Adnan A Hezri, ‘The Sustainability Shift: Refashioning Malaysia’s Future’
(Penang: Areca Books, 2016), 222pp, References, Index

BOOK REVIEW | Adnan Hezri’s book, ‘The Sustainability Shift: Refashioning Malaysia’s Future’, offers a good insight into the dynamics of the policies and institutional environments affecting sustainability in Malaysia. Hezri very deftly takes us through the complex national policy environment.

It is the author’s observation that for several reasons, the present Malaysian policy and institutional environments are not doing enough or are inadequate to promote sustainable development. In fact, it is not in the ‘sustainable development mode’ as it were.

His proposal is to address the challenges, shortcomings and scope of the policies and the institutional environments to allow us to shift from mere concerns of environmental protection to the larger concerns of sustainability.

Beyond the complexity of Hezri’s effort, the ‘cognitive strategy’ adopted in the book is fairly simple and straightforward. As stated above, the policy environment is not mature enough to handle the present national and global concerns of sustainability. All we need do is to set it right.

Though by no measure simple, all we need to do is re-work the policy environment by moving it away from its present jumble of obstacles and shortsightedness, and by shaping it with new concerns, aims and directions towards sustainability.

In this regard, we must credit Hezri for some very innovative suggestions and use of phrases for refashioning Malaysian’s future/s. Suggestions such as ‘sustainability citizenship’ and ‘institutional heartware’ are exciting, engaging and worth exploring.

But beyond this labour of love to create a dynamic new policy environment peppered with some innovative concepts to achieve a ‘sustainability shift’ in Malaysia, the book does not really offer a glocally appropriate or genuine way forward that is locally, nationally and globally relevant. Of course, following what Hezri suggests will certainly help Malaysia but refashioning Malaysia’s sustainable future(s), I am not sure.

The world, in reality, is in a very serious mess. We are in a state of glocal eco-emergency. Taking this observation of an eco-emergency, from the ‘Eco-Manifesto: Forests, People and Sustainability in Malaysia’, a manifesto produced by Transparency International in 2013, a manifesto prepared by a team of which I was a member, Hezri does not seem to have responded to what a state of emergency demands.

Many of the nine planetary boundaries are in the red. We have pushed it that way. More are moving in that direction. The ‘Earth Overshoot’ day is being brought forward every year: we had used up our 2016 resources by August; it would probably be July in 2017 or 2018. Very sadly, we are forcing the extinction of animals at increasing rates by destroying their habitat indiscriminately or poisoning the water or food they consume.

The climate change matter is extremely serious as islands and a number of coastal areas are facing submergence. Homes and homelands are disappearing. The drastic glacial changes in the North and South Poles are going to pose extreme danger for the near future.

Forest cover around the world, including South-East Asia, is being destroyed at a phenomenal rate. Incidence of inter-ethnic strive has grown. Border conflicts have grown. Big money is being spent on wars - on buying and selling weapons. Once we produced weapons to fight wars; now, we are producing wars to sell arms. War is a big industry. So is health. Medico-pharmaceutical business cannot afford a fully healthy population for that will be an oversupply of healthy people...