Achieving Sustainable Development: The Centrality and Multiple Facets of Integrated Decisionmaking

The biggest challenge for sustainable development in coming decades will be to operationalize it: to make it occur, or to make an effective transition toward it, in communities, places, and businesses all over the world.Very few seriously question the problems that sustainable development is intended to address-growing environmental degradation and a growing gap between rich and poor.There is also greater understanding that sustainable development is based on a set of principles that would profoundly affect national and international governance.The relationships among these principles are less well understood, though.Much of the public and academic discussion concerning sustainable development focuses on intergenerational equity' and the precautionary approach or principle 2 alone.Worse still, given the current and increasing magnitude of the world's environmental and poverty problems, relatively little progress has been made toward sustainable development in the past decade.In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, countries of the world agreed to Agenda 21, an ambitious plan of action for realizing sustainable development.'Sustainable development is development that protects and even restores the environment rather than degrades or pollutes it.It is intended to address the mutually