ABSTRACT
In the years surrounding the Rio Summit of 1992, the apparition of sustainable development appeared on the international stage and was warmly greeted by the majority of the world’s governments. It has remained a prominent objective ever since. The ambiguity of the term is infamous and has been the motivation for both its widespread adoption and the frustration over to its progress. There is plenty, perhaps too much, debate around what sustainability or sustainable development implies, which has been usefully disaggregated by Jacobs (1995) in his suggestion that we should conceive of sustainable development on two levels. The first is the level of vague principle, akin to freedom and democracy, that is almost universally agreed (although not by all, see for example, Beckerman, 1994) and the second a level of interpretation or implementation, where there is a high degree of contestation. The first of these levels is potentially less problematic, providing the ‘vision-thing’, which has, on occasion, acted as a powerful energising force for the adoption of national and regional sustainability strategies. The second level is where the sustainability paradigm faces it’s key challenges as it is here that difficult trade-offs have to be made and where opposition from vested economic and ideological interests have to be confronted. Despite these problems, it is clearly only through implementation that sustainable development can begin to prove its worth and display its long-term relevance.
