Week 7 Reflection: Barriers to Sustainable Development 🌍🚧

Date: 15 April 2025
Course: SCSH 1201 – Sustainable Development: Issues, Principles and Practices (Section 4)

I came to expect that sometime between now and next week’s lecture, the real-world barriers that stopped sustainable development from being more than a buzzword will get brought into sharp focus. Last week, we spoke about solutions and progress, but this week, we were compelled to confront the incompatible, hardwired challenges that slow it all down.

We literally unpacked the truth — that we are facing the barrier of economic inequality, broken institutions, exploitation of the environment, human greed and much more. And yet we also possess the means to change.

Key Lessons and Takeaways 📝

1. Inequality: The Root of Unsustainability

This was one of the most striking points: The richest 10% are 76% of the global wealth (Oxfam). It is unfair that this concentration of wealth actively blocks sustainability.

It brought it to our mind as we all remember the famous saying of Ngozi Okonjo Iweala;

“The total amount of subsidies Europeans are receiving per day that their cows receive exceeds the daily income of the average African.”

It is a form of injustice that produces resentment, denies opportunity and traps billions in the poverty and vulnerability of lives that spin in circles.

This is a moral failure from an Islamic viewpoint. Zakat is more than a religious ritual; waqf and adl (justice) are systems to disrupt inequality and rebalance.

2. Pillars in Crisis: Economic, Environmental, and Social

To explore how the three pillars of sustainability—the economic, the environmental, and the social arena—are being threatened by all of them.

It is based on greed, not need, economically. Profit outweighs purpose.

We consume as we please, as if we have 1.7 Earths—by itself, this gives a huge warning to israf (waste), mizan (balance).

Institutions often tend to be corrupted or dysfunctional and tend to do less than what their personnel are intended to do.

We clearly saw that the tools of sustainable development are not single tool fixes but are a moral revolution.

3. From Global Ideas to Local Action

We also discussed the need for global goals to be turned into local realities. If grand plans have no effect on the lives of people, then they won’t succeed.

The bad news was that all that was built on the GNH model of Gross National Happiness by a small country which values well-being over wealth.

The zero waste shop and the circular economy model, which also arises in IIUM's Green Initiatives, helped universities to act as examples.

This confirms that change can come in smaller, more local ways.

Personal Reflections ✍️

The discussion for this week is quite serious, and that is a good thing.

It led me to question the idea of sustainability as a memorised list of SDGS, and to think of it as a moral responsibility for us who will contribute to the future leadership.

I remembered the Prophet, who said:

As students, citizens, and khalifahs, it is our duty to address injustice, fix broken systems and live an ethical life.

It reminded me of the Prophet ﷺ, who said: