Sustainable Development

Conceptual Overview

As Ronnie Harding has noted, if sustainability is taken to refer to the state at which something (such as a natural resource, the economy, or a human way of life) is maintained, then SD is the means by which it is achieved. Sustainability is the goal and SD the way of reaching it. SD emerged as a reaction to the “limits to growth” debate of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged the assumption that an unlimited supply of natural resources will support infinite economic growth and lead to human well-being. It was originally agreed to by the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) in 1987 and brought to world prominence at Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The Rio Summit saw more than 170 national government delegations endorsing SD principles and the implementation program, Agenda 21, which featured wide public participation as a key tenet. The concept has since been popularized as the first attempt to reconcile environment with development—offering a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between economic growth, distributive justice, environmental protection, and the sustainability of the planet.

SD has a global scope, and the United Nations has played the key role in its promotion to government agencies, multinational business organizations, and international NGOs. Continuing from the Rio Summit, the influence of the United Nations has been maintained through organizations and intergovernmental agreements such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Global Compact. As well as in the global context, however, SD refers to nested systems at local and regional levels. As John Dryzek has noted, SD systems are both social and biological—the social world is not seen as separate from the natural world. The discourse delivers the strong social message that cooperation between all aspects of civil society is the basis for sustainability.

The implementation of this vision entails juggling the three highly evaluative objectives that underpin SD: intergenerational justice, intragenerational equity, and the precautionary principle. Addressing these core objectives requires decision makers to balance three sets of relationships: between humans and the rest of the biosphere, between present and future generations, and between the developing and developed worlds. For instance, to implement intergenerational justice means ensuring that future generations have access to a quality of life at least equivalent to ours. The question is how to decide what share of finite resources should be consumed or exploited now and what should be left for the future. As Mark Smith notes, there are two quite different philosophical interpretations of this principle of intergenerational justice. On John Rawls's account of “just savings,” no one generation should leave the next generation worse off. The opposing interpretation is that obligations to future generations cannot be binding because their lack of entitlement to property puts them outside the moral community. In most accounts, SD deals with this philosophical challenge by resorting to its strongly anthropocentric and practical reasoning that immediate human needs should get preferential treatment to the long-term preservation of nature.

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