ABSTRACT

To achieve sustainable development, we need a model that links this ethical statement to practical guidelines for global and national policymaking. This chapter presents a five-step normative model of sustainable development. The first step acknowledges that sustainable development is a normative value system, which consists of three moral imperatives. The second step presents theories that give weight to those imperatives. The third step derives key themes from those theories. The fourth step suggests headline indicators for each key theme. The fifth step assigns thresholds to the indicators. These thresholds define the sustainable development space within which humans can safely operate.