Leapfrogging Possibilities For Sustainable Consumption and ...

It is imperative to design and develop ecologically sustainable, economically viable, and
socially desirable products and services that are necessary to satisfy basic needs. A
systems perspective of production and consumption is of paramount importance.
Improvements that have been done at the technical efficiency level related to production
systems should be scrutinized to avoid the risk of a rebound effect situation where these
improvements are offset by the ever increasing consumption. As a way of positively
influencing the consumption component, the productive machinery should be decoupled
from the activity of creating and generating new demands. Economically, continuous
growth in the production realm should be based on creative mechanisms of producing
affordable products and services and expanded marketing that reaches out to the lowincome
members of the society.
Overall, production systems and consumption patterns should be optimized leading to:
1) Low level of life cycle concentration of natural substances from the earth’s crust
and man-made substances in the ecosphere
2) Low level of life cycle intervention on productivity, originality and diversity of
subsystems of ecosystems
3) Increased quality of life by meeting basis needs in a sustainable way. This implies
creating optimum number of new jobs for local communities per unit of resource
use or per unit of profit generated by managing the trade-off between issues such
as profit-making interest of companies, requirement of professionalism, labourintensiveness,
degree of value added, etc.
4) A situation where optimum proportion of primary raw material is processed for a
value added export and domestic consumption paying attention to possible
conflicting parameters such as access to technology, availability of hard currency,
and the need for job creation.
One of the prerequisites for the optimization of the whole of production systems and
consumption patterns is a change in the type of technological systems involved. For a
well established system, the changes can assume an evolutionary mode where
incremental improvements are made gradually. Owing to an already established
technological and institutional setup, the incremental changes, more often, occur at the
technical level in which some technological components are changed without
significantly affecting the whole system.
The economies of most countries in the North, for example west European countries,
have evolved over a long period of time from agricultural economy to an economy that
featured the flourishing of craftsmen and artisans, then to an economy of industrial
production and manufacturing and finally to an information and service-based economy.
The Asian Tigers which in 1950s had similar human development and economic profiles
as in present day Sub-Saharan Africa leaped to their current status of playing the role of
a globally powerful economic partner by addressing productivity through improving
access and quality of education systems at all levels including compulsory elementary
and secondary level education. The improvement in productivity enabled the pursuance
of an export-driven economic model of development. High levels of savings both at
6