What is Sustainable Development?

1_ Emergence of Sustainable Development
   In 1984, the United Nations established an independent group of 22 people drawn from member states of both the developing and developed worlds, and charged them with identifying the long-term environmental strategies for the international community. In 1987, the World Conference on Environment and Development published their report entitled, ‘Our Common Future’ (WCED, 1987), often known as the ‘Brundtland Report’, after its chair, the then Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The report used the term ‘sustainable development’ widely and defined it as ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
    The report is said to have put sustainable development firmly into the political arena of international development thinking. Certainly, it has been translated into more than 24 languages (Finger, 1994) and its definition of the term continues to be that which is most widely used.
   In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the ‘Earth Summit’, took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, it was the largest ever international conference held, with over 170 governments represented  and a further 2,500 NGOs and 8,000 accredited journalists attending (O’Riordan, 2000). The central aim was to identify the principles of an agenda for action towards sustainable development in the future.
    The challenge was seen to require consensus at the highest level, so that, for the first time, heads of state gathered to consider the environment. By this time, the term ‘sustainable development’ had also ‘gained a currency well beyond the confines of global environmental organisations’ 
   Certainly in the developed world, the substantial media attention given to the serious environmental disturbances surrounding forest fires in Indonesia, flooding in the Americas, China and Bangladesh, and typhoons in South-East Asia, for example, brought questions of conservation and ideas of sustainability into the public vocabulary. In the fields of development and the environment, an evident consensus was emerging that sustainable development was an important rallying point for research and action and a desirable policy objective which should be striven for.
   However, it was evident through the decade of the 1990s, that there was substantial debate and contestation concerning the meaning and practice of sustainable development. For example, whilst the primary output of the Rio Conference, the huge ‘Agenda 21’ document, carried much political authority and moral force (Mather and Chapman, 1995) important tensions were evident through the proceedings at Rio such as between the environmental concerns of rich and poor countries, between those who wished to exploit resources and those who wished to conserve them, and between the development needs of current generations and those of the future. For some, the term ‘sustainable development’ has subsequently been
redefined so many times and used to cover so many aspects of society–environment relationships that there are now ‘doubts on whether
anything good can ever be agreed. 
   For others,sustainable development is an idea that ‘makes a difference’ precisely because it is contested, requires debate and compromise and because it challenges both researchers and policy-makers (McNeill, 2000).
 2_ What is sustainable development?
    In 2002, 104 heads of state once again met in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).The global challenge of sustainability is now understood to lie in the complex interdependencies of environmental, social and economic development. New understanding has emerged of the linkages between environmental resources and conflict and the threats to environment of globalisation (as well as opportunities) as discussed in more detail here. In addition, a much more diverse range of interest groups was engaged in activities at Johannesburg than at Rio. In particular, there were many more non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the developing world representing issues of human rights, social justice and business accountability, for example. These activities suggested new ways of
addressing sustainable development at a global level and a ‘more decentralized understanding of where change comes from.
The concept of sustainable development
    Literally, sustainable development refers to maintaining development over time. By the early 1990s, it was suggested that there were more than 70 definitions of sustainable development in circulation
Definitions of sustainable development
‘In principle, such an optimal (sustainable growth) policy would seek to maintain an “acceptable” rate of growth in per-capita real incomes without depleting the national capital asset stock or the natural environmental asset stock.’
‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’
(World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: 43)