Publisher's Synopsis
Sustainable development has become the primary focus of national and international environmental policy. Designed as a common global strategy for industrial and industrializing countries, some see it as offering environmental protection without sacrificing economic growth. But sustainability has become a hotly contested concept. As its critics point out, sustainable development seeks to achieve environmental protection without confronting the tough choices facing modern corporate-industrial society and its consumption-driven way of life. To what degree is the existing system itself responsible for the environmental crisis? Can we achieve a sustainable future merely by tagging environmental requirements onto the existing industrial order? Or must we address the political-economic system itself?
Broadly committed to the goals and values of a green political perspective, the chapters in this book show the environmental crisis to be essentially a political-economic crisis. The pursuit of sustainability cannot proceed without significant changes in our economic enterprises, public institutions and personal lives. Reaching beyond the contradictions of sustainable development, the authors explore the kinds of political arrangements needed to throw open sustainability to wide-ranging debate, both national and international. They advance alternative environmental policy-making processes designed to forge a genuine political consensus around these questions, as well as institutional, cultural and behavioural strategies capable of translating it into effective policy solutions. Fundamental to these strategies, a progressive commitment to participatory democracy is seen to provide the surest footing for both the articulation and realization of a sustainable future.
