Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ment agencies, led by the UN and the IUCN, but with the support and critique of
scholars, non-governmental organisations and bi- and multilateral aid agencies in
Europe and the USA. Sustainable development's place in mainstream development
thought was secured by the 1987 publication of
Our Common Future
(the so-called
Brundtland report), the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio
de Janeiro in 1992, and the associated release of Agenda 21, which served as an
agenda for sustainable development in the 21st century (Conca and Dabelko, 1998;
WCED, 1987). These events led to a fl uorescence of scholarship, activism and initia-
tives on the part of academics, non-governmental organisations, bilateral develop-
mental agencies and multilateral lending institutions. These efforts also led to
considerable critique of the notion as hollow rhetoric and oxymoronic, as discourse
of sustainable development was adopted by development organisations, Third
World activists, transnational corporations and even the US Army. A concept that
appeals to such a broad range of seemingly irreconcilable interests, critics argued,
in reality stands for very little indeed (Redclift, 2005).
As its many critics have pointed out, the concept of sustainable development is
at once under-theorised and impossibly broad in scope, having run into something
of an intellectual cul-de-sac from which it has yet to be extracted. For this reason,
Sneddon (2000) argues that geographers could more usefully focus on the concept
of
sustainability
, which, as he notes, has more specifi c applications to social and
ecological systems. For Sneddon, a conceptual decoupling of sustainability from
sustainable development would have the benefi t of introducing specifi city and poten-
tial for critical evaluation into muddled debates regarding development and eco-
nomic models. As Sneddon (2000, p. 525) argues,
The advantage of 'sustainability' lies in how researchers invoking it must reference
it against specifi c geographic, temporal and socioecological contexts. This context-
specifi city forces the crucial questions: what exactly is being sustained, at what scale,
by and for whom, and using what institutional mechanisms?
A focus on sustainability trains analytical attention on specifi c social and ecological
processes: rates of resource extraction vis-à-vis resource regeneration (in the case of
water, wood or fi sh, for instance), or the maintenance (or otherwise) of biodiversity.
Inherent to this approach, moreover, is a focus on particular geographies of sustain-
ability: the spaces and scales in which social and ecological processes occur and
intersect, and at which the sustainability of these processes can and should be evalu-
ated. Thus, a focus on sustainability, more than sustainable development, opens
terrain for explicitly geographical analysis.
Such analysis has been undertaken in attempts to quantify the ecological impacts
and sustainability of economic activities at the urban and national scales. Perhaps
the best known of these indexes is the 'Ecological Footprint' (Wackernagel and Rees,
1996), an attempt to measure the area of land and water necessary to support a
given population's patterns of resource consumption and waste emission (see www.
footprintnetwork.org). Another major sustainability measure, the Environmental
Sustainability Index (ESI), was developed jointly by the Yale University Center for
Environmental Law and Policy and the Columbia University Center for Interna-
tional Earth Science Information Network (http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/es/esi/).
Like the Ecological Footprint, the ESI quantifi es the sustainability of resource use
according to country-level indicators, assigning scores and rankings to individual
