The Chronicle interview.

• Position: Development Alternatives organisation - Interview

ASHOK KHOSLA has for more than three decades promoted alternatives for sustainable development and protection of the environment. He holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Harvard University, where he also taught courses on the environment. A founding Director of the Government of India's Office of Environmental Planning and Coordination--the first national environmental agency in a developing country--Mr. Khosla was a Director, from 1976 to 1982, at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), where he designed INFOTERRA, the international referral system for sources of environmental information of the United Nations. In 1983, he founded Development Alternatives, a not-for-profit corporation that combines social objectives with business methods in creating sustainable livelihoods for thousands of the rural and urban poor in India. On 19 November2002, he was awarded the UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize, sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and founded by the late Ryoichi Sasakawa, which has been awarded annually sin ce 1984 to individuals who have made outstanding global contributions to the management and protection of the environment. Horst Rutsch of the UN Chronicle spoke with Mr. Khosla on 22 November.

On the limits of globalization

Globalization so far only serves the rich, whether in the North or the South. The benefits come in the form of cheap goods and huge windfall profits for financial transactions and capital movements, and all kinds of other things that have very little to do with the realities of half of the world's population. Globalization does not lead to the creation of jobs, especially for the poor, most of whom are not going to get jobs anywhere through the efforts of globalized mechanisms.

There has to be another way. The other way, I believe, is by strengthening local economies. And that's where the concept of sustainable livelihoods comes in. These need to be created by sustainable enterprises. We've got to create enterprises and entrepreneurs who can mobilize the resources to create lobs. And for that, you need new kinds of technologies, new kinds of financing mechanisms and you need marketing systems--totally different and very flexible. But what characterizes the benign mechanisms are the capability of being decentralized, dependence on renewables, and amenability to use local skills and local materials. In essence, technologies and institutions have to be within the control of the community and individuals. That's a very different approach--not just building massive dams or large factories, refineries or power stations, but creating opportunities for local economies.

Economies of scale only exist as long as you externalize on the real costs--to nature, to the poor, to society and so on. It's very easy to talk about this as long as you don't include many of the costs that are implied by high degrees of centralization, which is highly subsidized, partly by the public but mostly by nature. It does not make sense to have those kinds of huge systems when you can do a lot of things locally just as well, and maybe better, tuned and tailored to local needs. That's the kind of economics we see as being necessary for sustainability.

On sustainable development

Many have tried to define sustainable development to understand the concept, but rather than trying to define it, one might just as easily describe it. It's pretty clear that you can't have sustainability if you have a massive amount of inequity and huge amounts of poverty--or affluence. The affluent tend to over-utilize certain resources in a way that destroys them, mostly so-called non-renewable resources. And the poor, to survive, have to get into more and more fragile eco-zones and tend to destroy the more renewable ones. It is no longer possible to accept extremes of poverty and affluence--not just from an ecological or economic or social point of view, or from a moral or social justice point of view, but from almost every other point of view. I think one has to accept that there has to be some lowering of ceilings and raising of floors before any real sustainable work can be brought about.

In my international work, I'm obviously interested in lowering the ceilings where consumption patterns and production systems in industrialized countries have to be transformed into...