy poverty. Hence, the claims of global and inter-generational justice will need to be matched by intra-national social justice in both North and South.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can identify three basic strengths of a need theory along the lines argued herein.

1. First, because human needs are conceived to be universal to all peoples, a sound theory of need permits inter-personal comparisons of well-being, including comparisons between radically different cultures and time periods. It is informationally more rewarding than alternative conceptions, encompassing both individual and population-level evaluations of well-being. It provides a more secure theoretical foundation for the numerous current empirical efforts to devise non-monetary indicators of well-being, pursued by numerous organisations including the OECD, EU and UN (Brainpool, 2014).
2. Second, it provides a critique of ‘unexamined sentiments’ and an advocacy of reflective and public reasoning. This it shares with the capabilities approach (see Appendix below), but it has the advantage that human needs are more ‘vividly intuitive’. The idea of common human needs challenges current obeisance to unregulated markets as allocative mechanisms (and indeed simple majoritarian decision making). Needs provide a route to questioning the idea of ‘consumer sovereignty’ and the justice and sustainability of current social structures.
3. Third, it supports strong moral obligations and claims to meet basic needs and provides a secure foundation for universal human rights. It thus lends powerful support for those pressing for the pursuit of both social and inter-generational justice: the twin and linked global challenges we face today. Global warming now poses an overwhelming threat to human well-being present and future. This imposes additional and urgent ethical demands for just and sustainable global welfare.

• What is the difference between human needs and needs satisfiers? 

Human needs are the fundamental and universal desires that underlie human motivation, while needs satisfiers are the specific elements, actions, or resources that individuals use to meet those needs. Understanding the relationship between these concepts is important for fields such as psychology, sociology, and economics, as it helps us comprehend human behavior and well-being.

• Do you agree that Gough’s theory of human needs provides a sounder basis for effective climate action than the standard economic approach to wellbeing? Why? Why not? 

It does, the main reason is that it provides a universal, intergenerational and cultural approach to evaluate the current satisfaction of basic needs, it does not require monetization or problematic subjective reporting at individual level. It is also useful to put ethical and political pressures to stop superfluous production beyond their fair and safe per capita footprint levels, and also call out to support and ensure internationally that each invidual have her or his basic needs covered. Its prioritization with respect growth or money reproduction will certainly reduce environmental pressures and clearly increase the coverage of social need.