Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature
批判可持续发展话语背后的经济理性，指出其将自然转化为环境、通过生物技术和知识产权等机制对第三世界进行空间殖民，适合关注发展批判、环境政治和全球正义的读者。
This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwords of today: sustainable development. I argue that, despite claims of a paradigm shift, the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economic, not ecological, rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specified by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the transformation of ‘nature’ into ‘environment’, a transformation that has important implications for notions of how development should proceed. The ‘rational’ management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on developing countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this ‘regime of truth’ for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be made ‘efficient’ because of the capitalization of nature.