ABSTRACT
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, in his report to the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, drew attention to the major challenges facing the nations of the world. He pointed to the urgent need to ensure the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on the planet by taking decisive action on climate change, the water crisis, the protection of soils, the preservation of forests, fisheries, and biodiversity, and the need to build a new ethic of stewardship. ‘We have been plundering our children’s future heritage to pay for environmentally unsustainable practices in the present’, he said (Annan 2000: 55). Annan’s call was in essence an appeal for economics to adopt sustainability as its overarching organizing principle. In previous chapters we have outlined a response to this appeal in terms of an ecological economics which emphasizes not only market processes, but also ecological processes – both human and natural. Within this context we have found a role for both democratic deliberation on the one hand and environmental rights on the other. In this chapter we bring these strands together with others, and suggest some directions for action.
