sustainability

Book Review
The Political Economy of Sustainability
Gabriela Sabau
School of Science and the Environment, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
20 University Drive, Corner Brook, NL A2H 5G4, Canada; gsabau@grenfell.mun.ca




Received: 5 February 2020; Accepted: 15 February 2020; Published: 18 February 2020


Abstract: Sustainability is a “contested” concept introduced at the beginning of the 18th century in
German forestry circles concerned about sustainable harvests and rebranded in 1987 as “sustainable
development” by the Brundtland Report, which defined it as harmonious economic, social, and
ecological development that enhances both current and future potential to meet human needs
and aspirations. However, after more than three decades of sustainable development, humanity
is on an unsustainable path featuring rampant ecosystem damage, rising social inequality, and
harmful cultural homogenization. This paper is a book review of Fred P. Gale’s Political Economy
of Sustainability, a book published in 2018 by Edward Elgar Publishers. The book advances the
innovative idea that the current lack of progress in implementation of the sustainable development
goals is due to the narrow understanding by individuals, firms, states, and political parties of the
values underlying sustainability. The book thus starts a much-needed conversation about economic
values, a conversation ousted from the neo-classical economics discipline in the late 19th century by
the marginalist thinkers who wanted to make it a positive science. The book identifies four elemental
economic values—exchange value, labor value, use value, and function value—and argues that
basing our socio-economic and political development on only one type of value with the exclusion
of the others has led to the current dangerously unsustainable path humankind is on. Achieving
sustainability value requires a balanced integration of all four types of values in all deliberations
about socio-economic activities. How can this be accomplished? The author proposes a pragmatic
solution in the form of a “tetravaluation” process, a dialogue involving multiple value holders
able to reflexively negotiate and compromise until the pluralistic sustainability value is discovered
and accepted by all the parties. The book challenges the unsustainable functioning of existing
economic, political, and cultural institutions and invites a rethinking of their governance, which
should deliberately embrace the pluralistic value of sustainability. The tetravaluation process has
the potential to generate sustainable choices and inform better policy decisions able to protect at the
same time the proponents of exchange value (consumers), the promoters of labor value (workers,
producers), the beneficiaries of use value (communities), and the holder of functional values (the
environment).

Keywords: sustainable development; sustainability; value; tetra-valuation; political economy;

exchange value; labor value; use value; function value

1. Introduction
The book Political Economy of Sustainability [1] is an ambitious and timely project undertaken by a
distinguished scholar. Fred P. Gale is an academic with more than 30 years of practical experience,
formal research, and personal reflection on the contested concept of “sustainability”. Sustainability
is indeed a contested concept. We know more about humanity being on an unsustainable path than
how to achieve sustainability. As a concept, it was introduced at the beginning of the 18th century
in German forestry circles concerned about sustainable harvests: “it is anything but sensible to cut

Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537; doi:10.3390/su12041537 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 2 of 13

down more wood in the forest than grows back” [2] (p. 307). The concept has been rebranded in 1987
as “sustainable development” by the Brundtland Report, which defined it as harmonious economic,
social, and ecological development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [3] (s. 2.1).
The main research question of Fred Gale’s book is why, after three decades of sustainable
development, “only limited and halting steps are being taken to secure Homo Sapiens a liveable
future” [1] (p. ix), one that is free of the unintended negative impacts of the current commercial
society: Ecosystem damage, social inequality, and cultural homogenization [1] (p. 3). The author’s
answer lies in the deficient way of articulating the meaning of sustainable development from within
a received political economic paradigm that promotes a monistic concept of economic value and
ignores the multiple values underlying sustainability. In the author’s opinion, “What is required is
a new political economy of sustainability that does justice to sustainability’s own unique, emergent,
pluralistic conception of economic value and wealth” [1] (p. 4), one that is able to “foster the emergence
of this post-monistic value economy by clearly articulating the nature of the new economic objective
(optimization across sustainability value’s four component values) and the means by which it is to be
achieved” [1] (pp. 8–9). In order to tackle these broad goals, the author sets out to reconceptualize
the nature of political economy from a sustainability perspective, by thoroughly investigating a series
of contested concepts, such as economic value, development, sustainable development, etc. He then
proposes a pluralistic conception of sustainability value, which embraces four different aspects of
something’s usefulness, noting that it could only be known a posteriori through a process of reflexive
and deliberative discovery and pragmatic negotiation, a process which the author calls tetravaluation.
Finally, the author explores various existing development measurement tools in order to see whether
any are adequate for measuring sustainability value, and discusses how we can govern and manage to
create sustainability value in businesses, government organizations, and individuals. He also proposes
some changes to cultural institutions (educational, media, etc.), which, in his opinion, can foster the
greater reflexivity required to secure implementation of sustainability value.
The book’s nine chapters start with, following the introduction, a historical account of the various
concepts of economic value in classical political economy, neo-classical economics, as well as in Marxist
and nationalist political economy (Chapter 2). The concept of value in environmental thought is
discussed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is a review of the concept of sustainable development and an
articulation of the concept of sustainability value, and of ways in which it could be legitimately brokered
through a process of negotiation across the four value components. Chapter 5 critically examines
various metrics of “growth”, “environmental performance”, “progress”, and “sustainable development”
and wisely concludes that none of the existing metrics are adequate to measure sustainability value,
as it, being an emerging property of a value-discovery tetravaluation process, resists an overall
management-by-metric rationale. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 investigate ways of implementing sustainability
value in the governance of corporations and supply chains, in polities and intergovernmental
organizations, and in individual preferences and behavior formation. Chapter 9 concludes and
outlines the good governance criteria for a legitimate tetravaluation process, also touching on the
issue of balancing power among the actors involved in the deliberative dialogue aiming to reach
sustainability value.

2. Investigation of a Series of Contested Concepts

Building on Gallie’s 1955 theory of “essentially contested concepts” [4], the author investigates
a series of concepts that are relevant for his purposes: Economic value, development, sustainable
development, sustainability, and political economy. By their nature, these are “contested” concepts,
because “while agreement can be reached regarding [their] high-level meaning, a large number of
competing, lower-level interpretations are nonetheless possible” [1] (p. 80). The five conditions
that set apart “contested concepts” are: [being] “appraisive, signifying some kind of achievement;
internally complex rather than simple; require an ordering of their internal components; subject to
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 3 of 13

reinterpretation in changing contexts; and finally, are defended by groups aware of the existence of
competing conceptions” [1] (p. 80).

2.1. Economic Value

The discussion of “economic value” in political economic thought is particularly meaningful for
today’s readers, given that most mainstream economics textbooks relegate the topic of “values” to a
paragraph or two referring to normative economics and value judgements. For classical economists,
identifying the activities that created value was important for understanding the nature and causes
of the “wealth of nations” [5]. Adam Smith, and other classical liberal economists after him, defined
“wealth” in materialistic terms, as the society’s capacity to produce “the necessities and conveniences
of life” [1] (p. 22). Classical economists also considered that the market was the “wellspring” of wealth,
based on humans’ “natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange some goods for others” [1] (p. 22)
and on the “rise of the factory system, which, by enabling specialization and the division of labour,
significantly increased productivity” [1] (p. 22). The exchange value generated by trade was expressed
as the “natural price”, which resulted from the relative labor required to produce the exchanged goods,
and which could be measured by adding up the separate components that contributed to that good’s
production: Workers’ wages, landlords’ rent, and manufacturers’ profits. The value of a good was also
its value to those who possessed it and who were willing to exchange it for some new goods or services.
In the second half of the 19th century, when political economy was reframed as a positive science
and became known as neo-classical economics, a thing’s value was “the contribution it made at the
margin to enhancing individual pleasure and diminishing pain” [1] (p. 25). This was the marginalist
economists’ contribution to refining the concept of exchange value, as they introduced the “axiomatic,
behaviourist assumption that humans have exogenously given preferences that are revealed in the
act of purchasing“ [1] (p. 26). Exchange value is, to this day, the key metric for assessing whether
development, as expressed in GDP growth, is occurring or not in most nations, as the whole “world is
enmeshed in the factory system . . . and virtually everyone’s livelihood [is] directly dependent on the
market” [1] (p. 218).
Socialism’s conception of economic value, developed by K. Marx based on D. Ricardo’s labor
theory of value, is called labor value. It assumes that value is created through the labor process, and
goods and services’ value/price is objectively given by the amount of socially necessary labor time
required to make them. Economic nationalism and communitarianism prioritize a thing’s direct use
value to the state or to the group in order to guide the development process, like, for instance, in
Friedrich List’s 1841 National Systems of Political Economy book [6], where use value aims to promote
the realization of a state’s productive powers.
The fourth type of economic value, ecological function value, is identified in Chapter 3, which
explores the works of environmentalists, ecological economists, and political ecologists. This is a rich
literature overview, covering several common themes about humans’ relationship with nature, such as
the impact of population growth and affluence, resource constraints, conservation or preservation,
ecosystem connectedness, and damaging technology, but also philosophical debates over whether the
value of nature is objective or subjective, intrinsic or extrinsic, or deontological or instrumental. The
author critically discusses all these frameworks ranging from “the conservatism of Malthus, to the
transcendentalism of Thoreau and Muir, the scientism of Pinchot, Carson, the Ehrlichs and Commoner
and the systems thinking of Georgescu-Roegen, Club of Rome and H. Daly” [1] (p. 58). Among
all these positions, he seems to favor a systemic account of value, inspired by the Limits to Growth
report [7], which implies that “what is valuable relates to the larger system within which humans live
and that its long-term preservation requires self-restraint in terms of human numbers and artefacts” [1]
(p. 57). The author also discusses H. Daly’s proposal to replace the current model of economic
development based on “growthmania” with an alternative model of a steady state economy [8],
which is “no longer growing, although it may be developing” . . . by “undergoing only ‘qualitative
change’—improvements in ‘culture, genetic inheritance, knowledge, goodness, ethical codes, and
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so forth embodied in human beings” [1] (p. 57). To remain within political economy’s materialist
and consequentialist tradition, the author chooses a concept of ecological value called function value.
According to this concept, “a thing is to be valued for the function it plays in a wider, interconnected,
complex, chaotic natural system that maintains itself in an ever-shifting dynamic equilibrium in the
face of external perturbations” [1] (p. 61). He explains his choice by stating: “The concept of value
underpinning environmental thought of relevance to a political economy, concerned as it is with the
impact of consumption along extraction-disposal chains, derives from the embeddedness of a thing in
a natural system of things—from its relationship to those other things and the function it performs
within the system of things” [1] (p. 61).
This incursion into the political economy and environmental thought literature on economic value
reveals the disconnect between proponents of these four distinct conceptions of economic value. While
they all define value as a good’s or service’s usefulness, they part ways when they insist on the pure
application and maximization of just one form of economic value, be it exchange, use, labor, or function
value. The author considers that this disconnect or lack of widespread negotiated cross-value balancing
among the four core economic values “explains why, despite the outpouring of enthusiasm following
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, little progress has been made in delivering sustainable
development” [1] (p. 221).

2.2. Development
Dubbed as “progress”, “growth”, or “improvement”, development in the post-war era has
meant a linkage between an increasing volume of goods and services produced/exchanged and an
expansion in societal “welfare”, “well-being”, and “happiness”. A discipline-wide consensus has
prevailed among economists that development so defined was political economy’s fundamental
objective [1] (p. 18). However, “development” is a contested concept due to the different conceptions
of the nature of economic value underlying the developmental objective. “When deployed within a
liberal framework, development means prioritizing ‘exchange value’, within an economic nationalist
framework, national ‘use value’, and within a socialist framework, ‘labour value’” [1] (p. 37). Indeed,
what liberals, for instance, “meant by development was the establishment of the political and economic
conditions for relatively freely functioning markets to enable the increased production consequent
on the specialization and division of labor to be traded” [1] (p. 26). As a consequence, “traditional
political, economic, and cultural arrangements geared towards a generalized form of subsistence
production and not exchange value, are considered barriers to ‘development’ “[1] (p. 26) and not
encouraged in a free-market economic system. Why is this monistic conception of economic value,
which underlies socio-economic development, not appropriate for sustainability value? The author
considers that the segregation of economic values leads to a type of development that involves the
discrete realization of the usefulness of things for their exchange value or use value or labor value [1]
(p. 39). This segregation also shapes fragmented institutional arrangements required to achieve
development: A ‘nightwatchman state’ [1] (p. 68) for economic liberals, which will secure legally
enforceable rights to private property, access to extensive domestic and international markets, free
trade and investment agreements, and low tax and spending regimes [1] (p. 37); “a strong state with
well-developed strategic planning capacity that deploys its national resources of raw materials, capital,
labor and know-how to achieve rapid industrialization” [1] (p. 37), for economic nationalists; and
strong state institutions that socialize (in whole or in part) the means of production, and can “play
a key, socially progressive role in ensuring that workers . . . .obtain their share of the total economic
surplus” [1] (p. 37), for Marxists. I completely agree with the author that the focus of existing
liberal democracies on exchange value has produced the current ills of the consumer society, which
exacerbates consumers’ preferences for unlimited consumption and emboldens producers to aim for
unchecked economic growth while paying lip service to the workers’ pleas for fair compensation, and
to communities’ expectations that their right to decent existence be safeguarded.
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2.3. Sustainable Development

Sustainable development has proven to be a contested concept since its conception and subsequent
evolution (1972–1992) in international conferences. In 1999, a consensus was reached that sustainable
development “is a pluralistic concept that identifies the need to balance economic, social and
environmental concerns in the making of public and private consumption decisions affecting
extraction-disposal chains” [1] (p. 88). The concept continues to be highly contested in how its
meaning is interpreted in practice. To make his point, the author succinctly presents four different
analyses of the sustainable development (SD) concept and the policy prescriptions for achieving it.
In 1996, Dobson [9] conceived SD as an inherently anthropocentric concept that ranged narrowly
between market and equity-based approaches and “does not encompass radical preservationist or
deep ecology conceptions of what is to be sustained” [1] (p. 81). For the market-based approach, the
objective is to sustain the total capital stock needed to enhance human welfare by primarily meeting the
needs and wants of present generations, based on the considerable substitutability of natural capital
for human-made capital [10]. For Dobson, SD means basically sustainable resource use, and the policy
prescriptions he recommends for achieving sustainable resource use are secure private property rights,
pricing nature, and promoting free trade. When the SD concept focuses on the equity-based approach,
the importance of sustaining “critical natural capital” to secure human welfare is accepted, inter
and intra-generational welfare is prioritized, and substitutability between critical natural capital and
human-made capital becomes unacceptable. Some possible solutions for promoting this approach are,
in Dobson’s view, a focus on economic equity, women’s rights, political empowerment, protectionism,
and appropriate technology.
Jacobs (1999) [11] identified six features of sustainable development: Environment–economy
integration, futurity, environmental protection, equity, quality of life, and participation. In his view,
possible solutions for achieving sustainable development are government action aiming to implement
the concept; contribution of civil society and media to identifying gaps between rhetoric and action;
and a degree of institutional learning, as agencies reflect on what needs to be achieved or improved.
The author proposes two conceptions of SD: A mainstream one and a radical one. The mainstream
approach includes: Weak and strong environmental protection linked to wise-use conservatism and to
limits to growth environmentalism, respectively; promoting equity between the global North and South
countries; stakeholder participation; and a specific scope of the subject area: In the North, sustainability
means solving environmental problems while in the South, sustainability means approaching wider
social life issues. Jacobs’s radical approach sees SD as a potential vehicle for realizing a green social
democratic vision [1] (p. 82). This approach identified market forces as the key drivers of environmental
unsustainability and the solution proposed was economic planning through government intervention
in the economy at a variety of levels, in addition to increased stakeholder democracy.
In 2005, Hopwood et al. [12] used a two-dimensional map depicting the degree to which sustainable
development is conceptualized as a vehicle for increasing equality (the y variable) and increasing
environmental protection (the x variable). The map displays three gradual options for the two variables:
Status quo, reform, and transformation, all of which can be used to distinguish between a large number
of theoretical positions on sustainable development by neo-liberal economists, ecological modernizers,
eco-fascists, social ecologists, socialist cornucopians, and eco-socialists.
The fourth study that the author has reviewed is Connelly’s 2007 article Mapping sustainable
development as a contested concept [13]. This study used a planner’s triangle as a heuristic device to
depict the total universe of positions theoretically possible with regard to the sustainable development
concept’s economic, environmental, and social dimensions. The triangle identified in the three vertices
the main focuses of the three dimensions of the SD concept: “economic growth” for the economic
dimension, “environmental protection” for the environmental dimension, and “social justice” for the
social dimension. The triangle also depicted the weak–strong sustainability axis, starting from the
economic vertex, and identified the space of the contested concept of sustainable development “in
an indeterminate region towards the center of the triangle” [1] (p. 84). This triangle has inspired the
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 6 of 13

author to develop the pluralistic concept of sustainability value. He expanded it by trying to explain
how sustainability value can be achieved in different contexts, through “some form of cross-value
discovery process” [1] (p. 86).

2.4. Sustainability
Another contested concept is “sustainability”. This concept is not defined as such in the book,
as the author states from the beginning that he uses the terms “sustainable development” and
“sustainability” synonymously to identify a specific locus of value [1] (p. 15). However, he identifies
one of the important characteristics of “sustainability”, the fact that it “requires collaborative forms of
multi-stakeholder governance and management to broker compromises across entrenched differences
in interests” [1] (p. ix). He also develops the concept of “sustainability value”, which he defines as “an
emergent property from duly-constituted cross-value managerial and governance value-discovery
processes” characterized by “contingency rather than finality” [1] (p. 8). He also hints to the specific
nature of sustainability, which is more complex than sustainable development, when he states that
sustainability is underlined by an “alternative, pluralistic, post-humanistic conception of economic
value that is better adapted to sustainability’s multifaceted requirements” [1] (p. 88).

2.5. Political Economy

The author uses the term “political economy” in the book’s title to convey the idea of the rich,
interdisciplinary nature of political economy, “a field of inquiry that should be concerned with the
totality of the impacts of the production and consumption of goods and services along ever-lengthening
and more complex extraction-disposal chains” [1] (p. 44). This richness of the “political economy”
concept has been lost in modern “economics”, one of the three legacies of the school of marginalist
thinking, “the narrowing of the discipline of political economy from one concerned with the broad,
multifaceted nature and sources of “wealth” to a sub-discipline and ‘science which studies human
behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’”, the 1932
Lionel Robbins definition of economics [14]. The author correctly states that building an economy
based on sustainability value requires a return to the rich concept of political economy, as a “political
economy of sustainability builds on the idea that sustainability is achieved via the aggregation of the
decisions of actors in extraction-disposal chains to produce, consume and finance only those goods and
services that balance the four usefulnesses that collectively compose sustainability value” [1] (p. 185).

3. Introducing Sustainability Value

In Chapter 4, the author develops the concept of sustainability value starting from Connelly’s
2007 two-dimensional, triangular sustainability heuristic [13]. Sustainability value is illustrated by
a three-dimensional tetrahedron, which depicts the four fundamentally different economic value
positions that have been adopted with regard to conceptions of a thing’s economic usefulness, based
on its direct use value, labor value, exchange value, and function value [1] (p. 86). The sustainability
value tetrahedron has four vertices: The economic vertex (exchange value), the environmental vertex
(function value), the worker vertex (labor value), and the national vertex (national use value). Both
the “worker vertex” and the “national vertex” capture the meaning of the category of the “social” in
sustainable development. Additionally, the author identifies two values associated with the concept of
“social justice”. The first, promoted by socialism, considers that “social justice consists in validating
the socially necessary labour time inherent in all produced things” [1] (p. 86). The second, analyzed
by economic nationalists, considers that “social justice consists in ensuring that a state realizes its
productive powers by exploiting available use values” [1] (p. 86).
By using a heuristic device (a tetrahedron) and not a mathematical equation to define sustainability
value, the author is better able to distinguish between conventional liberal, national, socialist, and
ecological monistic accounts of the nature of value, and to promote a “rethinking of how political
economy has carved up ‘reality’ to understand it. As a field, political economy remains trapped
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 7 of 13

in nineteenth-century divisions between economic nationalists, liberal cosmopolitans and socialist

internationalists. Proponents of each school remain wedded to their own research programme’s ‘hard
core’” [1] (p. 87). In the author’s opinion, “sustainable development is not reducible to the maximization
of any single value; rather, it requires optimization across all four-value components” [1] (p. 89).
The author hopes that the sustainability value tetrahedron, by bringing in the ecocentric conception of
value and the need to reflexively consider sustainability under its four dimensional values, has the
potential to free partisans from the monistic economic value positions they previously might have
held, and to move them to the “value pluralist position located towards the tetrahedron’s center” [1]
(p. 88). In order for this to happen, people and groups involved in all activities of extraction-disposal
chains must participate in tetravaluation processes aiming to balance, through compromise, the four
constitutive dimensions of sustainability value, exchange, use, labor and function. The goal is to arrive
at the sustainability value when the “lowest common denominator compromise acceptable to all” has
been achieved [1] (p. 221). This is not an easy process. In the author’s opinion, it requires “a high
level of individual and social reflexivity, on the one hand, and a willingness to negotiate trade-offs
across deeply held value positions, on the other” [1] (p. 221). Besides, the process is “at constant risk
of being distorted by social, cognitive and cultural factors that give rise to myside bias, present bias,
confirmation bias, and other biases” [1] (p. 221). Tetravaluation processes can be either informal, when
decisions involve only individuals and their families, or formal, when decisions affect larger groups
from the community upwards. In this latter case, the formal negotiating processes must be “grounded
in a set of administrative law and good governance precepts” to give them legitimacy. Later in the
book, the author discusses the institutional requirements for the legitimate brokering of sustainability
value, including the five conditions of a legitimate tetravaluation process, which needs to be balanced,
representative, transparent, knowledge-rich, and accountable [1] (pp. 223–226).
Before embarking on an inquiry into the ways contemporary society manages and governs
economic activities with the aim to achieve sustainability value, the author asks whether sustainability
value can be measured. His goal is to show that existing metrics of economic performance have a role
to play in informing a tetravaluation process of value discovery but cannot substitute it, as “governing
and managing for sustainability value is a socio-political not a techno-managerial undertaking” [1]
(p. 92). Chapter 5 undertakes a thorough critical analysis of existing metrics that might be useful in
measuring sustainability value. They include single index, composite index, dashboard, and survey
metrics, currently employed to measure progress towards sustainability in different analytic units:
Territories, organizations, and sectors. The author is skeptical about the usefulness of these indicators
for measuring sustainability value, as he considers that “all metrics have strengths and weaknesses
and that the information they contain will always be partial, partially interpreted and therefore
contested” [1] (p. 95).
The metrics’ evaluation starts with the gross domestic product (GDP), an indicator of an economy’s
performance, summarizing whether the national economy is growing and development occurring,
based on its exchange value [1] (p. 92). The author also considers a variety of adjusted GDP approaches
that have been used in the attempted to improve GDP: The index for sustainable economic welfare
(ISEW), the genuine progress indicator (GPI), and adjusted net savings (ANS), an indicator of “weak
sustainability” based on Solow’s substitutability assumption [10] that “gains made in some forms
of capital can be traded off against losses in other forms of capital, so long as the net outcome is
positive” [1] (p. 104). Among the ecological single indexes, the author discusses the ecological footprint
(EF) and the living planet index (LPI), two indicators assessing sustainability value’s function value,
and both critical of GDP. The proponents of EF consider that “developed countries are mostly on
an unsustainable trajectory because they are consuming more of the world’s biocapacity than they
own” [1] (p. 106), and the proponents of the LPI think that “solutions require ‘a new economic system
that enhances and supports the natural capital on which it relies’, where business is ‘repurposed’
to be accountable for social and environmental benefits and where people ‘reduce the emphasis on
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material wealth, confront consumerism and the throw-away culture and promote the desirability of
more sustainable diets” [1] (p. 108).
The author also reviews three composite indices, the human development index (HDI), the
environmental performance index (EPI), and the better life index (BLI) and concludes that “the BLI
emerges as the most promising, from a political economy of sustainability perspective. Unlike the
HDI and the EPI, the BLI contains a broader range of indicators, many of which are mappable into
sustainability value’s four component values” [1] (p. 120). However, the BLI cannot be used for
measuring sustainability value, as it “contained no mechanism for linking concerns over different
types of capital depletion with objective and subjective measures of individual welfare” [1] (pp.
132–133). The two dashboard indicators assessed, the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development’s (OECD) green growth indicators (GGIs) and United Nation’s (UN) sustainable
development goals (SDGs), while potentially useful for developing an index of sustainability value, are
regarded with skepticism by the author for the way they have been weighted: “the GGIs emphasizing
exchange value, and the SDGs downplaying it in favor of use value” [1] (p. 133). Finally, the World
Happiness Report (WHR), a survey-based indicator built on the subjective well-being model, “provides
significant resources to shift the focus on exchange value back to national use value, community
value and labour value” [1] (p. 131). However, the author recommends caution in its use due to its
subjectivity and extremely limited capacity to grasp function value [1] (p. 133), as demonstrated by a
study on the evolution of happiness in China, where it was assessed that life satisfaction had also risen,
rather than fallen, with an increase in coal consumption after 2005 [1] (pp. 131–132).
The chapter concludes with an invitation to those metrically minded to take the opportunity to
develop measures for the new concept of sustainability value, and recommends that they keep in mind
Munda’s 2005 [15] warning that “a sustainability policy exercise implies difficult decisions such as the
choice of indicators, their policy prioritization and the choice of ideal values“ [1] (p. 133).

4. Governing for Sustainability Value

An important premise of this book is that in order to achieve the goal of sustainability, a much
larger proportion of the world’s population than currently must be convinced that an economic
valuation problem exists, and that all actors involved in the modern market system, producers and
consumers alike, must participate in tetravaluation processes. In the author’s words: “all activities
implicated in extraction-disposal chains must be governed to ensure the balancing of exchange, use,
labour, and function values” [1] (p. 221), a process that needs to be supported by appropriately
structured new national and international governance arrangements [1] (p. 180). The aim of Chapter
6, Governing business for sustainability value, is to discuss the implications of implementing the new
concept of sustainability value for societal wealth and its associated governing institutions, as well as
to test the feasibility of the new concept in a practical sense, by illustrating how sustainability value is
already being partially realized within some extraction-disposal supply chains and corporations.
The chapter starts with a compelling overview of the evolution of the understandings of the term
‘governing’ over the past 30 years in national and global economies. The main benchmarks the author
discusses are: The rise of the concept of “governance” in the 1980s, as a result of the disconnect between
the structures of modern governments with their objectives to only “manage discrete aspects of a
seamless socio-natural reality” and which “usually fail to achieve the high degree of policy integration
and coherence that sustainable development demands” [1] (p. 138); the rich literature on the “new
governance”, a concept adopting either a ‘state-centric approach’ (“government by different means”)
or ‘society-centric approaches’ which “treat governance as qualitatively different from government
and as occurring ‘beyond government’ ” [1] (p. 139); the rise of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s with
agendas to limit government via a range of strategies of ‘downsizing’, ‘privatizing’, ‘corporatizing’,
and ‘contracting out’ many of the government’s functions to the private sector and not-for-profit
companies [1] (p. 139); the ‘dramatic’ boost in the process of globalization produced by the diffusion of
neoliberalism around the world; the rise of the multinational corporations (MNCs) in the second half of
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 9 of 13

the 20th century, and their ability to “exercise enormous market and political power”, and “dominate
global production” and “be key actors in most extraction-disposal supply chains” [1] (p. 139); the rapid
spread of the quality assurance standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO 9000) in the 1980s; the embrace by MNCs of corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms
or various certification schemes; the embrace by businesses of multi-stakeholder governance, which,
at the domestic level, can include community-level social enterprises managing forests, fisheries,
or watersheds; engaging in participatory budgeting and planning of municipal expenditures and
priorities; or launching of national roundtables and consultative fora. At the international level,
multi-stakeholder governance occurs in government–business–civil society partnerships aiming to
secure greater transparency in natural resource management, to introduce standards for investment in
developing countries, or to encourage triple-bottom line reporting, or the establishment of labeling
and certification schemes. This overview clearly shows the devolution in the last three decades of
governing power from the public sector to private actors. The main consequence of this shift is that the
state is less plausible to play a leading role in delivering sustainable development and “the evidence
shows that so far it has failed to do so” [1] (p. 10).

4.1. Governing Business for Sustainability

The next question the author asks is “If multi-stakeholder governance is the answer to the
question of how to secure greater policy coherence across the economic, environmental and social
dimensions of sustainable development”, then “why does the evidence suggest that progress towards
sustainability is stalling and going backwards?” [1] (p. 141). He finds an explanation in the absence of
clear guidelines on how to better integrate multi-stakeholder interests in decision-making, such as
“which actors to include, when to include them, and what decision-making processes to employ” [1] (p.
141). He believes that multi-stakeholder governance, by reaching out and including more actors in
decision-making, has the potential to realize sustainability value, but he recommends moving beyond
multi-stakeholder governance to processes of tetravaluation in which “production of economic value is
a discovery process that involves continuously balancing sustainability value’s four components” [1]
(p. 142). This involves carefully identifying stakeholders representing the four components of
sustainability value; empowering them to have a genuine influence over the outcomes by organizing
multi-stakeholder governance towards the top of Arnstein’s ladder of participation [16], where
stakeholders can exert “citizen power”; using a partnership model of decision-making that ensures
“that the assembled stakeholders have a strong claim to speak on behalf of the constituency they claim to
represent” [1] (p. 145); and establishing new rules regarding decision-making, beyond simple majority
voting, which do not generate inequality or “disempower minorities and hinder the deliberation
required to generate more inclusive, creative compromises” [1] (p. 146).
The chapter draws on scattered examples from supply chains in key commodity sectors (forestry,
fishery, agricultural products, and minerals) and from various forms of corporations where processes
of tetravaluation are emerging. “Although extraction-disposal chains remain dominated by a logic
of exchange value maximization, within their interstices are found parallel production systems that
also ‘deliver the goods’ without externalizing as much of the cost onto communities, workers, the
marginalized and nature” [1] (p. 8).
The author uses as an example of supply-chain tetravaluation, the process that produced the
gold standard in the forestry sector, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate. “The FSC’s
standard encompasses a set of eco-social forestry norms that express concern for labour, community
and indigenous peoples’ rights and forest ecosystem integrity” [1] (p. 148). FSC was established in 1993
in Toronto, Canada, and certifies today almost 200 million hectares of forests, mainly in North America,
Europe, and Russia. The FSC has a unique tripartite membership structure that divides membership
into three chambers representing economic, social, and environmental values, with each chamber
further divided into members representing the global North and South. Interests promoting exchange
value in the economic chamber are balanced by interests representing a diversity of use and labor
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 10 of 13

values in the social chamber (composed of labor unions, community organizations, and indigenous
peoples organizations) and by interests representing function value in the environmental chamber
(composed of large and small, institutionalized and grassroots environmental organizations) [1] (p. 147).
The FSC also has a balanced board structure of 12 directors, four for each chamber, split between the
global North and South [1] (p. 147).
As for corporations, the author considers that they currently are poorly structured in order to
realize sustainable economic value due to their institutional form and purpose, which prioritizes
the realization of exchange value over sustainability value’s other component elements [1] (p.11).
However, the author identifies efforts to meet the definitional requirements of sustainability value
in some past and emerging corporate forms, such as community corporations, social enterprises,
cooperatives, and beneficial corporations (B Corps). The search for new corporate business models has
been prompted by the “now widespread recognition in the academic and practitioner literature of
the need for corporations to adopt a beyond-profit conception of value and, somehow, deliver broad
economic value” [1] (p. 154). A rich literature now exists in the fields of business ethics, corporate
social responsibility (CSR), and supply-side management, which examines mechanisms available to
corporations to deliver societal benefits beyond profits to shareholders. Such mechanisms include
revised laws of incorporation, restructured corporate boards, realigned managerial incentives, and
a range of managerial tools [1] (p. 150). The author refers to the positive “turn” of entrepreneurs to
social enterprise, whose broad aim is “to produce the needed goods and services at a price that covers
the cost of production while ensuring no harm is inflicted on community and nature” [1] (p. 150).
He gives some examples of successful social enterprises, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
established in 1933 and still in operation. Financially independent, TVA earns money from the sale of
electricity, which it reinvests in the Tennessee Valley region to foster social and economic development.
Another example of government–business enterprise with a public purpose that the author cites is the
UK British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), whose broad purpose is “to inform, educate and entertain”.
The author also discusses the “B Corp” movement that started in 2006 with the goal of setting up
certified beneficial corporations, as “companies that demonstrably have a beyond-profit business ethos
and are ‘doing well by doing good’” [1] (p.151). Today, there are more than 1800 companies in the B
Corp database. “The B Corp movement has clearly grasped the key principle underlying sustainability
value: that exchange value (customers) is only one component of value that also includes labour value
(workers), function value (environment) and use value (community). Decisions have to be made on
how these values are to be traded against each other” [1] (p. 155).

4.2. Governing the Polity for Sustainability

In Chapter 7, Governing the polity for sustainability value, the author investigates whether the
structure and mode of operation of Western politics are appropriate for delivering or supporting the
delivery of sustainability value. His answer is that existing governing arrangements in developed
countries are largely not delivering sustainability value [1] (p. 180), mostly due to the party-political
systems of government in which “competitive elections put the state temporarily in the hands of
a political party that prioritizes a subset of sustainability value’s four component values to the
detriment of the others” [1] (p. 10). Such systems “do little to prevent powerful actors from exerting
undue influence on people’s political and economic preferences” and are prone to foster inter-value
competition between business, community, labor, and environmental groups, “instead of bringing
actors together in a deliberative negotiation to directly ascertain the nature of sustainability value in
a specific decision-making context” [1] (p. 11). The author also mentions that such a system “has a
built-in bias towards unsustainability as manifested in a virtually unchallenged and unchallengeable
logic of ever-expanding consumption” [1] (p. 11).
The chapter does, however, identify two existing governance systems with potential to promote
tetravaluation processes, one at the national level and another one at the international level. At the
national level, the open corporatist political systems of North European countries, Norway, Sweden,
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 11 of 13

Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, have the best empirical record for fostering multiparty
coalitions, as they “have learned to broker cross-value deals involving exchange, use and labor
value and, in the post-UNCED era, a degree of function value” [1] (p. 170). At the global level, the
International Labour Organization (ILO), the only tripartite UN agency, which, since 1919, brings
together governments, employers, and workers to negotiate labor standards and develop policies
and programs promoting decent work for all women and men, “offers promise” [1] (p. 160) from a
political economy of sustainability perspective. The author considers that “suitably reformed”, both
the open corporatist political system and the ILO “could make major contributions to the realization of
sustainability value domestically and internationally” [1] (p. 180).

4.3. Governing Individuals’ Preferences for Sustainability

Chapter 8 extends the governance for sustainability challenge to each individual in the civil society.
The chapter analyzes “the role that individual and group preferences play in discriminating between
and purchasing only those products that realize sustainability value” [1] (p. 185), based on the author’s
previously expressed belief that a new category of consumers is emerging, the “consumer-citizens”,
who “have the potential to motivate more integrated and sustainable production practices” [1] (p. 9).
The chapter starts by debunking a long-held assumption in economics that homo economicus is a
rational utility maximizing individual able to make perfect choices based on income, goods’ prices, and
preferences. The author cites recent studies in behavioral economics, biology, psychology, sociology,
and cultural research, which reveal a much more complex picture about human nature and preference
formation. These studies show that an “individual’s preferences are often non-reflexive and form
only in the act of making a decision; and that they are not necessarily rationally-ordered, may be
lexically structured, may differ from meta-preferences, occur under conditions of bounded rationality,
and may be ‘nudged’ by biological, cognitive, sociological, media and advertising factors outside
of conscious perception” [1] (pp. 9–10). Most of the time, individuals engage in a default behavior
based on the fast-and-frugal, system 1, autonomous thinking [17], grounded in social upbringing,
cognitive beliefs, and cultural embeddedness, while a deliberate choice for sustainability value implies
a “new tetranormalized behavioural repertoire derived from slow-and-deliberative, system 2, reflexive
thought that often challenges what an individual believes to be the case” [1] (p. xii). The author notes
that increasingly “consumer-citizens” display this type of reflexive thinking when they “no longer
purchase goods based solely on price, quality and availability but are also concerned to ensure that
products and process and production methods meet a broader set of requirements and ‘do no harm’ to
nature, workers and communities” [1] (p. 9). What accounts for this more reflexive behavior? The
author mentions “the important role played by underlying personal values and the political, economic,
social and cultural institutions that shape the length and content of individual preference schedules.
There is, moreover, no way out of the hermeneutic circle of value that individuals are seized of and have
an elective affinity for . . . ” [1] (p. 229). This is a welcome attempt by the author to extend the concept
of value that individuals hold beyond the utilitarian economic value discussed throughout the book.
An individual inclined toward sustainable choices might be so because he/she thinks that this is the right
thing to do. Among the institutions that can contribute to increasing the reflexive behavior necessary
for an informed participation in a sustainability tetravaluation process the author discusses higher
education. The formal commitment of higher education to embrace sustainable development started in
1990 when several universities signed the Talloires declaration, a 10-point action plan for incorporating
sustainability and environmental literacy in teaching, research, operations, and outreach at colleges
and universities. However, the author notes that the 30-year record of higher education’s engagement
with sustainability (including the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development, 2005–2014)
has been “disappointing”, as “most institutions maintain an ‘instrumental’ approach to sustainability
and focus on ‘system-determined problems’” [1] (p. 210). I completely agree with the author’s view
that in higher education institutions, which “are so poorly designed to realize sustainability value” [1]
(p. 212), “the necessary, wider structural transformation has yet to occur” [1] (p. 210). Among the
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 12 of 13

reasons for the dismal performance of universities in promoting sustainability value, the author cites
the poor design of the concept of higher education for sustainability, which has been ‘tamed’ to fit a
‘business as usual’ approach; new public management-type reforms, which have introduced an ethos
of ‘academic capitalism’; and a shift in the university governance towards ‘strong’ presidents, rectors,
and vice-chancellors presiding over smaller business-dominated governing boards “who manage
through an appointed executive staff an increasingly alienated and time-poor faculty, subject to a
range of internal and external teaching, research and impact metrics” [1] (p. 211). Another more
general reason is the failure of higher education to promote critical reflexivity concerning all knowledge
claims, by generating and disseminating perspectives, which, from a perspectivist conception of
science, constitute “imperfect mindware”. Such is the case of the discipline of neoclassical economics,
which, starting in the 1970s, has encouraged millions of academics and students to “interpret a thing’s
usefulness exclusively from an exchange value standpoint”, making them unable to perceive any
values beyond exchange value [1] (p. 212).

5. Discussion
The book is well referenced, with a bibliography of more than 600 titles, not counting titles quoted
in the very ample notes section at the end of each chapter where the author, true to his belief that
knowledge is always partial and incomplete, reaches out across disciplinary boundaries in search for
alternative explanations and insights. Reading the endnotes is as rewarding as reading the book itself.
The Political Economy of Sustainability is a challenging book inviting the reader to introspection
about the economic values that underlie our unsustainable choices and shape the existing economic,
political, social, and cultural institutions, which have mostly failed to steer societies onto a sustainable
path. The author is to be commended for starting this values clarification discussion, which is essential,
not only academically but also pragmatically, for finding a cure to the humanity’s current unsustainable
ways. He has correctly identified four different types of economic values that guide people’s value
judgements about the usefulness of the things they need in their lives and in the productive processes,
as exchange, labor, use, and function values. He has also developed a plausible explanation of the
failure of the existing competing liberal, socialist, nationalist, or political ecology frameworks to
produce, on their own, the “process of change” envisioned by the 1987 WCED report on sustainable
development: Each of these political economies monistically embraces one form of economic value
and denies all other forms, while achieving ecological, social, and economic sustainability requires
the concurrent embrace of all forms of value. Can we ever hope to achieve the global consensus
needed for the large-scale implementation of the lofty goals of sustainability, that ”state of collective
grace” [18] that will allow humanity to continue enjoying life on this marvelous planet for many more
generations to come? What needs to happen for the currently fragmented sustainability movement to
become mainstream and involve corporations, political, and social institutions, and individuals, as
both producers and consumers, in new social practices that fundamentally redefine our relationship
with the environment and with each other? How can we get the critical mass of sustainability inclined
people, who are potentially able to shape new social and ecological priorities and create the conditions
for their implementation? These are deep questions that surface throughout the book, and require
urgent responses. The author is aware that technical or administrative actions are not sufficient for
bringing about sustainable outcomes, and that new institutions and governance structures are needed
to help people, as active agents of change, make radically new economic choices. He proposes a new
governance arrangement in the form of a reflexive deliberative values balancing dialogue aiming
to lead to discovery of the sustainability value, in particular contexts, as a negotiated compromise
among all the divergent forms of values held by participants. By proposing to bring at the negotiating
table, on an equal footing, the holders of divergent economic values, the author assumes that they
possess high individual and social reflexivity and are open to sacrificing part of their deeply cherished
particular values [1] (p. 221) for the sake of achieving the higher value of sustainability. I find the idea of
mandatory tetravaluation processes in all private and public activities carried on in extraction-disposal
Sustainability 2020, 12, 1537 13 of 13

chains, which the author advocates for, both appealing and feasible. It is appealing for its potential to
define sustainability value as an objective value, discovered or co-created by many dialogue partners,
a meta-value that is above all other particular values, as it expresses the permanent and aggregated
values of the community and of nature, in which the community is embedded. It is feasible, as I have
seen sustainable solutions being reached through a type of tetravaluation dialogue in a small-scale
fishing community in Tárcoles, Costa Rica [19], a dialogue that has led to both thriving fish stocks and
happy fishing people. I highly recommend this book to policy decision-makers, to political economists
of all stripes, to researchers and students interested in sustainability and governance, and to all those
who care about our sustainable future.

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

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