The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

Sustainable development and ecological modernisation

8.1 The Brundtland Commission

The United Nations General Assembly

established the World Commission on

Environment and Development in 1983 in

response to growing concerns about both

environmental degradation and the economic

crisis. The Commission, chaired by Gro Harlem

Brundtland, the Norwegian prime minister,

consulted widely for four years, soliciting

reports from expert bodies and holding public

meetings in several countries. In 1987 it

produced its final report,Our Common Future,

popularly known as the Brundtland Report

(WCED 1987 ), which popularised the concept

Sustainable development

To understand the Commission’s approach

to sustainable development, it is important to

be aware of the political context in which it

operated. Since the 1972 Stockholm

Conference there had been growing awareness

of the severity of environmental problems,

accentuated by new worries about the global

problems of climate change, ozone depletion

and biodiversity loss. However, the

environmental agenda had been largely

hijacked by the affluent North. Meanwhile,

poorer countries in the South were

experiencing major economic problems with

the collapse in commodity prices, the debt

crisis and economic stagnation all contributing

to worsening poverty (and environmental

degradation). Against this background the

continuing East–West tensions associated with

the Cold War raised serious security concerns.

This political context explains why the

Commission deliberately designed sustainable

development as abridgingconcept that could

unite apparently diverse and conflicting

interests and policy concerns (Meadowcroft

2000 ). Specifically, it sought to bring together

the environmental agenda of the North with the

developmental agenda of the South; hence the

title of the final report,Our Common Future.

8.2 Agenda 21

Agenda 21 (UNCED 1992 ) provides the

blueprint for implementing sustainable

development agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit

(and approved by over 170 nations). This

substantial document covers an enormous

number of environment and development

issues, with forty chapters ranging from

‘Changing Consumption Patterns’ and

‘Combating Deforestation’ to ‘Children and

Youth in Sustainable Development’ and

‘Strengthening the Role of Farmers’. Indeed, a

key feature of Agenda 21 is that it does not

confine itself to the traditional agenda of

environmental degradation and conservation,

but devotes considerable attention to the

political, economic and financial aspects of

sustainable development. Thus twenty-five of

the forty chapters focus on non-ecological

issues.

Agenda 21 website: http://www.un.org/esa/

sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/

agenda21toc.htm.

of Implementation (see Box8.3), although it has few powers to force com-
pliance. Most industrialised countries have published national sustainable
development strategies (J ̈anicke and J ̈orgens 1998 ; Lafferty and Meadowcroft
2000a)and many local authorities have launched Local Agenda 21 strategies
(Lafferty 2001 ).