Читать книгу The Political Economy of the BRICS Countries - Группа авторов - Страница 61

Sustainable development is about ensuring that the current generations of human beings live in such a fashion that all other living beings, including future generations of human beings, can live within the limited resources available on the planet earth. Human development, with amazing growth in material goods and services aided by technology as well as the energy obtained from fossil fuels, has been quite dramatic in the last 200 years or so. However, it is being increasingly realized that in the process of material growth and development, human beings have wrought severe damage on the physical and natural environment. Some of the damages have been considered to be irreversible and global in nature, such as climate change and its effects.

Hence, sustainable development is a global problem that must be tackled through an international consensus on strategies and policies. Within this bigger rubric of global interventions, there are some problems that are local in character and require national or even municipal interventions. For instance, the preservation of biodiversity or some endangered species may be a national problem requiring national policies for conservation and protection. Another example of a local problem could be a factory emitting noxious fumes that cause some serious lung diseases. This is a problem with limited effects around the physical neighborhood of the factory. A simple solution would be to close it down, or force it to change its technology, or at least pay a price for the social health costs its pollution creates.

Given the way our modern societies are organized, nation states do have an important role to play in ensuring the world moves on to a sustainable development path. First of all, when a global problem is being tackled, say for instance global warming and climate change, a global consensus on the policy or actions that are to be taken is required. However, nation states have to agree to the solution and undertake their own parts of the action, consistent with the global decisions. Second, their own national policies can go a long way in efficiently tackling local problems of environmental conservation and protection. Third, a government can play a very critical role in creating an enabling atmosphere where individuals and communities make plans and undertake innovative solutions at the grassroots level. Fourth, the nation state can create social features of sustainable living in terms of improved well-being measured in terms of more employment, higher incomes, higher educational attainments, and better health and sanitation facilities. Finally, the nation state might influence, through mass communication techniques, a better sensitization of citizens to the importance of sustainable development. This in turn would nurture an individual’s commitment to changing one’s own lifestyle and consumption habits. Hence even though sustainable development is a global issue, national policies and interventions are an important part of any solution that will drive the world economy on to a sustainable pathway (Sarkar and Sinha, 2018).

In the next section, we discuss some of the sustainability issues that are germane to a nation state and its governance. This will give us a better understanding of the importance of the nations referred to as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.