Sustainable Development in Brundtland and Beyond: How (Not) to Reconcile Material Wealth, Environmental Limits and Just Distribution

Abstract

Industrialization and massive use of fossil fuels made large-scale poverty unnecessary for the first time in human history. In the course of the twentieth century three goals emerged as broadly accepted central purposes of socioeconomic development: to increase the material well-being of people everywhere, especially of the poor (wealth), to improve global equity (distribution) and – beginning approximately in the 1960s – to safeguard the physical basis of all development by staying within the global environmental carrying capacity (limits). The inability of development theories prevalent in the 1970s to reconcile these goals gave rise to the concept of “sustainable development.” The Brundtland Commission struggled with the question of how to simultaneously address all three goals, integrating them to different degrees into their list of recommendations. Over a period of almost 3 years Commissioners met eight times to discuss relevant issues, ranging from population to energy, industry, international economic relations, and biodiversity. Most disagreements were tied to different views on how to deal with discrepancies of living conditions in different parts of the world. All Commissioners agreed that poverty was key to any solution. But this unanimity did not make the central dilemma go away: if poor countries needed to enjoy economic growth in order to reduce poverty but the growth of the entire global economy was eventually constrained by physical limits on a finite planet, logically questions of redistribution of income and wealth became part of agenda. However, this idea was patently unacceptable in industrialized societies where the concept of deserved wealth was deeply ingrained and where people’s expectation, political careers and the economic system relied heavily on ongoing economic growth. Perspectives also differed on the reasonable development choices for Southern societies. Should they reject the highconsumption routines practiced in the North or were they, on the contrary, entitled to enjoying similar material living standards before being lectured on low-impact life-styles? The idea of retaining a reformed system of “development” by making it “sustainable” was an effort to find a way out of this impasse. Subsequent international development initiatives have alternatively adopted and discarded different elements of this concept. Wealth has been the dominant goal to be endorsed, which often turned “sustainable development” into mere greenwashing. Limits were initially ignored but inevitably returned as the evidence regarding the reality of physical limits kept mounting, especially with regard to climate change. Distribution has received relatively least attention, but has also refused to disappear. Consumption, transfer of finances and technology and methods of automatic financing have been recurrent themes of discussions, both by those endorsing and those rejecting the need for redistribution. Thus, 30 years after the creation of the concept of “sustainable development” its key challenge of reconciling three conflicting goals remains as relevant as in the beginning. This paper argues that much of the fate of the twenty-first century will depend on how well humanity will succeed at finding a solution for this challenge.