Sustainomics and sustainable development

Published: May 7, 2007, 2:16 pm

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Basic Framework

Sustainomics seeks to provide a comprehensive, practical framework for making present and future development efforts more sustainable. Sustainable development has become well accepted worldwide, following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg. World decision makers are now looking at this approach to address many critical policy issues.

The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987) defined sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Among many subsequent definitions, the sustainable development triangle in Figure 1 shows one widely-accepted concept proposed by Munasinghe, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. It encompasses three major perspectives—economic, social, and environmental.

Figure 1: Sustainable development triangle – key elements and interconnections (corners, sides, center). (Source: adapted from Munasinghe 1992a, 1994a)

Historically, the development of the industrialized world focused on material production. Not surprisingly, most industrialized and developing nations have pursued the economic goal of increasing output and growth during the twentieth century. Thus, traditional development was strongly associated with economic growth, with some social aspects as well (see the discussion on poverty and equity, below). By the early 1960s the lack of ‘trickle-down’ benefits to the growing numbers of poor in developing countries, resulted in greater efforts to improve income distribution directly. Consequently, the development paradigm shifted towards equitable growth, where social (distributional) objectives, especially poverty alleviation, were recognized to be as important as economic efficiency. By the early 1980s, a large body of evidence had accumulated that environmental degradation was a major barrier to development, and new proactive safeguards were introduced (such as the environmental assessments). Thus, protection of the environment became the third major element of sustainable development.

Sustainomics has been described by Munasinghe as “a transdisciplinary, integrative, comprehensive, balanced, heuristic and practical framework for making development more sustainable”. It draws on the following basic principles and methods.

Making development more sustainable (MDMS)

The step-by-step approach of “making development more sustainable” (MDMS) becomes the prime objective, while sustainable development is defined as a process (rather than an end point). Since the precise definition of sustainable development remains an elusive and perhaps unreachable goal, a less ambitious strategy that merely seeks to make development more sustainable does offer greater promise. Such a gradient-based method is more practical and permits us to address urgent priorities without delay, because many unsustainable activities are easier to recognize and eliminate. Although MDMS is incremental, it does not imply any limitation in scope (e.g., restricted time horizon or geographic area – see item (c) below). While pursuing the MDMS approach, we also follow a parallel track by continuing our efforts to better define the ultimate goal of sustainable development. Finally, MDMS encourages us to keep future options open and seek robust strategies which meet multiple contingencies and increase resilience.

Sustainable development triangle and balanced viewpoint

Sustainable development requires balanced and integrated analysis from three main perspectives: social, economic, and environmental (Figure 1). Each viewpoint (represented by a vertex) corresponds to a domain (and system) that has its own distinct driving forces and objectives. The economic view is geared towards improving human welfare, primarily through increases in the consumption of goods and services. The environmental domain focuses on protection of the integrity and resilience of ecological systems. The social domain emphasizes the enrichment of human relationships and achievement of individual and group aspirations. The interactions among domains (represented by the sides) are also important to ensure balanced assessment of trade-offs and synergies that might exist among the three dimensions. Issues like poverty may be placed in the center of the triangle to re-emphasize that they are linked to all three dimensions.

Transcending conventional boundaries for better integration

The analysis transcends conventional boundaries imposed by discipline, space, time, stakeholder viewpoints, and operationality. The scope is broadened and extended in all domains, to ensure a comprehensive view. Trans-disciplinary analysis must cover economics, social science and ecology, as well as many other disciplines—since sustainable development itself involves every aspect of human activity, including complex interactions among socioeconomic, ecological and physical systems. Spatial analysis must range from the global to the very local, while the time horizon may extend to decades or centuries. Participation of all stakeholders (including government, private sector and civil society) through inclusion, empowerment and consultation, is important. The analysis needs to encompass the full operational cycle from data gathering to practical policy implementation and monitoring of outcomes. Applying the principle of subsidiarity will make overall governance more effective.

Full cycle application of practical analytical tools

A variety of practical analytical tools also facilitate governance over the full cycle from initial data gathering to ultimate policy implementation.

Two complementary approaches based on “optimality” and “durability” may be used to integrate and synthesize across economic, social and environmental domains, within an integrated assessment modeling framework. An issues-implementation transformation map (IITM) helps to translate issues in the environmental and social domains, into the conventional national economic planning and implementing mechanisms within line ministries and departments.

Restructuring the pattern of development to make economic growth more sustainable is explained through a “policy tunneling” model, especially useful in developing countries, where poverty alleviation will require continued increases in income and consumption. Other practical tools include the Action Impact Matrix (AIM), integrated national economic-environmental accounting (SEEA), sustainable development assessment (SDA), environmental valuation, extended cost-benefit analysis (CBA), multi-criteria analysis (MCA), integrated assessment models (IAMs), and so on. A range of sustainable development indicators help to measure progress and make choices at various levels of aggregation.

In the sustainomics framework, sustainable development is described as a process for improving the range of opportunities that will enable individual human beings and communities to achieve their aspirations and full potential over a sustained period of time, while maintaining the resilience of economic, social and environmental systems. Thus, sustainable development requires both increases in adaptive capacity and opportunities for improving economic, social and ecological systems. According to Gunderson and Holling, improving adaptive capacity increases resilience and sustainability. Expanding the set of opportunities for improvement gives rise to development. Heuristic behavior of individual organisms and systems facilitates learning, the testing of new processes, adaptation, and improvement.

The sustainomics framework recognizes that balance is needed in the relative emphasis placed on traditional development (which is more appealing to the South) versus sustainability (which is emphasised by the North). The approach seeks continuing improvements in the present quality of life at a lower intensity of resource use, thus leaving behind for future generations an undiminished stock of productive assets (i.e., manufactured, natural and social capital) that will improve their quality of life.

Elements of Sustainable Development

Economic Aspects

Economic progress is often evaluated in terms of welfare (or utility) – measured as willingness to pay for goods and services consumed. Thus, many economic policies typically seek to enhance income, and induce more efficient production and consumption of goods and services. The stability of prices and employment are among other important objectives.

Economic efficiency helps maximize income. It is measured against the ideal of Pareto optimality, which encourages actions that will improve the welfare of at least one individual without worsening the situation of anyone else. The idealized, perfectly competitive economy is an important (Pareto optimal) benchmark, where (efficient) market prices play a key role in both allocating productive resources to maximize output, and ensuring optimal consumption choices which maximize consumer utility. If significant economic distortions are present, appropriate shadow prices may be used. The well-known cost-benefit criterion accepts all projects whose net benefits are positive (i.e., aggregate benefits exceed costs). It is based on the weaker ‘quasi’ Pareto condition, which assumes that such net benefits could be redistributed from potential gainers to losers—leaving no one worse off than before. More generally, interpersonal comparisons of welfare are fraught with difficulty – both within and across nations, and over time (e.g., the value of human life).

According to Hicks, economic sustainability seeks to maximize the flow of income that could be generated while at least maintaining the stock of assets (or capital) which yield these beneficial outputs. Economic efficiency continues to optimize both production and consumption. Problems arise in identifying the kinds of capital to be maintained (e.g., manufactured, natural, human and social capital), and their substitutability. Often, it is difficult to value these assets (especially ecological and social resources) and the services they provide. Even key economic assets may be overlooked, especially in situations where non-market based transactions are important. Meanwhile, the equation of welfare with monetary income and consumption has been challenged for many years. More recently, researchers (e.g., Maslow 1970) have identified hierarchies of needs that provide psychic satisfaction, beyond mere goods and services.

The issues of uncertainty, irreversibility and catastrophic collapse pose additional difficulties, in determining dynamically efficient development paths. Many common microeconomic approaches rely on marginal analysis (e.g., comparing incremental costs and benefits of economic activities), which assumes smoothly changing variables. They are inappropriate for analyzing large changes, discontinuous phenomena, and sudden transitions among multiple equilibria. Recent work has begun to explore the behavior of large, non-linear, dynamic and chaotic systems, and concepts like system vulnerability and resilience.

Environmental Aspects

Development in the environmental sense is a recent concern relating to the need to manage scarce natural resources in a prudent manner – because human welfare ultimately depends on ecological services. Ignoring safe ecological limits could undermine long-run prospects for development. Recent literature covers links among environment, growth and sustainable development.

Environmental sustainability focuses on overall viability and normal functioning of natural systems. For ecological systems, sustainability is defined by a comprehensive, multiscale, dynamic, hierarchical measure of resilience, vigor and organization. Resilience is the ability of ecosystems to persist despite external shocks, i.e., the amount of disruption that will cause an ecosystem to switch from one system state to another. An ecosystem state is defined by its internal structure and set of mutually re-inforcing processes. Vigor is associated with the primary productivity or growth of an ecosystem. Organization depends on both complexity and structure of the system. For example, a multicellular organism like a human being is more highly organized than a single-celled amoeba. Higher states of organization imply lower levels of entropy. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics requires that sustainability of complex organisms and systems depend on the use of low-entropy energy derived from their environment, which is returned as (less useful) high-entropy energy.

Natural resource degradation, pollution and loss of biodiversity are detrimental because they reduce resilience, increase vulnerability, and undermine system health. The notions of a safe threshold and carrying capacity are important, to avoid catastrophic ecosystem collapse. Sustainability may be also linked to the normal functioning and longevity of a nested hierarchy of ecological and socioeconomic systems, ordered according to scale – e.g., a human community would consist of many individuals, who are themselves composed of a large number of discrete cells. Gunderson and Holling use the term ‘panarchy’ to denote such a hierarchy of systems and their adaptive cycles across scales. A system at a given level is able to operate in its stable (sustainable) mode, because it is protected by slower and more conservative changes in the super-system above it, while being simultaneously invigorated and energized by faster changes taking place in sub-systems below it.

Sustainable development is not necessarily synonymous with maintaining the ecological status quo. A coupled ecological-socioeconomic system could evolve, while maintaining levels of biodiversity that guarantee resilience of ecosystems on which future human consumption and production depend.

Social Aspects

Social development usually refers to improvements in both individual well-being and overall social welfare resulting from increases in social capital – typically, the accumulation of capacity enabling individuals and communities to work together. According to North, the institutional component of social capital involves formal laws as well as traditional or informal understandings that govern behavior, while the organizational component is embodied in individuals and communities operating within these institutional arrangements. The quantity and quality of social interactions underlying human existence (including levels of mutual trust, and shared social norms and values), determine the stock of social capital. Thus, social capital grows with greater use and erodes through disuse, unlike economic and environmental capital, which are depreciated or depleted by use. We note that some forms of social capital may be harmful (e.g., cooperation within criminal gangs).

There is also an important element of equity and poverty alleviation (see below). Thus, the social dimension of development includes protective strategies that reduce vulnerability, improve equity and ensure that basic needs are met. Future social development will require socio-political institutions that can adapt to meet the challenges of globalization. The latter often undermines traditional coping mechanisms that have evolved in the past (especially to protect disadvantaged groups).

Social sustainability parallels environmental sustainability. Reducing vulnerability and maintaining the ability of socio-cultural systems to withstand shocks, is also important. Enhancing human capital (through education) and strengthening social values, institutions, and governance are key aspects. Many harmful changes occur slowly, and their long-term effects are often overlooked in socio-economic analysis. Preserving cultural capital and diversity worldwide, strengthening social cohesion, and reducing destructive conflicts, are integral elements of this approach. An important aspect involves empowerment and broader participation through subsidiarity – i.e., decentralization of decision-making to the lowest (or most local) level at which it is still effective. In summary, for both ecological and socioeconomic systems, the emphasis is on improving system health and its dynamic ability to adapt to change across a range of spatial and temporal scales, rather than the conservation of some ‘ideal’ static state.

Poverty and Equity

Poverty and equity are two important issues, which have social, economic and environmental dimensions (see Figure 1). Over 2.8 billion people (almost half the global population) live on less than US$2 per day, and 1.2 billion barely survive on under US$1 per day. The top 20 percentile of the world’s population consumes about 83 percent of total output, while the bottom 20 percentile consumes only 1.4 percent. Income disparities are worsening – the per capita ratio between the richest and the poorest 20 percentile groups was 30 to 1 in 1960 and over 80 to 1 by 1995.

Equity is an ethical and usually people-oriented concept with primarily social, and some economic and environmental dimensions. It focuses on the basic fairness of both decision-making processes and outcomes. Equity may be assessed in terms of several generic approaches, including parity, proportionality, priority, utilitarianism, and Rawlsian distributive justice. Societies normally seek to achieve equity (or fairness) by balancing and combining several of these criteria.

Sen states that poverty alleviation, entitlements, improved income distribution and intra-generational (or spatial) equity are key aspects of economic policies seeking to increase overall human welfare. Broadly speaking, economic efficiency provides guidance on producing and consuming goods and services more efficiently, but is unable to provide a means of choosing (from a social perspective) among alternative patterns of consumption which are efficient. Equity principles provide better tools for making judgments about such choices.

Social equity is also linked to sustainability, because grossly unfair distributions of income and social benefits are unlikely to be lasting in the long run. Equity will be strengthened by enhancing pluralism and grass-roots participation in decision-making, and by empowering disadvantaged groups. Arrow et al state that in the long-term, inter-generational equity is vital, where both equity and efficiency aspects are affected by the economic discount rate. The sustainomics framework outlines methods of reconciling potential conflicts between equity and economic efficiency.

Equity in the environmental sense has received recent attention because of disproportionately greater environmental damages suffered by poor groups. Thus, poverty alleviation efforts are being broadened (beyond raising monetary incomes), to address the degraded environmental and social conditions facing the poor.

In summary, both equity and poverty have economic, as well as social and environmental dimensions, and therefore, they need to be assessed using a comprehensive set of indicators. Economic policies should emphasise expanding employment and gainful opportunities for poor people through growth, improving access to markets, and increasing both assets and education. Social policies need to focus on empowerment and inclusion, by making institutions more responsive to the poor and removing barriers that exclude disadvantaged groups. Environmental measures to help poor people might seek to reduce their vulnerability to disasters, crop failures, loss of employment, sickness, economic shocks, etc. Thus, an important objective of poverty alleviation is to provide poor people with assets (e.g., social, natural and economic), that will reduce their vulnerability, and increase the capacity for both short-run coping and longer-run adaptation to external shocks. The foregoing ideas blend with the sustainable livelihoods approach, which focuses on access to portfolios of assets, capacity to withstand shocks, gainful employment, and social processes.

An even broader non-anthropocentric approach to equity involves the concept of fairness in the treatment of non-human forms of life or even inanimate nature. One view asserts that humans have the responsibility of prudent ‘stewardship’ over nature, which goes beyond mere rights of usage.

Consistent integration of economic, social and environmental considerations

We begin by comparing the concepts of ecological, social and economic sustainability. Maintaining the set of opportunities is as important as the preservation of the asset base. The preservation of biodiversity maintains options and allows the system to retain resilience by protecting it from external shocks, in the same manner that preservation of the capital stock protects economic assets for future consumption. Differences emerge because under the economic definition, a society that consumes its fixed capital without replacement is not sustainable, whereas using an ecological approach, loss of resilience implies a reduction in the self-organization of the system, but not necessarily a loss in productivity. In the case of social systems, resilience depends on the capacity of human societies to adapt and continue functioning in the face of stress and shocks. Socio-cultural and ecological sustainability are linked because of the organizational similarities between human societies and ecological systems, and the parallels between biodiversity and cultural diversity. In the longer-term, the concept of co-evolution of social, economic and ecological systems within a larger, more complex adaptive system, provides useful insights regarding harmonious integration of the various elements of sustainable development (see Figure 1).

According to Munasinghe, it is important to integrate and reconcile the economic, social and environmental aspects within a holistic and balanced sustainable development framework. Two broad approaches, based on the concepts of optimality and durability, are relevant for this purpose.

Optimality

The optimality-based approach has been widely used in economic analysis to generally maximize welfare (or utility), subject to the requirement that the stock of productive assets (or welfare itself) is non-decreasing in the long-term. This assumption is common to most sustainable economic growth models. The essence of the approach is illustrated by the simple example of maximization of the flow of aggregate welfare (W), cumulatively discounted over infinite time (t), as represented by the expression:

Here, W is a function of C (consumption), and Z (set of other relevant variables), while r is the discount rate. Side constraints may be imposed to satisfy sustainability needs – e.g., non-decreasing stocks of productive assets.

Some ecological models also optimize variables related to system vigor, like energy use, nutrient flow, or biomass production. In economic models, utility is often measured in terms of net benefits of economic activities. More sophisticated economic optimization approaches include environmental and social variables (e.g., by attempting to value environmental externalities, system resilience, etc). However, given the difficulties of quantifying and valuing many such ‘non-economic’ assets, the costs and benefits associated with market-based activities tend to dominate in most economic optimization models.

Basically, the optimal growth path maximizes economic output, while the sustainability requirement is met by ensuring non-decreasing stocks of assets. Some analysts support a ‘strong sustainability’ constraint, which requires separate preservation of each category of critical asset (e.g., manufactured, natural, socio-cultural and human capital), assuming that they are complements rather than substitutes. Other researchers have argued in favor of ‘weak sustainability,’ which seeks to maintain the aggregate monetary value of the total stock of assets, assuming that various asset types are substitutes and may be valued.

Side constraints are often necessary, because the optimization approach (including economic efficiency and valuation) may not be easily applied to ecological objectives like protecting biodiversity and improving resilience, or to social goals such as promoting equity and empowerment. Such environmental and social variables cannot be easily incorporated within a single valued objective function based on cost-benefit analysis. Thus, techniques like multi-criteria analysis may be required to facilitate trade-offs among non-commensurable variables. Moreover, the lagged price system might not anticipate irreversible environmental and social harm, and non-linear system responses that could lead to catastrophic collapse. Therefore, non-economic indicators of environmental and social status are helpful. The constraints on critical environmental and social indicators are proxies representing safe thresholds, which help to maintain the viability of those systems. Risk and uncertainty also necessitate the use of decision analysis tools.

Durability

The second broad integrative approach focuses primarily on sustaining the quality of life – e.g., by satisfying environmental, social and economic sustainability requirements. Such a framework favors ‘durable’ development paths that permit growth, but are not necessarily economically optimal. There is more willingness to trade off some economic optimality for the sake of greater safety (i.e., risk aversion), in order to stay within critical environmental, social and technical limits.

Economic system durability might require consumption levels to be maintained – i.e., per capita consumption that never falls below some minimum level, or is non-declining. Environmental and social durability requirements may be expressed in terms of indicators of ‘state’ that monitor the longevity and normal functioning of complex ecological, social and techno-economic systems. There is the likelihood of further interaction here due to linkages between the sustainability of social, ecological and techno-economic systems – e.g., social disruption and conflict could exacerbate damage to both ecological and techno-economic systems, and vice versa. By contrast, long-standing social norms in stable traditional societies have helped to protect the environment.

Durability encourages a holistic systemic viewpoint, which is important in sustainomics analysis. The self-organizing and internal structure of complex systems often make ‘the whole more durable (and valuable) than the sum of the parts’. A narrow definition of efficiency based on marginal analysis of individual components may be misleading. For example, it is more difficult to value the integrated functional diversity in a forest ecosystem than the individual species of trees and animals. Therefore, the former is more likely to fall victim to market failure (as an externality). Furthermore, even where correct environmental shadow prices prevail, some analysts point out that economic cost minimization could lead to homogenization and consequent reductions in system diversity. Broader systems analysis also helps to identify the benefits of cooperative structures and behavior, which a more partial analysis may neglect.

The possibility of many durable paths favors simulation-based methods, including consideration of alternative futures (rather than one optimal result). This approach parallels research on integrating human actors into ecological models, including multiple-agent modeling to account for heterogeneous behavior, bounded rationality leading to different perceptions and biases, and social interactions involving imitation, reciprocity and comparison.

In the durability approach, maintaining asset stocks enhances system sustainability, because various forms of capital are a bulwark that decreases vulnerability to external shocks and reduces irreversible harm, rather than merely producing more economic outputs. System vulnerability, resilience, vigor, organization and ability to adapt will depend dynamically on the capital endowment as well as the magnitude and rate of change of a shock.

Indicators

The status of asset stocks helps to assess whether development is becoming more sustainable. Therefore, it is important to identify relevant economic, social and environmental indicators, at different levels of aggregation ranging from the global/macro to local/micro. Indicators must be comprehensive in scope, multi-dimensional in nature (where appropriate), and account for spatial differences.

Measuring economic, environmental, human and social capital also raises various problems. Manufactured capital may be estimated using conventional neoclassical economic analysis. Market prices are useful when economic distortions are relatively low, while shadow prices could be applied in cases where market prices are unreliable. Natural capital needs to be quantified first in terms of key physical attributes. Typically, damage to natural capital may be assessed by the level of air pollution (e.g., concentrations of suspended particulate, sulfur dioxide or greenhouse gases), water pollution (e.g., biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) or chemical oxygen demand (COD)), and land degradation (e.g., soil erosion or deforestation). Then this physical damage could be valued using environmental and resource economics techniques. Human resource stocks are often measured by educational levels, productivity and earning potential. Social capital is more difficult to assess. Putnam described it as ‘horizontal associations’ among people, or social networks and associated behavioral norms and values, which affect the productivity of communities. Social capital may be viewed more broadly in terms of social structures, which facilitate the activities of agents in society – including both horizontal and vertical associations (like firms). An even wider definition is implied by the institutional approach that includes not only the mainly informal relationships implied by the earlier two views, but also more formal frameworks provided by governments, political systems, and legal provisions. Recent work has sought to distinguish between social and political capital (i.e., the networks of power and influence that link individuals and communities to the higher levels of decision-making).

Complementarity and convergence of optimal and durable approaches

The two approaches are often complementary in national economic management. For example, economy-wide policies involving both fiscal and monetary measures (e.g., taxes, subsidies, interest and foreign exchange rates) might be optimized using quantitative macroeconomic models. Nevertheless, decision-makers inevitably modify these economically ‘optimal’ policies before implementing them, to take into account other ‘durable’ sociopolitical considerations (like poverty alleviation, regional factors, etc.), which facilitate governance and stability. The determination of an appropriate target trajectory for future global greenhouse gas emissions provides another useful illustration of the interplay of durability and optimality. Climate change researchers are currently exploring the application of large and complex integrated assessment models that include coupled sub-models representing various ecological, geophysical and socioeconomic systems—with scope to test both optimality and durability approaches.

In practice, the two approaches point towards convergent solutions. First, wastes ought to be generated at rates within the assimilative capacity of the environment. Second, scarce renewable resources should be utilized at rates compatible with the natural rate of regeneration. Third, non-renewable resource use rates should depend on the substitutability between these resources and technological progress. Both wastes and natural resource inputs might be minimized, by moving from linear throughput to closed loop (or recycling) mode. Finally, inter- and intra-generational equity (especially poverty alleviation), pluralistic and consultative decision-making, and enhanced social values and institutions, are important additional aspects.

Tools for Sustainable Development Analysis and Assessment

Some important tools for sustainable development analysis and assessment include: the Action Impact Matrix (AIM) for prioritising the economic, environmental and social interactions of various macroeconomic and sectoral development policies; advanced cost-benefit analysis (CBA) including economic valuation of environmental and social impacts; multi-criteria analysis (MCA), especially in cases where some impacts cannot be easily quantified in monetary terms; and green accounting.

The Action Impact Matrix (AIM) process is the key link from initial data gathering to practical policy application and feedback. Critical sustainable development concerns are incorporated into conventional national development strategy and goals in two main ways: an upward link where sustainable development issues are embedded in the macro-strategy of a country via the medium- to long-term development path; and a downward link where sustainable development issues are integrated into the national development strategy in the short- to medium-term, by carrying out sustainable development assessments (SDA) of micro-level projects and policies.

Sustainable Development Assessment (SDA) is another important tool to ensure balanced analysis of both development and sustainability concerns in both policies and projects. The ‘economic’ component of SDA is based on conventional economic and financial analysis (including cost-benefit analysis). The other two key components are environmental and social assessment (EA and SA). SDA also includes poverty assessment. Thus, SDA seeks to integrate and harmonize economic, environmental and social analyses.

Green accounting includes material and energy balances (MEB) and greened national accounts, notably the System of integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA). Physical MEB assess material throughput and the dematerialization of the economy as an ecological sustainability concept. The monetary part of the SEEA measures produced and natural capital maintenance, which reflects an economic sustainability concept.

Sustainomics and sustainable development

Contents

Basic Framework

Making development more sustainable (MDMS)

Sustainable development triangle and balanced viewpoint

Transcending conventional boundaries for better integration

Full cycle application of practical analytical tools

Elements of Sustainable Development

Economic Aspects

Environmental Aspects

Social Aspects

Poverty and Equity

Consistent integration of economic, social and environmental considerations

Optimality

Durability

Indicators

Complementarity and convergence of optimal and durable approaches

Tools for Sustainable Development Analysis and Assessment

Further Reading

Citation

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