The Challenges of Development

Abstract

Introduction In March 1987, the Brundtland Commission submitted its report on strategies for securing sustainable world development to the United Nations General Assembly. Four years in the making, Our Common Future by Gro Harlem Brundtland and her commissioners offered the world a diagnosis of the ills facing humanity and laid out a vision for building a future which was ‘more prosperous, just and secure’. The central idea of Our Common Future was that of sustainable development, a framework for integrating environmental policies and development strategies. Thus: sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present, without compromising the ability to meet those of the future. Far from requiring the cessation of economic growth, it recognises that the problems of poverty and underdevelopment cannot be solved unless we have a new era of growth in which countries of the global South play a large role and reap large benefits. Anthropogenic climate change was a relatively low-key issue in 1987 (see Chapter 2: The Discovery of Climate Change ), emerging only slowly from its scientific heartland and still the subject of quite specialist and elite discourses. Yet Our Common Future addressed nearly all of the dilemmas that climate change has brought into sharper focus over the intervening twenty years. The language of sustainable development has been increasingly deployed in debates about climate change; for example the interdependence between the environmental, economic and social dimensions of global change; bringing the well-being of future generations forward into debates about the responsibilities of the present generation; and paying attention to the institutional (in-)adequacies of a globalising world.