The document discusses the history and key concepts of sustainable development:
1. The Brundtland Commission in 1983 first proposed strategies for sustainable development, defining it as development that meets present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own needs.
2. Major UN conferences on sustainable development include the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that produced agreements like Agenda 21 and the UNFCCC.
3. Sustainable development involves balancing social, economic, and environmental concerns, and requires ongoing efforts across many sectors of society.
18. SPHERES OF CONCERN KEY CHALLENGES/ SOURCES OF LITERATURE 1. Environmental context HOLISM AND COEVOLUTION To better understand how the environment and development interrelate we need to develop a holistic world view. Holism joins the fruits of a sociological imagination and a biogeophysical imagination. This challenge calls for new insights and theory-building about the interplay of nature (including entropy), history and power. Literature categories : 4. Environmental Science; 8. Environmental History & Human Geography; 10. Political ecology 2. Legal and institutional terrain EMPOWERMENT AND COMMUNITY-BUILDING An ecological perspective brings out aspects of social and political rights which the liberal paradigm has neglected. Instead of thinking about social justice only in terms of the equal treatment of equivalent units, it acknowledges the right of each community of people to a familiar habitat, like creatures in the natural world. It recognizes the attachments which bind people to each other and to places, and out of which evolve the unique meaning of each person's life (Marris,1982). Sustainable development requires new approaches that challenge not only economic rationality but also bureaucracies, in ways that encourage political pluralism and the participation by civil society in the management of its productive and vital processes (Leff 1993). This calls for calls for organizing struggles to democratize the workplace and the state administration so that substantive contents of an ecological progressive type can be put into the shell of liberal democracy (OConnor 1994). Literature categories : 1. Managerialism, policy and planning; 2. Social conditions, 3. Environmental law; 10. Political ecology
19. 3. Culture and civil society SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUITY Efforts to work out the conceptual, technical, and organizational bases for sustainability will be incomplete without explicit attention to the ethics and moral philosophy involved. How do calls for intergenerational equity relate to demands for intragenerational equity (taking into account class, gender and race )? Before we accept sustainable development as a new morality as well as a new economic strategy, we need to know what ecological, social, political, and personal values it serves, and how it reconciles the moral claims of human freedom, equality, and community with our obligations to individual animals and plants, species and ecosystems Literature categories : 7. Ecophilosophy, environmental values & ethics; 9. Utopianism, anarchism, & bioregionalism; 10. Political ecology 4. Economy and technology SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION Sustainable development calls for more than economic and technical adjustments. How we can promote technology, together with social learning and social change, necessary to bring our patterns of production, reproduction, and consumption into concert with the capacity of the ecosystem to perform life-giving functions over the long run--that is, the capacity to regenerate the raw material input and to absorb the waste outputs of the human economy; and in such a way that the process fosters intragenerational as well intergenerational equity. Literature categories : 5. Ecological design; 6. Ecological economics; 10. Political ecology SPHERES OF CONCERN KEY CHALLENGES/ SOURCES OF LITERATURE
