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Like democracy and globalization, the concept of sustainable development has become one of the most ubiquitous, contested, and indispensable concepts of our time. Although the concept was first introduced in response to environmental concerns, it has been defined primarily by the mainstream tradition of economic analysis, which tends to marginalize the issue of ecological sustainability itself. Recently, however, scholars advancing various critical perspectives challenged the mainstream economic analysis of sustainable development. This essay examines the presuppositions, logic, and major themes of mainstream sustainable development theory, primarily within economics, and explores the critiques of mainstream analysis offered by various poststructuralist cultural theorists and ecological Marxists. Although considered to be superior in their greater emphasis on ecological sustainability, neither of these critical approaches is deemed adequate in itself. The argument here instead leads to the conception that an adequate approach to sustainable development requires combining insights from various critical approaches and perspectives.
Keywords: sustainable development; poverty; environment; Agenda 21; World Bank
Sustainable development is the dominant paradigm of development at the regional and local levels in the countries of the periphery as well as the center. With few exceptions, development theorists, environmentalists, academics, aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations favor it. It is perhaps one of the few areas of agreement between these disparate groups. Yet what is sustainable development? Mainstream analyses of this concept and its significance differ enormously from those of critical-poststructuralist and Marxist-approaches. The purpose of this analysis is to reveal some of the hidden presuppositions of the mainstream approach and to provide insights into critical alternatives. I argue that neither of the two major critical approaches has a "monopoly on truth" at present. Rather, a diversity of theoretical alternatives is needed, reflecting the combined and overlapping strengths of the critical traditions considered here-each of which is aimed at ecological sustainability in a way that the dominant paradigm is not.
During the 1970s, there was a great deal of skepticism about the desirability of growth from an ecological point of view (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1974; Schumacher, 1973). The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1974) argues for limiting population and economic growth in not only the developed world but also the underdeveloped world. Schumacher (1973) argued in Small Ix Beautiful that...