The normative dimension of environmental sustainability in Malaysia: analytical demands on the social sciences

Abstract

Environmentally related risks and hazards of the environment cause tensions in the fabric of societies. With rapid development in the past 50 years, the natural ecosystem in Malaysia has been under constant pressure of change, triggering a concomitant shift in risk perception by scientists and activists, and to a lesserextent among bureaucrats and politicians in the government. Organized movement or environmentalism in Malaysia which began in the 1970s was a manifestation of the changing societal perception about the risk associated with unchecked land clearing and development programme. However, both in academe and government, intellectual and policy responses to environmental problems evolved mainly from the empirical perspective of those trained in the engineering and natural sciences. Dominant understandings of environmental issues are neither reflexive nor critical, and are skewed towards scientised and globalised epistemology which may not be representative of the reality in the country. As a result, Malaysia is collectively blinkered as far as the place of society in environmental protection is concerned. Arguably, existing debates on the rights of the marginalized people in the forest, or the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised by rapid urbanisation, are underlined by facile inputs from the social sciences. In short, the environment is only seen as a mere material substrate of the social in the modernity project. If we are to produce accounts of environmental problems that are sensitive to social and cultural change, we need a different institution, and a different knowledge culture. This paper advocates 'sustainability' as a potentially emancipative concept equivalent to other higher-order notions such as democracy and justice. It is argued that sustainability could be used to interrogate the social and cultural aspects of contemporary environmental issues in Malaysia. Its cognitive power resides in its promises to fuse empirical (biophysical) concerns with the normative dimension comprising moral and aesthetic considerations of societies. Although much has been written about sustainability as a potent unifying paradigm, equally important but less researched, is the role of sustainability as a generator of problems. Based on selected nature-society problematiques, the paper outlines a set of demands - research, educational and policy - for the social sciences to contribute in mainstreaming environmental and sustainability issues in Malaysia.