ABSTRACT
Sustainable development has achieved broad recognition within many sectors of society, particularly in the North. The codification in the widely cited Brundtland Report (Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987; see Chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion) served as a catalyst to begin rethinking the logjam between environmental preservation and economic development. Sustainable development, or meeting the needs of the present generation without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their needs, has come to permeate policy documents in international and national venues while being widely adopted as an institutional and educational priority among universities, nonprofit actors, and various human-service institutions. Corporations have also taken up the call, though critics have referred to their participation as juggling “people, planet and profit” with the last category subsuming the first two (see Jickling & Wals, 2008, p. 2). The 1992 Rio Earth Summit introduced sustainable development to a global audience of advocates and policymakers while raising awareness about the need to address mounting environmental concerns. These concerns were compounded by the collapse of state-economic systems of the former Soviet Union, whose demise spawned new national economies in eastern Europe and western Asia. Emerging markets complicated and pressed on an increasingly liberalized global economic sphere, all while China liberalized their economy in the context of a rapidly expanding Asia.
