ABSTRACT
Sustainable development has increasingly stimulated interest among development practitioners, scholars, and politicians. This chapter presents the dialogue on the relevance of the sustainable development concept to improving human development. It describes the sustainable development in the context of governance with reference to African countries in general and Liberia in particular within a political economy framework. The chapter provides an effective operational meaning of sustainable development and presents an overview of the sustainable development challenges faced by most African countries. It discusses the Liberian situation, as a case study to provide an empirical content and provides brief preliminary insights of an evolving institutional framework in which sustainable development, defined and placed in a specific context, may be relevant to this imperative. The chapter suggests the pursuit of innovations that would ensure the effective implementation of appropriate strategies for inculcating a value system, promoting institutional stability, and undertaking constitutional reforms and capacity-building programs for institutional strengthening.
