Sustainable Development

Origins

While the resource conservation ideas behind sustainable development can be traced back more than a century, the current focus on this concept coalesced in the 1960s around the work of scholars and researchers such as Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Carson's Silent Spring (1962), while focused on the issue of toxic pesticides in the environment, highlighted the important connections between human well-being and the environment. Ehrlich's Population Bomb (1971) brought attention to the growth of the global population and the ways in which that population's resource needs were leading to unsustainable uses of the environment. Perhaps [Page 1687]most incendiary, though, was the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972), which took the messages of Carson, Ehrlich and others and predicted a bleak future for humanity if contemporary growth rates were not slowed. Each of these works focused on sustainability as it related to natural resources and the environment. The responses to these challenges, which included the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and the subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), therefore tended to focus on the protection and preservation of the environment as a path to sustainability.

The publication of Our Common Future (1987), often called the Brundtland Report, reoriented the conversation about sustainability from an environment-first perspective to a more holistic perspective that considers social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues as highly interwoven. This change in the understanding of human-environment relations in the context of development was, at least in part, linked to ongoing development and aid efforts. For example, aid workers dealing with issues such as famine in the mid-1980s began to argue that society, perception, and knowledge had much more important roles in food outcomes than was previously imagined. In the case of the Ethiopian famine, many argued that food shortage was not a product of an absolute lack of food, but an outcome of particular networks of access and production, both of which related to social roles and status. From these concerns emerged efforts to understand the linkage among environment, development, and human wellbeing through livelihoods, especially sustainable livelihoods. Thus the Brundtland Report captured, at the broad policy level, the changing ideas of not only policymakers but also those working in and researching issues of sustainability on the ground.

The changing focus of sustainable development from an environment-led issue to one that embraced a wide range of issues culminated in the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), often called the Earth Summit. At this meeting, leaders of more than 100 nations agreed to a global action plan, called Agenda 21, to deal with linked issues of environment and development. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was convened in the wake of this meeting to ensure appropriate follow-through on the Agenda 21 items. But even as “sustainable development” entered common parlance as an idea desirable to virtually everyone, it also regressed into a consideration of environmental issues as the driving force behind sustainability. For example, some of the focal outcomes of UNCED, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), were environment-first concerns that were posthoc linked to issues of human well being to suit the changing institutional goals of organizations such as UNEP. Thus, while environmental assessments became a common part of development planning in the 1990s, the linkage of environmental issues to development, or to wider social, economic, and political concerns within development remained poorly articulated and therefore a central problem for sustainable development.

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