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Thinking About Local Sustainability and Land Use

November 17, 2015, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location Center for Environmental and Life Sciences - 120
Posted InCollege of Science and Mathematics

Paul Gottlieb is Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Rutgers University’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. A PhD graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, Dr. Gottlieb has thirty years of experience in urban planning and economic development. From 1987 to 1990, he served as a research economist at the New Jersey Office of State Planning. Through most of the 1990s, he directed an economic development research center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His current research addresses rural conservation issues, especially the policy tools of agricultural zoning and purchase of development rights. He is also interested in broad normative issues associated with local development. These include tradeToffs (or synergies) between wealth creation on the one hand and the preservation of natural environments, amenities, and the desire for community stasis on the other.

In this talk I will connect some well known concepts from the sustainability literature to a set of applied problems in local development. To a large degree, sustainability was born as a normative framework for thinking about global challenges, not local ones. While some ideas that apply at the global scale can be scaled down to the local, the fallacy of composition (at a minimum) suggests that this will not always be the case. I will also argue that traditional frameworks of classical economics are underutilized – and in many cases deeply misunderstood – by sustainability advocates working at all scales. Well accepted definitions of the sustainability objective (e.g., from the Brundtland report) are very economics-friendly, as is the “triple bottom line” objective of social, economic, and environmental health. One of economics’ most important contributions to policy discourse is to acknowledge that there can be trade-offs among the three sustainability objectives - not always, of course, and presumably less in the long run than the short run. Although the doctrine of “synergies” is often taken as a matter of faith within the sustainability community, its existence is ultimately an empirical question on which much work remains to be done. I will describe my own published work, which I recognize (often after the fact) has been designed to identify tradeToffs or synergies among sustainability’s “big three.” In work for the Brookings Institution, for example, I discovered that the assumed tradeToff between metropolitan-scale economic development and environmental conservation is illusory. In land use policy, I have identified tradeToffs between the objectives of environmental conservation and social equity. This last objective is too often an afterthought in sustainability circles.