Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature

This paper explores the contradictions inherent in what has become the buzzword of the 1990’s: sustainable development. I argue that despite claims of a paradigm shift, the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economistic, not ecological rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specified by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the transformation of “nature” into “environment”, a transformation that has important implications on notions of how development should proceed. The “rational” management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on developing countries is problematic and I discuss the implications of this “regime of truth” for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be made “efficient” because of the capitalization of nature.