ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more broadly at the role of institutions in empowering people. It discusses participatory development, the development of opportunity, democracy, decentralization of power and the significance of central governments in fostering or hindering these aims. The concept of sustainable development embodies a belief that people should be able to alter and improve their lives in accordance with criteria which take account of the needs of others and which protect the planet and future generations. Thus people’s rights and responsibilities form the crux of any discussion of sustainability. In the end, the opportunity for people’s participation in any society is determined by the quality of civil and political rights that they are accorded: in a word, political freedom. At the beginning of the 1990s, capitalist democracy appears to have emerged the victor from more than four decades of global confrontation with socialist central planning.
