ABSTRACT
Sustainability is fundamentally about the choices that people1 make and the associated consequences. Ismail Serageldin (1993) notes, “People are the instruments and benefi ciaries, as well as the victims, of all development activities”(p. 2). Sustainability and sustainable development are many things to many people and are viewed variously as a rubric, vision, philosophy, mission, goal, mandate, principle, marketing ploy, constraint, criteria, and movement. The Global Development Research Center reports more than 100 defi nitions of sustainability and sustainable development (Srinivas, 2004). In a recent Oregonian article, Amy Wang (2004) proclaimed that “sustainability should not be a rigid doctrine that we impose at any cost, but instead a liquid concept that we pour down the path of least resistance” (p. 26). In a more scholarly approach, Carlos Castro (2004) declares that the notion of sustainable development “has become one of the most ubiquitous, contested, and indispensable concepts of our time . . . [and] has been defi ned primarily by the mainstream tradition of economic analysis, which tends to marginalize the issue of ecological sustainability” (p. 195). William Clark, Robert Kates, Alan McGowan, and Timothy O’Riordan (2005) declare that “science and policy for sustainable development analyzes the problems, places, and people where environment and development come together, illuminating concerns from the local to the global” (p. 2).
