Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ongoing East-West conflict. Soviets and Americans each claimed that their
respective political systems guaranteed Third World nations' sovereignty in
different ways, but the quasi-colonial material relationship undercut such
claims. Beginning in 1955, a number of developing nations, following the lead
of powerful governments in India and Egypt, began to make a coordinated
and concerted effort to at once capitalize materially on the East-West compe-
tition for Third World allegiance and reassert their political independence
from the two superpowers. This “nonaligned movement” worked through
the U.N. General Assembly to secure aid for economic development during
the U.N. Development Decade of the 1960s. In the wake of this success, these
same developing nations demanded that efforts to address global environ-
mental problems at the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment
in Stockholm also include concerns over economic development.
10
Sustainable development was a Western, capitalist answer to those
demands. As described in the Brundtland Report, sustainable develop-
ment offered a way for the traditional organs of development aid— multi-
national banks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank,
and other independent and nationally funded aid agencies— to at once
distribute capital to promote the democratic capitalist system and to satisfy
complaints about the equity of that system levied by left-leaning critics.
Sustainable development also addressed concerns over environmental
degradation raised both by Western nations and, importantly, by Third
World citizens themselves. Sustainable development, the WCED claimed,
should guide growth in all countries, “developed or developing, market ori-
ented [code for capitalist] or centrally planned [code for communist].”
11
But
the Brundtland Report made it clear that the concept would best thrive in
a flexible, capitalist world. As the Soviet Union's ability to influence Third
World development declined in the early 1980s, the sustainable develop-
ment paradigm came to serve both as a mechanism for institutionalizing
the triumph of the global capitalist system and as a check on that system's
excesses. It also became the dominant framework in which to understand
potential solutions to the problem of global warming.
rio and the end of the cold War
The concept of sustainable development entwined with the politics of
global warming in the run-up to the most important event in international
