Читать книгу Global Issues - Kristen A. Hite - Страница 18

At first, global discussions about development, environment, and social issues occurred on very separate tracks. The 1972 Stockholm Conference on Human Environment was seen by many poor countries as an effort by rich countries to constrain the development of the rest of the world under the auspices of environmental protection. The view at that time was that environmental protection was a luxury that could only be afforded once a country had developed. Besides, countries argued, most of the environmental problems were located in the handful of countries that had been able to accumulate wealth as they industrialized without the controls. But as environmental problems became more widespread, so did discussions about how they related to the development process itself.

In the 1970s an awareness grew – in both the “less developed” nations and the “developed” industrialized nations – that some of the social and environmental changes which were coming with economic growth were undesirable. More people were coming to understand that for economic development to result in happier human beings, attention would have to be paid to the effects that economic growth was having on social and environmental factors. Were an adequate number of satisfying and challenging jobs being created? Were adequate housing, healthcare, and education available? Did women have equal opportunities? Were people living and working in a healthy and pleasant environment? Did people have enough nutritious food to eat? Every country is deficient in some of these factors and, in this context, is still “developing” in some capacity.

By the 1980s, concerns were mounting about the social and environmental implications of more and more countries following a development model based on ever increasing rates of production and consumption. By 1987, the concept of “sustainable development” emerged in a landmark report by the Brundtland Commission called Our Common Future. The term means that economic growth in the present should not take place in such a manner that it reduces the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Economic growth and efforts to improve the living standards of the few or the many should be sustainable; in other words, they should be able to be continued without undermining the conditions that permit life on Earth, thus making future development impossible or much more difficult. The term represents an effort to tie economic growth, the protection of the environment, and social development together, a recognition that future economic growth is possible only if the basic systems that make life possible on Earth are not harmed. It also implies a recognition that the economy, the environment, and social conditions are all important, that economic development and the reduction of poverty are essential to the protection of the environment.

The United Nations environment conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 made the term “sustainable development” widely known around the world. Sustainable development was endorsed by the conference and a new organization – the Commission on Sustainable Development – was set up under the United Nations to monitor the progress nations are making to achieve it. But it still was not a mainstream concept for the development community.

Meanwhile, the social dimensions of development were becoming more acute. The elevated profile of the “Right to Development” from its introduction in 1981⁷ made it clear that development needed to be inclusive, not just economically lucrative in the context of raising a country’s average GNP. The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing elevated gender issues to a new level. The International Labor Organization saw a proliferation of global labor agreements to address some of the workforce challenges of industrialized economic growth. The World Bank and other multilateral development banks began adopting new policies and procedures to address unacceptable impacts to communities caught in the crosshairs of well‐intentioned development projects. And amid all of this, poverty remained persistent and pervasive, even as the twentieth‐century development model continued to churn out ever‐increasing rates of production and consumption.