ABSTRACT
For 30 years, local, national and global development has been challenged by the imperatives of economic restructuring and environmental sustainability. This challenge has proven to be a formidable one. Each imperative represents profoundly complex changes while debate and policy responses have often been complicated by the framing of the relationships between them in the jarring, antagonistic terms of a negative sum trade-off summarized as 'more economy and less environment', or vice versa. Even in the affluent west (and Japan), economy and environment have posed lasting, politically charged conundrums. Indeed, in the early 1970s, as governments in these countries sought to give priority to environmental concerns, their economies simultaneously became significantly more volatile while unemployment rates returned to levels not witnessed since the 1930s. Beyond the affluent west (and Japan), in countries with fewer resources and less democratic forms of governance, the priorities of economy and environment have appeared to be even more daunting, and the negative sum trade-off between the two even more stark.
