ABSTRACT
Sustainable development was codified for the first time in the World Conservation Strategy (WCS), a document prepared over a period of several years in the later 1970s by IUCN with finance provided by UNEP and the World Wildlife Fund (IUCN 1980). It was then further developed through the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Brundtland 1987), and the follow-up to the WCS, Caring for the Earth (IUCN 1991), before its appearance in Agenda 21 at the Rio Conference in 1992. These documents differ, but have a remarkably consistent core of ideas, a ‘mainstream’ that has persisted through the two decades between Stockholm and Rio (Adams 1995). At the heart of these documents is a vision of sustainable development strongly influenced by science, by ideas about wildlife conservation, by concerns about multilateral global economic relations, and by an emphasis on the rational management of resources to maximise human welfare. The stock from which all these mainstream documents descended, and the forum at which ideas of sustainable development were first brought onto the international agenda, was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in June 1972.
