Sustainable Development Gains University Cachet

Environmentalists and left-leaning economists have been trying to get people interested in sustainable development for nearly two decades. Now they’re getting a new breath of life from Columbia University.

By JON E. HILSENRATH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Columbia, which is throwing huge resources at the subject, is betting that sustainable development will be the next hot-button issue in academia. This month, Columbia disclosed that it is housing its new star economist, Jeffrey Sachs, in an $8 million townhouse near Central Park West in Manhattan, a neighborhood that is also home to celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld and Madonna. The townhouse will double as a place where Mr. Sachs can entertain world dignitaries to push his wide-ranging views about the environment, infectious disease and Third-World poverty.

The townhouse is just a small piece of Mr. Sachs’s growing empire at Columbia, which lured him away from Harvard University in April to head its Earth Institute. A previously obscure institution known mostly to geologists and atmospheric scientists, the Earth Institute — with an overall annual budget of $80 million — will be the university’s attempt to put its own stamp on a range of issues important to the developing world.

"I’m trying to make sustainable development work," says Mr. Sachs, who made a name for himself in the 1980s and 1990s pushing "shock therapy" economic reforms in countries experiencing hyperinflation.

But many economists scratch their heads when asked to define sustainable development. "I have no idea what it means, except that it is politically correct," says Michael Kremer, a Harvard University economist who researches health and education in poor countries.

The notion of sustainable development first gained traction during the 1980s and was mostly related to a concern by advocacy groups that rich countries were depleting the world’s resources and ruining its atmosphere. Economic growth, the argument went, was not sustainable unless government policies were more environmentally friendly. To right-leaning economists, it sounded like the discredited notion proposed by Thomas Malthus two centuries ago that the world population might grow too fast to feed itself.

"It is not a very useful concept," says William Easterly, a former World Bank economist who will soon join the faculty of New York University.

What is clear is that reaching out to the world’s poor is becoming a priority again in universities and policy circles. The subject has been elevated in part by the realization that terrorism can brew in poor places such as Afghanistan and by the devastation of AIDS and poverty still plaguing large parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia.

In Washington, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill put the plight of poor countries on the Bush administration’s agenda when he toured Africa earlier this year with the rock star Bono. From corporate America, Bill Gates earlier this month pledged $100 million to address AIDS in India. Meanwhile, the latest round of trade negotiations between rich and poor countries is supposed to be a "development round," focused on opening trading opportunities for the world’s poorer countries.

Mr. Sachs says old ideas about sustainable development are outdated. "I don’t believe that growth in rich countries imperils the poor," he says. Instead, he and Columbia want to give their own eclectic definition to the idea.

A conversation with Mr. Sachs ranges from the level of nitrogen in African soil to the role that magnesium silicate might play in addressing global warming to the peculiar perils posed by the anopheles gambiae strain of mosquitoes. It neatly sums up sustainable development for him and the Earth Institute.

In Mr. Sachs’s mind, addressing the problems of the world’s poor means getting your hands dirty with the science behind those problems, such as how soil can be altered to improve African agricultural productivity.

"Development economics has cornered itself by looking at too limited a range of issues," says Mr. Sachs. "If you want to understand the problems in Africa, you really need to understand malaria; you need to understand African-soil fertility and El Nino."

This is where the Earth Institute comes in. It is a collection of large and disparate research centers, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which studies earthquakes and volcanoes, to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which studies climate change. Mr. Sachs wants to use these institutions to marry the science behind poor-country problems with economic solutions. The approach isn’t entirely unique. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Global Change Science, for instance, brings economists together with scientists. But the scale at Columbia will be much larger.

Mr. Sachs is going at sustainable development with missionary zeal. He’s starting a new doctorate program in sustainable development. He’s bringing in new faculty, such as Pedro Sanchez, a tropical-soil expert. He’s planning a large fund-raising campaign to expand the institute’s resources. And he’ll use his perch at Columbia to launch advisory work with the United Nations and individual countries.

But making any kind of economic development work is tough business, says Mr. Easterly, whose book "The Elusive Quest for Growth" lays out the many pitfalls of development economics.

"The list of failed panaceas," Mr. Easterly says, "includes foreign aid, foreign investment, education, family planning, big infrastructure projects, conditional aid, debt forgiveness, and so on." The real problem for many countries, he says, is that they don’t have the political institutions needed to make development work — like even-handed courts or clean government. Good science is important, but it won’t change that.

Write to Jon E. Hilsenrath at [email protected]