EMBEDDED ECONOMIES AS SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIES

Emerging around 1980s, the global discourse on sustainable development ironically coincided with the embrace, by mainstream leadership of international political economy, of Neoliberal Capitalism thereby setting the stage for emergence of a global market economy. The central argument of this paper is that at the heart of the challenge of securing sustainable development lies the creation of economies necessarily „embedded‟ in their localised socio-cultural, natural and political settings, since „embedded economies‟ alone can act as spheres of responsibility, not economies abstracted -as the on-going pursuit, creation and maintenance of a so called „global world economy‟, discrete and supposedly governed by some abstract universal laws basically reflects. Drawing upon powerful, emerging insights in the sciences both natural and social, besides in philosophy and spiritual literature, this critique is substantiated by a critical appraisal of the features and fallouts of the foundational philosophy underlying the mainstream, conventional view of Economics itself. Adopting a Social Constructivist perspective, it is then argued that such unsustainable current practices having been “created” by a false ontology are therefore amenable to deconstruction and reconstruction upon the foundations of an alternative sustainable discourse of development based on „embedded economies‟. Advocacy of an embedded economy comes from the belief that fostering an effective politics of sustainable development is only possible within the context of the particular-where real stakeholders have democratic and social control over the economy. The hallmarks of sustainability- equity (both intra and intergenerational) and environmental resilience --it is argued, can never be effectively realised in the context of a „alien‟ globalised economy based on the relentless generation and feeding of „artificially manufactured wants‟ because unsustainability (ever deepening inequity and mindless abuse of nature) is simply built into the juggernaut of neoliberal capitalism that is fast emerging to engulf the planet Earth.