ABSTRACT
Sustainable development has become the core idiom framing international and national debates about environment and development. From the release of the report Our Common Future (1987) by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), sustainable development has been endorsed by world leaders on several occasions, most importantly at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and at the Johannesburg Summit in 2002. Sustainable development has also become a part of the conceptual framework of international organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank, and achieved a near-constitutional status in the European Union. In the countries we are studying, sustainable development has figured prominently on the political agenda, especially in Norway and Canada, and to some lesser extent in the United States (US) and Russia. However, even in the US and Russia, there are signs of an increasing focus on sustainable development.
