Public Housing, Private Owners: Sustainable Development Lessons from the Fight to Shut the Poletti Power Plant

Abstract

In the twentieth century, traditional notions of state sovereignty underwent a profound transformation. Emerging principles of human rights and sustainable development revolutionized thinking about the responsibilities states have within their own territories. Sovereignty in its Westphalian sense — based on principles of non-intervention — gave way to a more nuanced vision of the State holding duties toward individuals and their environment. Thick layers of international theory began shaping the State duty to progressively realize human rights, including the right to development and the right to a healthy environment. The Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future introduced the concept of sustainable development, which was supposed to be the apotheosis of this process — the means of integrating economic, environmental and social drivers of state action. Unfortunately, sustainable development’s ambitious integration project rapidly found itself under the sway of neo-liberal economic theory, which prioritized economic integration and gave short shrift to economic and social concerns. It is time to reclaim sustainable development from neo-liberalism’s efficiency-based economic determinism. Those seeking to give social and environmental concerns equal weight in decision-making must seize the initiative — truly sustainable development will be ‘claimed not granted.’Things will change only if ordinary people demand it. Past advocacy efforts can offer guidance for what a successful claiming of sustainable development might entail. There is much to learn from close examination of successful, socially-oriented environmental advocacy — from what successful advocates/activists did on the ground, and how they shaped their environmental claims. This principle remains true even for actors who do not themselves make human rights claims, and do not self-identify as human rights actors. This chapter examines one such situation, using the successful campaign to shut the Charles A. Poletti Power Plant to glean lessons about how to push decision-makers to value social and environmental concerns equally with economic ones.