A Triptych Software Development Paradigm - Correct System Design: Recent Insights and Advances - page 33

the other hand, would appear to assume and even necessitate continual economic
growth and ignore the question of ecological constraints or \carrying capacity".
When these two concepts are put together, a very dierent one emerges, and the
result is much more than the sum of the parts. It is therefore a multi-dimensional
concept, and it must be addressed at various levels simultaneously. Sustainability
may be divide into three types: social, ecological and economic. The ecological
denition is perhaps the clearest and most straightforward, measuring physical
and biological processes and the continued functioning of ecosystems. Economic
denitions are sharply contested between those who emphasize the \limits" to
growth and carrying capacity, [23] and those who see essentially no limits [24].
Similar to global environmental change, sustainable development remains rst
and foremost a social issue. Although the precise geo-spheric/bio-spheric \limits"
of the planet are unknown, it is suggested here that the limits to the globe's
Sustainability for humans are more urgently social than they are physical. In
other words, we will reach the social limits of Sustainability before we reach the
physical ones. Thus, our focus should be on society-based solutions for managing
the multiple aspects of global change rather than on technology-based ones. It
is important to emphasize the human aspect of sustainable development | for
example, institutional and political constraints.
Any conclusions about the meaning of sustainable development remain de-
pendent on considerations of context and spatial and time delimitations. At a
global level, the following set of denitions serves well:

In the narrowest sense, global Sustainability means indenite sur-
vival of the human species across all the regions of the world... A broader
sense of the meaning species that virtually all humans, once born, live
to adulthood and that their lives have quality beyond mere biological sur-
vival... the broadest sense of global Sustainability includes the persistence
of all components of the biosphere, even those with no apparent benet
to humanity [25].

4 Sustainable Development | A Domain Analysis

We analyze the concept of sustainable development. The analysis is decomposed
into a number of parts.

4.1 Development

Development is about resources: be they natural resources, monies people, equip-
ment, capabilities, or other. \Raw" development is (like) a function: from a set
of resources to a set of resources:

type
R
value
D 0 :R R !