Sustainable Mountain Development - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 597

to 1996, bringing together representatives of the governments of 62 countries and the
European Union.
The IAGM also underlined the importance of nongovernmental involvement, recog-
nizing that the process which led to Chapter 13—in contrast with many other chapters
of Agenda 21 —was driven by a relatively small number of academics and development
experts, mainly from industrialized countries. Thus, parallel to the intergovernmental
process, a nongovernmental process developed. In 1995, an international nongovern-
mental consultation in Lima, Peru, brought together 110 participants from 40 coun-
tries. This led to the establishment of the Mountain Forum, a global network of nongov-
ernmental, intergovernmental, scientific, and private-sector organizations and individu-
als, with the mission to promote “global action toward equitable and ecologically sus-
tainable mountain development” (Byers 1998). In Europe, after a questionnaire sent to
5,000 NGOs across the continent, in 16 languages, had achieved a 20 percent response
rate (Geoffre 1997), a nongovernmental consultation took place in France in 1996. The
100 participants, from 24 countries across Europe, developed recommendations to gov-
ernments and the European Union (ARPE/CIAPP 1996; Price 2003); the meeting also
led to the establishment of the European Mountain Forum, one of five regional struc-
tures within the Mountain Forum during the 1990s and 2000s.
FIGURE 12.1 Sustainable development involves three basic dimensions: economy, society, and eco-
logy, forming the “magic triangle” of sustainability. When applying the concept of sustainability,
two perspectives have to be clearly distinguished: the systems perspective, which focuses on im-
pacts (i.e., on processes within and among the three basic dimensions), and the normative per-
spective, which relates to the values assigned to these processes. The normative perspective al-
ways depends on a specific societal and temporal context. (From Wiesmann and Hurni 2011, ad-
apted from Wiesmann 1998.)