Efficiency: Sufficient for Sustainability?
It is disclosed that efficiency alone does not suffice to achieve sustainability. One also needs resilience (reflected through a diversity of structures and options) to a slightly greater degree if optimal sustainability is to be attained.
Efficiency: Sufficient for Sustainability?
What is the relationship between sustainability and efficiency? This is the question a recent paper in Ecological Economics (See: Goerner, Sally J: Lietaer, Bernard; and Ulanowicz, Robert E. 2009. “Quantifying economic sustainability: Implications for free-enterprise theory, policy and practice.” Ecological Economics, vol. 69, pp. 76-81) was meant to precisely answer in quantitative fashion.
The paper answers the question posed through a new metric called Quantitative Economic Development (QED). QED operates through the premise that both natural systems and economic ones, as long as they observe matter-energy-information flows, are amenable to a common description.
Operating upon this premise, QED discloses that efficiency alone does not suffice to confer sustainability. It turns out that sustainability is the result of a creative tension between efficiency and resilience. Efficiency has to do with the system’s or network’s ability to consolidate gains and to grow. Resilience is the network’s ability to exhibit “flexible fall-back positions and diversity of actions that can be used to meet the exigencies of most disturbances and the novelty needed for on-going development and evolution…”
The two sub-metrics, efficiency and resilience, are complementary: Although they logically exclude one another, they nonetheless require one another to achieve sustainability. A system that exhibits efficiency alone becomes increasingly brittle even as it grows and become ever more directed. A system that loses efficiency beyond a certain point and begins to exhibit increasing resilience thereafter also becomes increasingly stagnant. Thus, an optimal mix of the two sub-metrics is required if optimal sustainability is to be attained.
Revealingly enough, however, the balance is not exact: the balance falls slightly in favor of resilience. The implication is that if one wants optimal sustainability, one must sacrifice some growth (quantitative increase) in favor of development (qualitative improvement), a distinction long urged by the ecological economist, Herman Daly. Quality of life truly requires collective or systemic moderation of individual aggrandizement of gain. Otherwise, what you get is the mess the bankers have put us in; or worse, the environmental mess we have all put ourselves in.
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