The Imperatives of Sustainable Development: Needs, Justice, Limits

Thirty years ago, the UN report Our Common Future placed sustainable development firmly on the international agenda. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development takes the ethical foundations of Our Common Future and builds a model that emphasizes three equally important moral imperatives – satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respecting environmental limits. This model suggests sustainability themes and assigns thresholds to them, thereby defining the space within which sustainable development can be achieved.

The authors accept that there is no single pathway to the sustainable development space. Different countries face different challenges and must follow different pathways. This perspective is applied to all countries to determine whether the thresholds of the sustainability themes selected have been met, now and in the past. The authors build on the extensive literature on needs, equity, justice, environmental science, ecology, and economics, and show how the three moral imperatives can guide policymaking. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development synthesizes past reasoning, summarizes the present debate, and provides a clear direction for future thinking.

This book will be essential reading for everyone interested in the future of sustainable development and in the complex environmental and social issues involved.

Erling Holden is Professor in the Renewable Energy Program at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway; and Professor at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.

Kristin Linnerud is a Senior Research Fellow at CICERO, Center for International Climate and Environment Research, Oslo, Norway.

David Banister is Professor Emeritus of Transport Studies at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK.

Valeria Jana Schwanitz is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway.

August Wierling is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Sogndal, Norway.