Valentine Udoh James, ed.,
Sustainable Development in Third World Countries: Applied and Theoretical Perspectives
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. xvii+245 pp. ISBN 0-275-95307-6, $69.50 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Frederick H. Buttel
Department of Rural Sociology and Institute for Environmental Studies,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

At a time when neoliberal notions of privatization, flexibility, structural adjustment, fiscal discipline and "getting prices right" reign supreme in official development circles, environmental responsibility has become essentially the only effective lever for restraining the powerful impulse to incorporate more completely the peoples and lands of the South in the service of capital. There has been a spate of scholarly studies in and on "sustainability" over the past decade or so. But progress in formulating strategies that yield both meaningful development and resource conservation has been disappointing. At the practical level, sustainable development remains largely confined to the rural renewable resource sectors -- at the same time that depeasantization and urbanization of the South continue to proceed rapidly. At the political level, the successes registered in popular mobilization against socially and environmentally destructive projects and practices remain more than counterbalanced by the fact that sustainability sloganeering has not made a fundamental difference in how the most powerful development assistance and finance institutions approach policymaking and project design. Thus, further scholarship on the topic of sustainability and sustainable development remains very welcome.

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James' edited volume, Sustainable Development in Third World Countries, focuses almost entirely on the practical aspect of sustainable development. The few times that the book's authors delve into social theory are the few occasions when radical criticisms of the precision of the terminology of sustainable development (e.g., M. Redclift, Sustainable Development, 1987) are acknowledged or when topics such as Western colonialism and neo-colonialism are debated briefly. This is not necessarily a shortcoming. A case could be made, nine years after the publication of the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 1987), that the time has long since passed that conceptual exegeses of the notion are very useful or interesting. Breakthroughs in practical scholarship are very welcome at this point in time.

World-systems researchers will thus need to recognize that this is not a piece of scholarship that has a strong connection to the world-systems perspective as commonly understood. Not only are the works of Wallerstein, Arrighi, Chase-Dunn, Frank, and others overlooked by the editor and authors, there is scarcely any reference to any of the major pieces of scholarship in development studies theory. Even the editor's own chapter on the need for national self-sufficiency for African countries proceeds without citing any of the important works on this topic from world-systems and related quarters (e.g., by Samir Amin, Gavin Kitching). Likewise, none of the authors has grappled with Michael Watts's seminal scholarship on the economic geography of environmental degradation in sub-Saharan Africa.

The problems of Sustainable Development in the Third World Countries begin with the book's title. Essentially all of the chapters are about sub-Saharan Africa, so that the reference to the "Third World" is somewhat misleading. Likewise, the subtitle - Applied and Theoretical Perspectives -- misleads in the sense that virtually all of the chapters in the book are applied in orientation. The "theoretical" material in this book is largely confined to theorizing about effective development practices and planning, rather than about development studies in the larger sense. Felix Edoho's chapter on "Toward Sustainable Development in the Twenty-First Century: Reengineering Development in Sub-Saharan Africa" does make an attempt to discuss sustainable development within a larger perspective on African underdevelopment, but this chapter unfortunately gets bogged down in criticizing the notion of "Western culpability" for the crises plaguing sub-Saharan Africa.

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While it is my view that this anthology does not move the field of sustainable development forward to a significant degree, there are some quite useful chapters in this volume. Lamb's chapter on "African Economic History and Its Planning Potential: An Investigation of Sources" and Edoho's chapter are worthwhile reading. D. M. Warren's two chapters on indigenous knowledge -- a chapter in Part I focused on agricultural development, and a second chapter in Part II on biodiversity conservation -- are useful. It would have been appropriate to stitch Warren's two chapters into one, though very likely this was not done because of the fact that the first half of the book is divided into Part I on "Sustainable Development and Agriculture" and Part II on "Conservation, Preservation, and Health Issues." (The three brief chapters of Part II - a total of slightly over 40 pp. - constitute such a thin slice of this subject matter that it would have been less clumsy to combine the two Warren chapters and fold the other two into an expanded Part I.) Constance McCorkle's chapter, "The Roles of Animals in Cultural, Social, and Agro-economic Systems,"is a well-argued antidote to Western environmental doctrine about the waste and destructiveness of animal agriculture in the South.

That the best chapters of this anthology are those based on the rural renewable resource sectors -- essentially only agriculture -- suggests that this will not be a volume that breaks new ground in the scholarly tradition of sustainable development. Only a few world-systems researchers with strong interests in sub-Saharan Africa will be drawn to Sustainable Development in Third World Countries.

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