The Concept of Sustainability
Sustainable development, or its shorthand version
sustainability, was rooted with the 1972 UN Confer-
ence on the Human Environment which debated
which was more important: environmental protection
or human development. The debates at Stockholm
gave birth to the notion that both environmental pro-
tection and economic development were inextricably
linked. That idea was refined through extensive dis-
cussions in UN circles over the many years that fol-
lowed (Blackburn 2007).
In 1987 the Brundtland Commission, a group ap-
pointed by the UN to propose strategies for improving
human well-being without threatening the environ-
ment published its report containing the definition of
sustainability most widely used today: Development
that meets the need of the present without compro-
mising the ability of future generations to meet their
own needs (World Commission on Environment and
Development 1987).
In 1997, John Elkington, introduced a definitional
term drawn from financial accounting: the triple bot-
tom line (TBL). By this he meant that to reach sus-
tainability, one must achieve not only economic
“bottom-line” performance but environmental and
social performance as well. The TBL of economic per-
formance, environmental quality, and social justice
was an approach of preserving capitalism while ad-
dressing the global decline in natural resources and an
emerging middle class in developing countries.
The concept of sustainable development led to the
first Earth Summit – the UN Conference on Environ-
ment and Economic Development (Rio de Janeiro
1992)- and to Agenda 21 – a blueprint or global action
plan for sustainable development in the 21st century