ABSTRACT
The international community introduced Sustainable Development as a reaction to the failure of traditional neoliberal development, with a recognition that we must start to consider the impact of development on the natural environment and aim for intergenerational ecological sustainability. Development is not a new concept. It has its roots in early thinking on progress in the 18th century with philosophers like Nicolas de Condorcet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Auguste Comte. K. Gardner and D. Lewis argued that it started with Larrain, who reasoned for the idea of social and economic progress in his “age of competitive capitalism,” 1700–1860. Modern development started at the end of World War II when former US President Harry Truman took office. The Western neoliberal development expectation that countries on the periphery must focus on economic growth has resulted in an exploitative and unbalanced unilateral resource flow that has supported the proliferation of neoliberal thinking that continues today.
