Efforts and programs toward aiding sustainable development in less affluent countries are primarily driven by the moral imperative to relieve and to prevent suffering. This utilitarian principle has provided the moral basis for humanitarian intervention and development aid initiatives worldwide for the past decades. It takes a short term perspective which shapes the initiatives in characteristic ways. While most development aid programs succeed in their goals to relieve hunger and poverty in ad hoc situations, their success in the long term seems increasingly questionable, which throws doubt on the claims that such efforts qualify as sustainable development. This paper aims to test such shortfall and to find some explanations for it. We assessed the economic development in the world's ten least affluent countries by comparing their ecological footprints with their biocapacities. This ratio, and how it changes over time, indicates how sustainable the development of a country or region is, and whether it risks ecological overshoot. Our results confirm our earlier findings on South-East Asia, namely that poor countries tend to have the advantage of greater sustainability. We also examined the impact that the major development aid programs in those countries are likely to have on the ratio of footprint over capacity. Most development aid tends to increase that ratio, by boosting footprints without adequately increasing biocapacity. One conceptual explanation for this shortfall on sustainability lies in the Conventional Development Paradigm, an ideological construct that provides the rationales for most development aid programs. According to the literature, it rests on unjustified assumptions about economic growth and on the externalization of losses in natural capital. It also rests on a simplistic version of utilitarianism, usually summed up in the principle of 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. We suggest that a more realistic interpretation of sustainability necessitates a revision of that principle to 'the minimum acceptable amount of good for the greatest sustainable number'. Under that perspective, promoting the transition to sustainability becomes a sine qua non condition for any form of 'development'.
In 2007 the University of Northern British Columbia initiated a two-year elementary teacher education program at the Northwest Campus in Terrace, British Columbia. The program was designed to meet specific community needs in the North that arise from inequities in the cultural safety of Indigenous teachers and students. The authors share three collegial inquiries into the program’s contribution toward improving cultural safety in K-12 schools and meeting social justice challenges in the region’s communities. Culturally safe allocation of space became better understood, affective learning outcomes were recognized as important determinants of cultural safety, and teacher action in classrooms towards cultural safety was scaffolded for various settings.En 2007, l’Université du Nord de la Colombie-Britannique a mis sur pied un programme de formation des enseignants à l’élémentaire d’une durée de deux ans, à son campus nord-ouest, situé à Terrace, en Colombie-Britannique. Ce programme a été conçu pour répondre aux besoins spécifiques de la communauté du nord, dont les inégalités existantes en termes de sécurité culturelle des enseignants et des élèves autochtones. Les auteurs partagent trois collaborations entre collègues issues du programme. Celles-ci ont contribué à améliorer la sécurité culturelle dans les écoles maternelle à secondaire 5 et à relever les défis de justice sociale présents dans les communautés de la région. L’attribution culturellement sécuritaire de l’espace a été mieux comprise, les conséquences affectives de l’apprentissage ont été reconnues comme des déterminants importants de la sécurité culturelle et les gestes des enseignants valorisant la sécurité culturelle dans leur classe ont été soutenus dans divers contextes
The greater mobility of people and the worldwide displacement of millions, forced or voluntary, has directed attention to their human security in foreign environments. We propose that a focus on cultural safety is becoming an essential requirement for the human security of displaced minorities everywhere, building on previous work in educational settings [6]. As a necessary though insufficient condition for human security, cultural safety is affected by dependency relationships, power imbalances, dominant paradigms, and norms of public conduct as they apply to displaced cultural minorities. The central question how cultural safety could be enhanced is addressed through empirical scenarios where the cultural safety of individuals was placed in jeopardy. Such events often manifest as the perception of offence, sometimes leading to violent conflict. Recognizing the futility of attempts to prevent all and any offence, our arguments amount to a novel approach to strengthen cultural safety, and thus human security: preparing both sides for offensive experiences as a means to pre-empt counterproductive reactions. We discuss strategies toward that goal that might allow individuals, families, larger groups and organizations to work collaboratively towards ensuring the cultural safety of displaced people, thus making a vital contribution towards sustainable human security.
In the current global environmental crisis medical aid and disaster relief is given by the UN and its branches, by governments and by NGOs, who regard it as their duty to address large-scale humanitarian catastrophes. The duty to give medical aid rests on traditional interpretations of health security and on the bioethical imperatives to relieve suffering and to save lives. However, those principles are not easily reconciled in the current situation of global environmental change and the threats it poses to human security. The global demand for health care has already outpaced resources in many regions, and those resources are likely to decline further. An ethic based on more comprehensive concepts of human security can lessen the contradictions between ethical priorities because it takes into account environmental security. However, that approach leads to clashes with common interpretations of human rights, including the so-called right to health care. The argument presented in this paper states that, under the imperative of ensuring the survival for humanity in acceptable and sustainable ways, the latest generation of human rights pertaining to health care and environmental quality have become ungrantable. While this does not render them negligible, it does necessitate a new approach to global development aid and health security, with severe consequences for individual autonomy.
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