ABSTRACT
Sustainable development entails coping with and overcoming a nexus of complex, dynamically interdependent, contradictory, and seemingly overwhelming problems and issues. The way forward for the sustainable development goals and sustainable development governance depends on providing the resources and enabling an environment necessary for their success. This chapter explores the evolutionary and dialectical processes by which two originally distinct concepts—development and environment—have become integrated in this one overarching principle. It focuses on the dynamic interplay of governmental, intergovernmental, and non-state actors. Both the development and environment areas have been distinctive in the extraordinary degree to which civil society actors have been actively engaged. The chapter explores the nature and evolution of governance structures and processes and how they have played themselves out on the global political scene. As the sustainability concept slowly gained traction after the Rio "Earth Summit," the political dynamics of sustainable development governance was mostly dominated by the "second" and "third" UNs.
