Sustainable Modernisation, Modernised Mixtures

Introduction to Sustainable Modernisation

WASTE has been working for some time to change the development co-operation and international assistance discourse and vocabulary from a focus on “development” to one on “sustainable modernisation”. This is more than a cosmetic change, because the concept of ‘development’ implies, among other things, that there is nothing there to begin with, and new systems have to be ‘developed’. At WASTE we find that this ‘tabula rasa’ hypothesis leads to systematically unsatisfactory outcomes, because there is always too much attention to what should be created, without enough attention to what there already is and why it might not be functioning well or at all. ‘Modernisation,’ in contrast, suggests updating, refining, or shifting existing systems, and implies that in order to do this, it is necessary to understand what is already happening.

Moreover, since the second world war, development has come to be associated with a range of institutions and power relations between the donor ‘developed’ countries and the recipient ‘developing’ countries. In development assistance, there is a tendency to depend on outside resources, especially technology and money. These dependencies may also impede, rather than support, the achieving of the Millenium Development Goals. Especially in MDG 7, which is about resources,it appears to us to be advisable to move away from a development assistance approach which imports the Northern, unsustainable patterns of resource use first, and then looks for Northern strategies to dismantle them.

‘Modernisation,’ in contrast, is something that is continually necessary for all countries, a process for which the case can be made that it occurs in highly parallel and sometimes globalised ways in cities as different as New York, Nairobi, and Kuala Lumpur. Specifically in relation to urban provisioning systems[1], there is a strong case to be made that the direction of all modernisation processes is away from the large, technical systems (LTS) that were invented during the industrial revolution and that reached their high point of usefulness in the middle of the 20th century. These “Fordist[2]” or “simple modern” systems rely on large technical facilities like coal furnaces or wastewater treatment plants that serve all users in the same way. The term “natural monopolies” suggests it all; they depend for their feasibility and profitability (insofar as that is important) on serving all users and preventing competition.

This LTS approach began to break down in Europe in relation to solid waste management in the 1980s, and there is good evidence that systems for energy, water, housing, sanitation and food supply are evolving in the same direction. In the 1970s it appeared that the direction of modernisation or future development would be towards smaller systems, sometimes referred to as “appropriate technology”, but recent research suggests that it is more accurate to speak of “modernised mixtures”, pluriform systems where different user groups have some measure of choice about types and levels of service, and where large and small, high and low-tech systems co-exist in a single complex system. The term “integrated waste management” came into use in the 1980s and 1990s to describe this kind of system for solid waste, where the waste stream no longer was directed to a landfill but split between various strategies for waste prevention, recycling, composting, energy recovery, export, and land burial. The roles, opinions, and decisionmaking of stakeholders were essential to creating this type of integrated system.

Modernised Mixtures

The idea of sustainable modernisation can be broadened to a vision of what sustainable development looks like in practice. The concept of complex or pluriform systems, or

Modernised mixtures (MM) combines many elements in a single management or institutional framework.

For example, a sustainable modernisation process that facilitates urban and peri-urban waste and sanitation modernised mixtures is considered to be essential to achieving the Millenium Development Goals. Since a MM view of the cases is at the core of this expression of interest, it is useful to explain a bit more about it.

Ahe sanitation system as a whole consists of one medium-large wastewater treatment plant, a set of inter-connected planted soil filtres, some lagoons, and a large number of dry and low-water toilets. There is also a specialised composting facility. The solid waste system consists of one large landfill, fed by three small and one medium-sized transfer stations. In addition ther are three medium-sized composting sites solid waste and sanitation systems and considerable recycling capacity of which is shared with the sanitation system.

Each system has its own over-arching institutional and financial framework, but within each there is room for a large degree of community and individual variation and even choice in technical approach, scale, and type of provider. All the compost facilities, for example, could be managed by a single operator, or contracted separately to farmers. The dry toilets could be linked to the planted soil filtres or managed by the household or community or some combination of these. The transfer stations could be owned and operated by the municipal authority or partially or completely under the private sector. Figure 1 also shows an area of overlap for which special institutional and financial arrangements are necessary, within the context of the overall system.

[1] “Provisioning systems” is a general term for a range of socio-technical systems that deliver energy, water supply, sanitation, housing, transport, or waste management, in an urban context. They can be conceived as a socio-technical co-operation between the system providers and the users. The system providers were usually, in the past, the national or local authorities, and the users were individual households or businesses, as well as institutions and the government itself.

[2] “Fordist” systems are based on the 19th and 20th century concepts and ideas about engineered industrial plants that were used to mass-produce Fords and other industrial products.