ABSTRACT
Promoting sustainable development opens up debates about our relationship with the natural world, about what constitutes social progress and about the character of development, both in the North and the South, in the present and into the future. These interrelated issues form the main themes of this book. The book explores the prospects for, and barriers to, the promotion of sustainable development in different socio-economic contexts: the high-consumption societies of the industrialized world, the Third World and the economies in transition in Eastern and Central Europe. The exploration is international in its focus, because it recognizes that promoting sustainable development is a quintessentially global task. In addition, particular efforts to promote sustainable development, including the funding, oversight and physical location of particular projects, usually take place at different locations and across different countries.
