Title:	HANDBOOK OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:	Giles Atkinson Simon Dietz Eric Neumayer
Keywords:	Development
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	Edward Elgar
Description:	This book has, at its heart, a concern with taking stock, twenty years on from the influential Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987), of the concept of sustainable development and its implications for the conduct of public policy. There is little doubt about the prominence of the term ‘sustainable development’ in contemporary debates about environmental and resources policy specifically and development policy more generally. Indeed, if any- thing the term itself has suffered from overuse alternatively as a panacea for all modern ills or as a meaningless catch-all theme to which all policy challenges (no matter of what complexion) are somehow inextricably linked. Nor is there consensus about what sustainable development is, which has led to another source of criticism. All this has led some critics to dismiss the concept altogether as one further example of the triumph of rhetoric over substance. Such criticisms are understandable but ultimately undeserved and, in reflecting within these pages on what sustainable development is, how it can be achieved and how it can be measured, it is the aim of this volume to provide ample demonstration of this. What we can conclude from the contributions that follow is that while sustainable development does indeed imply a broad research and policy agenda (both in terms of its scale and its scope), it is also an agenda that is far more coherent than might appear to be the case at first glance. Much of this coherency stems from a shared concern about the development path that developed and developing countries (as well as the world as a whole) are on. For us, as others, this is the essential difference between saying that some action is ‘undesirable’ and saying that it is ‘unsus- tainable’. That is, undesirable actions may warrant the attentions of policy makers but are not necessarily the domain of concern about sustainable development
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/26586
ISBN:	978 1 84376 577 6
Appears in Collections:	Regional and Local Development Studies

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