ABSTRACT
Sustainable development is, pre-eminently, a political concept. Politics is centred on recognizing competing interests and values, and the mechanism whereby attempts are made at reconciliation. Finding a balance – between the interests of humans and the rest of nature; between present and future generations; between the North and the South; between economic prosperity and environmental protection – provides the crucial political context of, and the subject matter of the academic political science contribution to, sustainable development. There is still a tendency for issues of development to be separate from the study of sustainability or environmentalism in the study of politics. This is partly a result of academic turf disputes and the needs of specialization. Equally significantly, it reflects the uneasy relationship between development and environmental protection. Sustainable development represents a political compromise, offering the prospect of continuing development particularly in the South at the same time as sustainability or environmental protection. For some radical or ‘dark’ Greens, if development is taken to mean economic growth then it becomes incompatible with any meaningful sense of environmental protection.
