Sustainable development and ecological modernisationdemocratisation of institutions and a shift away from consumerist lifestyles.
Other themes, such as the acceptance of the capitalist economic system and
theneed for continued economic growth, seem to accept the status quo.
The core concepts also beg many hoary but unresolved political questions.
Forexample, what are basic needs? Should they reflect the needs of citizens
in the USA or Bangladesh? How far will the living standards of rich indus-
trialised nations have to be readjusted to achieve sustainable consumption
patterns? Different answers to these questions produce conflicting inter-
pretations of sustainable development. These ambiguities have not been
helped by the absence of a detailed framework in the Brundtland Report
tohelp individual countries turn these broad principles into practical pol-
icy measures. Consequently, policymakers have been able to pick and choose
from the pot-pourri of often contradictory ideas in the Agenda 21 document
while the endless stream of reports and books seeking to give flesh to sus-
tainable development has fuelled disagreement as much as it has brought
consensus.
The proliferation of meanings is not just an exercise in academic or prac-
tical clarification but a highly political process of ‘different interests with
different substantive concerns trying to stake their claims in the sustainable
development territory’ (Dryzek 2005 :146). As it has become more impor-
tant, key interests have tried to define sustainable development to suit their
ownpurposes. Thus an African government might emphasise the need for
global redistribution of wealth from North to South in order to eliminate
poverty, while a transnational corporation might insist that sustainability
is impossible without vibrant economic growth to conquer poverty, stabilise
population levels, provide for human welfare and, of course, maintain profit
levels.
With so much ambiguity surrounding the meaning of sustainable devel-
opment, there have been several attempts to construct typologies distin-
guishing different ‘versions’ of sustainable development (Pearce et al. 1993 ;
O’Riordan 1996 ;Baker 2006 ,inter alia). Most typologies identify ‘weak’ and
‘strong’ forms of sustainable development, with some normatively outlining
atransitionfromweakertostronger versions. Baker ( 2006 ) has designed a
‘ladder’ of sustainable development (see Table8.1), which is a useful heuris-
tic device to identify different forms or discourses of sustainable develop-
ment. The ladder ‘identifies the political scenarios and policy implications
associated with each rung’, and links them to different philosophical beliefs
about nature (ibid.: 28). The bottom rung is the technocentricpollution control
approach, which believes that human ingenuity will solve any environmen-
tal problem. It assumes the existence of an environmental ‘Kuznets curve’ in
which the high pollution associated with early industrialisation will decline
as economic development continues into a post-industrial stage.Weak sus-
tainable developmentaims to integrate capitalist growth and environmental
concerns. Its objective is to keep the overall stock of human capital and nat-
ural capital (i.e. natural resources and ecological processes) constant over