Organization : Critical Actions : Intro to SD : SD Gateway

	Introduction to Sustainable Development
	Critical Actions

	Welcome

	Definitions

	Critical Actions

	Production
	Consumption
	Organization

	Characteristics

	Further Exploration

ENDA - This new approach says that local problems can be solved by local communities, by all groups in the community, including women and young people, working and taking decisions together. But there is nothing isolationist about this. The newly empowered local community, through democratic decision-making and problem-solving, matures into a body capable of interacting productively with the local authority and even with the state.

Earth Council - Sustainable development is government's core concern, but must not be only government's concern, and citizens should not believe that they can simply wait for change and blame government if it does not come. At the close of the 20th century it is the interaction and engagement of all of the sectors in society that create change.
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REC - While past environmental policy and management in Western countries, as well as in CEE and NIS countries, has tended to be divorced from economic policy, today growing experience and evidence show that a rather new set of policy instruments—economic instruments—can combine environmental and economic objectives.
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Organize Ourselves Differently

How we organize ourselves and establish rules to govern our actions will play a major role in determining whether we move toward more sustainable paths.

Good governance will require reforming decision-making processes to increase opportunities for public participation, including a wide variety of activities ranging from consultation hearings as part of an environmental impact assessment, to co-management of natural resources. In its deepest form, public participation seeks to involve civil society in all steps of planning, implementation and evaluation of policies and actions. Public participation can:

Help to establish good pathways for sustainable development
Enhance understanding and relationships
Increase eagerness to participate, leading to better implementation of decisions
Enrich the community and build social capital

Reducing corruption, the misuse of power for private benefit or advantage, is also necessary to achieve sustainable development. It has proven to be highly destructive since corruption leads to the disregard of public interest and warps competitive markets. It leads governments to intervene where they need not, and it undermines their ability to enact and implement policies in areas in which intervention is clearly needed—whether environmental regulation, health and safety regulation, social safety nets, macroeconomic stabilization, or contract enforcement. ¹

We govern our economies through a complex array of regulations, laws and market incentives. Unfortunately, tax structures, payments to producers, prices supports and the like function as perverse subsidies that have detrimental effects on both the economy and the environment. They are also often distributionally regressive, benefiting mostly the wealthy—often political interest groups—while draining the public budget. As recent studies from the Earth Council and the International Institute for Sustainable Development have noted, the world is spending nearly $1.5 trillion annually to subsidize its own destruction. ² That is twice as much as global military spending a year, and almost twice as large as the annual growth in the world's economy. Removing even a portion of these perverse subsidies would provide a large stimulus for sustainable development.

1. World Bank, "Helping countries combat corruption: The role of the World Bank," Anti-corruption knowledge resource center, (http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/corruptn/corrptn.pdf) (September 1997)

2. See The Van Lennep Programme on Economics and Sustainable Development (http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/econ/) and Norman Myers, Perverse subsidies: Tax $s undercutting our economies and environments alike, Winnipeg: IISD, 1998, (http://iisd.ca/pdf/perverse_subsidies.pdf)