Implementing Sustainable Development

Despite all the talk of sustainability, there has not been enough action to halt or reverse the impacts of climate change. Decades after the Rio Earth Summit and despite the many policies and commitments to move toward sustainable development, there continues to be a serious implementation gap. Implementing Sustainable Development focuses on the challenges of turning international commitments and policy promises into local action. Through global examples and cases, the authors examine not only the core principles, but also successful and failed efforts to address the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainable development. They systematically guide readers through the technical, legal, economic, administrative, political, ethical, and cultural feasibility of putting sustainable development solutions in place. Based on broad research, Claudia María Vargas and Phillip J. Cooper offer a practical and useful approach to identifying and addressing policy implementation challenges—what works, what doesn’t, and why. Features of this thoroughly revised second edition include: Dozens of case studies from the throughout the worldAn overview of the UN Sustainable Development GoalsAction-oriented solutions to the challenges of sustainable developmentCareful consideration of local and indigenous knowledgeKey issues of equity, equality, and the importance of community involvement

This book examines how governments in industrialised countries have engaged with the challenge of sustained development over the past decade. Analysis of initiatives undertaken by nine national governments and the European Union reveal important differences in the ways the international commitment to sustainable development has been received. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, political leaders from more than a hundred countries made a formal commitment to intensify efforts to resolve global environment and development problems and to strive for sustainable development. This volume examines how governments in the developed industrial world have responded to the challenge of sustainable development since it was catapulted into the international stage. It focuses on the central government engagement with sustainable development in Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. The study shows that sustainable development has been integrated into governmental idiom in most jurisdictions and has come to be associated with a series of changes to the structures and approached deployed to manage environmental problems. Yet, it also reveals significant differences of interpretation and priority, and in enthusiasm with which sustainable development has been received.