Speaker
Description
The benefits and burdens of large infrastructure projects are strongly variegated across society and biological species in space and time. Planning invariably involves making trade-offs and justifying them. Equity and justice have long been on planners’ agendas, but few have attempted to operationalise them into decision-support methods.
Existing (and often mandated) methods, such as cost-benefit analysis, are based on utilitarian ethics, which take a ‘weak’ sustainability and equity position by prescribing the maximisation of the total amount of wealth, without considering its distribution, even if it implies the suffering of already disadvantaged populations or species. In contrast, the ‘strong’ sustainability and equity perspectives hold that not all ecological or social damage can be compensated for by economic growth (Daly, 1996; Neumayer, 2010), which also relates to the concepts of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009) and doughnut economics (Raworth, 2012).
The question is what alternative ethical framework aligns both with strong sustainability and equity principles but can also be used for guiding trade-offs, and how to operationalise it in a transparent and tractable decision-support method.
Here we propose a method, Proportional Needs Analysis (PRONA), which quantifies the utility of a project by how much it relieves or aggravates the fundamental needs of those affected. We take a prioritarianist position by valuing both the total increase of welfare, as in utilitarianism, and its distribution, as in egalitarianism (Adler & Norheim, 2022; Parfit, 1997). This is compatible with strong sustainability and equity but hitherto offered no guidelines for nonarbitrarily and impartially prioritising the interests of those affected.
Aiming for the simplest possible operationalisation of prioritarianism, the core of PRONA is a social welfare function with a diminishing (logarithmic) utility curve, where the marginal value of a resource decreases with abundance but increases to infinity when nearing critical deprivation.
Evaluating a project requires selecting relevant socio-spatial entities (‘stakeholders’) and indicators, to be done on an ad-hoc, participatory or theoretical basis, as well as empirical or modelled data on the entities’ initial position, critical threshold levels and how their position is affected. How this works in practice we demonstrate with the example of the implementation of a low-emission zone in Brussels, Belgium.
References
Adler, M. D., & Norheim, O. F. (2022). Prioritarianism in Practice (SSRN Scholarly Paper 4167000). https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4167000
Daly, H. E. (1996). Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Beacon Press. http://pinguet.free.fr/daly1996.pdf
Neumayer, E. (2010). Weak Versus Strong Sustainability: Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Parfit, D. (1997). Equality and Priority. Ratio, 10(3), 202–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9329.00041
Raworth, K. (2012). A safe and just space for humanity. Can we live within the doughnut? Oxfam discussion papers.
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H. J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/26268316
| Keywords | Decision-support methods; proportional needs analysis; strong sustainability; distrubutive ethics |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
