Introduction

This book was written from a sense of acute unease with the rhetoric that has accompanied 'sustainable development' since the report of the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, was published (WCED 1987). My unease was compounded by the events during and after the Earth Summit, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This story has been told elsewhere (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). My purpose in this book is to examine the assumptions behind our understanding of 'sustainable development', and the idea that environmental management can, and should, be practised at a global level.