Abstract
Given progress in policies for pursuing sustainable development, promoting commitment to thinking and acting more far-sightedly has become the primary strategic challenge. In the face of impatience, selfishness, uncertainty, analytical limitations, and vulnerability, strategies for promoting far-sightedness can be identified by assessing how these obstacles can be overcome. Strategies for creating or rescheduling tangible and deference rewards, realigning performance evaluations, implementing cognitive exercises, framing communications, altering decision-making processes, using self-restraint devices both to resist temptation and to enhance credibility, altering institutions to empower the patient, and stabilizing living conditions are the major categories for identifying and assessing the many strategies which arise out of both ordinary and constitutive policy initiatives.
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Notes
See Lasswell (1971, Chaps. 2 and 5) for an overview of the framework and criteria for these analytical tasks.
The best and most thorough treatise on the economic valuation of the environment and natural resources, Freeman (2003), reviews several economic methods for estimating “non-use value” that does not entail consumption by the individual valuing the existence of environmental or natural-resource aspects. Thus economic valuation recognizes that people can act on behalf of other people or even on behalf of non-human entities, whether particular species or the ecosystem per se.
Chile, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela introduced reforms in the fiscal relationships between the governments and major state enterprises that, at least for a period, led to more rational resource exploitation (Ascher 1999).
A useful framework for distinguishing these strategies is provided by Kronman 1985.
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Ascher, W. Long-term strategy for sustainable development: strategies to promote far-sighted action. Sustain Sci 1, 15–22 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-006-0001-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-006-0001-x