Foreign Affairs

January/February 2006

 

Recovering Sustainable Development
David G. Victor

Summary: Sustainable development -- the notion that boosting economic growth, protecting natural resources, and ensuring social justice can be complementary goals -- has lost much appeal over the past two decades, the victim of woolly thinking and interest-group politics. The concept can be relevant again, but only if its original purpose -- helping the poor live healthier lives on their own terms -- is restored.

DAVID G. VICTOR is Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the CFR report Climate Change: Debating America's Policy Options.

A FASHIONABLE NOTION

The concept of sustainable development first emerged from academic seminar rooms two decades ago, thanks to a best-selling report called Our Common Future. Put together by the World Commission on Environment and Development, the report argued that boosting the economy, protecting natural resources, and ensuring social justice are not conflicting but interwoven and complementary goals.

A healthful environment, the theory goes, provides the economy with essential natural resources. A thriving economy, in turn, allows society to invest in environmental protection and avoid injustices such as extreme poverty. And maintaining justice, by promoting freedom of opportunity and political participation, for example, ensures that natural resources are well managed and economic gains allocated fairly. Civilizations that have ignored these connections have suffered: consider the Easter Islanders, who by denuding their forests triggered a spiral of economic difficulties and strife that eventually led to their civilization's collapse.

Yet even as sustainable development has become conventional wisdom over the past two decades, something has gone horribly wrong. Because the concept stresses the interconnection of everything, it has been vulnerable to distortion by woolly thinking and has become a magnet for special interest groups. Human rights watchdogs, large chemical companies, small island nations, green architects, and nuclear power plant operators have attached themselves to the fashionable notion only to subvert it for their own ends. Instead of bringing together nature, the economy, and social justice, sustainable development has spawned overspecialized and largely meaningless checklists and targets. Particularly harmful has been a series of consensus-driven UN summits that have yielded broad and incoherent documents and policies. Sustainable development, the compass that was designed to show the way to just and viable economics, now swings in all directions.

This deterioration was probably unavoidable. But the slide matters, and not only because sustainable development has become a cover for inaction and a black hole for resources; it is also a wasted opportunity. The concept has gained such a powerful following over the past two decades that if it recovered its original meaning, it could become a guiding force for governments, firms, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Fixing this mess requires understanding how it came to be and recalibrating the compass so that it can reliably point in a single direction again.

THE PRICE OF FAME

One way to trace the slide of sustainable development is to follow the idea's degradation through the UN. After all, its earliest high-profile proponent, the World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, operated under a UN mandate. The UN General Assembly and the UN Secretariat were always at the forefront in championing Brundtland's vision. And today, the conferences, commissions, and task forces that constitute the sustainable development apparatus all find their focus within the UN system. What happens there is worth observing -- not because the UN is solely responsible for what has gone wrong, but because the organization reflects the aspirations and flaws of the players that are.

The trouble began at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, ...