Abstract
It has now been a decade since the United Nations-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) published Our Common Future. How time flies when you’re having fun. The Brundtland report popularized the concept of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.1 In the years after the publication of Our Common Future, the concept of sustainable development seemed to offer at least a tenuous reconciliation of the need for continued economic development with the realization that if development involves the technological trajectory followed by the industrialized countries, generating enough income for the poorer five-sixths of the world’s population may entail various forms of ecological catastrophe, on scales ranging from the local to the transnational.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 43.
The best non-technical discussion of these issues in the literature remains Frances Cairncross, Costing the Earth: The Challenge for Governments, the Opportunities for Business (London: Economist Books, 1991): 37–53.
For more technical treatments, see David Pearce and Giles Atkinson, ‘Capital Theory and the Measurement of Weak Sustainability’, Ecological Economics, 8 (1993): 103–8;
David Pearce and Giles Atkinson, ‘Measuring Sustainable Development’, in Daniel Bromley (ed.), The Handbook of Environmental Economics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995): 166–81.
Richard Kazis and Richard Grossman, Fear At Work: Job Blackmail, Labor and the Environment (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982).
Brigid McMenamin, ‘Environmental Imperialism’, Forbes, 157, 10 (20 May 1996): 132.
Journal of Canadian Studies, 31, 1 (Spring, 1996).
Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).
Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State (New York: Free Press, 1995): 41.
WCED, Our Common Future: 67–70. The figure cited is from United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 45.
Among many contributions to this debate see Derek Churchill and Richard Worthington, ‘The North American Free Trade Agreement and the Environment’, in Frank Fischer and Michael Black (eds), Greening Environmental Policy: The Politics of a Sustainable Future (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995): 87–103;
Herman Daly and Robert Goodland, ‘An ecological-economic assessment of deregulation of international commerce under GATT’, Ecological Economics, 9 (1994): 73–92;
Ted Schrecker and Jean Dalgleish (eds), Growth, Trade and Environmental Values (London, ON: Westminster Institute, 1994). It is important to note that many commentators, although not all, are far more sceptical about that compatibility of continued trade liberalization with ecological protection and sustainable development objectives than was the Brundtland Commission. See WCED, Our Common Future: 78–84.
World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 50–3.
Eric Helleiner, ‘Freeing Money: Why Have States Been More Willing to Liberalize Capital Controls than Trade Barriers?’ Policy Sciences, 27, 4 (1994): 309–10.
A conspicuous exception is James K. Boyce, ‘Equity and the Environment: Social Justice Today as a Prerequisite for Sustainability in the Future’, Alternatives: Perspectives on Society, Technology and Environment, 21, 1 (January/February 1995): 12–17.
Jeffry Frieden, ‘Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance’, International Organization, 45 (1991): 425–53; Helleiner, ‘Freeing Money’: 299–318;
Eric Helleiner, ‘Explaining the Globalization of Financial Markets: Bringing States Back In’, Review of International Political Economy, 2 (1995): 315–41.
As appears to have been the case with respect to the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico; see Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, ‘War and Peso’, New Statesman & Society, 8, 341 (24 February 1995): 18–20.
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987): 70.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schrecker, T. (1997). Introduction: Sustainability, Globalization and Moral Imagination. In: Schrecker, T. (eds) Surviving Globalism. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25648-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25648-8_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-25650-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25648-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)