2.1.4 The Sustainable Development concept
Sustainable development (SD) has been discussed extensively in the theoretical literature since the concept was adopted as an overarching goal of economic and social development by UN agencies, by the Agenda 21 nations, and by many local governments and private-sector actors. The SD literature largely emerged as a reaction to a growing interest in considering the interactions and potential conflicts between economic development and the environment. SD was defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development in the report Our Common Future as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987).
The literature includes many alternative theoretical and applied definitions of sustainable development. The theoretical work spans hundreds of studies that are based on economic theory, complex systems approaches, ecological science and other approaches that derive conditions for how development paths can meet SD criteria. Furthermore, the SD literature emphasizes a number of key social justice issues including inter- and intra-generational equity. These issues are dealt with in Section 2.6.
Since a comprehensive discussion of the theoretical literature on sustainable development is beyond the scope of this report, a pragmatic approach limits us to consider how development can be made more sustainable.
The debate on sustainability has generated a great deal of research and policy discussion on the meaning, measurability and feasibility of sustainable development. Despite the intrinsic ambiguity in the concept of sustainability, it is now perceived as an irreducible holistic concept where economic, social, and environmental issues are interdependent dimensions that must be approached within a unified framework (Hardi and Barg, 1997; Dresner, 2002; Meadows, 1998). However, the interpretation and valuation of these dimensions have given rise to a diversity of approaches.
A growing body of concepts and models, which explores reality from different angles and in a variety of contexts, has emerged in recent years in response to the inability of normal disciplinary science to deal with complexity and systems – the challenges of sustainability. The outlines of this new framework, known under the loose term of ‘Systems Thinking’, are, by their very nature, transdisciplinary and synthetic (Kay and Foster, 1999). An international group of ecologists, economists, social scientists and mathematicians has laid the principles and basis of an integrative theory of systems change (Holling 2001). This new theory is based on the idea that systems of nature and human systems, as well as combined human and nature systems and social-ecological systems, are interlinked in never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal within hierarchical structures (Holling et al., 2002).
A core element in the economic literature on SD is the focus on growth and the use of man-made, natural, and social capital. The fact that there are three different types of capital that can contribute to economic growth has led to a distinction between weak and strong sustainability, as discussed by Pearce and Turner (1990), and Rennings and Wiggering (1997). Weak sustainability describes a situation where it is assumed that the total capital is maintained and that the three different elements of the capital stock can, to some extent, be used to substitute each other in a sustainable solution. On the other hand, strong sustainability requires each of the three types of capital to be maintained in its own right, at least at some minimum level. An example of an application of the strong sustainability concept is Herman Daly’s criteria, which state that renewable resources must be harvested at (or below) some predetermined stock level, and renewable substitutes must be developed to offset the use of exhaustible resources (Daly, 1990). Furthermore, pollution emissions should be limited to the assimilative capacity o