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The Limits to Scarcity

by 30 Mar 2011

Lyla Mehta introduces The Limits to Scarcity, a collection of essays examining the concept of scarcity, how it underpins much of modern economics and its use as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity’s survival on the planet.

Limits to Scarcity cover

The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation, edited By Lyla Mehta with a foreword by Steve Rayner (Earthscan Science in Society Series, Dec 2010)
More information and buy online… (for a 20% discount, enter Defra20 in the voucher box)

Conventional wisdom suggests that we live in an age of permanent scarcity. Scarcity is considered to be an inescapable and ubiquitous feature of human existence. While not denying that there are biophysical limits to natural resources and that women and men (especially the poorest and powerless among them) often encounter chronic shortages of food, water and energy, The Limits of Scarcity argues that it is now time to question universalist portrayals of scarcity and write their obituary.

Why is this important? Of late, there has been a flurry of scarcity reports and concerns. In March 2009, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, declared that the planet faced ‘a perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources that threatened to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration leading to major upheavals in the world and coming to a head in 2030. The years 2007–2008 saw dramatic increases in world food prices, causing much social unrest in both the south and north. Mainstream interpretations of the crisis attribute blame to an ever-increasing population and the changing diet of the growing middle-class populations in Asia. Critics, by contrast, argue that causes lie elsewhere, for example in diverting land to grow biofuels largely for consumption in the north, structural changes in trade and agricultural production, rising oil prices and perverse subsidy regimes.

The past few years have also witnessed a growing concern about water scarcity and its threat to human well-being and livelihoods, economic and agricultural production, as well as the threat of ‘water wars’ having both international and intranational dimensions. Does all this suggest a déjà vu perhaps of the 1970s where resource scarcity was a prominent political concern due to the oil shocks and accompanying financial crises? The 1970s raised critical questions regarding the existence of scarcity among plenty and abundance, about the need to set ‘limits’ to growth (see The Limits to Growth by Meadows et al, 1972) and about the imperative for all humankind to coexist on ‘spaceship earth’, our one planet which was increasingly being viewed as fragile and vulnerable.

Almost 40 years on and in the midst of another global financial crisis, climate change poses new challenges to both human existence and resource availability. ‘Water wars’, famine and oil threats still appear as news stories. Resource scarcity continues to be linked with population growth and growing environmental conflicts, and science and technology or innovation are usually evoked as the appropriate ‘solutions’. Scarcity remains an all-pervasive fact of our lives. But what is scarcity? Why has blame been attributed to it for many of humankind’s woes, for centuries? Why is it so all-pervasive and does its all-pervasive character help or hinder us in governing the allocation and distribution of crucial resources such as water, oil, food and so on? What are the different disciplinary perspectives on scarcity? Are the economists to be blamed for creating scarcity? Are there alternative viewings of ‘scarcity’ and better ways to talk about finite resources? These questions are the focus of The Limits of Scarcity.

In the book, theoretical and empirical contributions examine changing conceptions of scarcity historically and critically engage with scarcity’s taken-for-granted nature across three domains (water, food and energy) and the implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The authors of this volume demonstrate that scarcity is not merely a natural phenomenon that can be isolated from planning models, allocation politics, policy choices, market forces and local power, social and gender dynamics. Several authors demonstrate that Homo economicus is neither universal nor desirable. The scarcity postulate (in other words, that needs, wants and desires are unlimited and the means to achieve these are scarce and limited) that underpins modern economics need not be universal. Needs, wants and desires do not have to be endless and unlimited. The book’s starting point is that ‘scarcity’ has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the north and south with science and technology often expected to provide solutions, but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the ‘problem’, about the technologies and about the so-called institutional fixes that are put forward as the ‘solutions’.

More often than not, the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated. Conventional visions of scarcity that focus on aggregate numbers and physical quantities are privileged over local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems in different ways. The ‘scare’ of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups, and problematic ideas of nature and society continue to get reproduced. These feed into simplistic and often inappropriate solutions that cause inaccessibility and perpetrate exclusions. Thus, the scarcity problem gets aggravated.

The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation, edited By Lyla Mehta with a foreword by Steve Rayner (Earthscan Science in Society Series, Dec 2010)
More information and buy online… (for a 20% discount, enter Defra20 in the voucher box)

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