PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Following the UNCED Rio Earth Summit, Agenda 21 became the international
blueprint for sustainability. Energy efficiency, environmental protection, inter- and intragenerational
equity and a long-term horizon emerged as major themes. An increasing
number of international organizations began to subscribe to the concept, with major
players including the United Nations Environment Programme and other UN agencies,
the World Bank, the OECD as well as the European Union. To operationalize the
concept without having one single commonly accepted definition proved difficult for
these international organizations. The OCED, for example, circumvented the definitional
problem by instead defining a series of policy goals forming the OECD’s core
Sustainable Development Strategy. The list of nine goals combines typical sustainability
calls ‘to promote worldwide economic growth,’ or ‘to integrate economic and
environmental policies’ with other developmental agendas such as ‘to control population
growth where it is excessive,’ or ‘to upgrade human and institutional resources’ (quoted
in Gillespie 1998:95). The post-Brundtland phase was thus a time where the term
sustainability was extensively broadened, rephrased and adapted. Both Pezzey (1989)
and Pearce et al. (1989) provide longish lists with different definitions of sustainability
developed in the 1980s, and the inflation of definitions certainly continued throughout the
1990s. In their 1997 volume evaluating the politics of sustainable development within
the European Union, Baker et al. develop a so-called “ladder of sustainable development
in advanced industrial societies” that - among other things - distinguishes between
approaches with anthropocentric versus eccocentric/biocentric philosophical
underpinnings. Meanwhile, McManus (1996) differentiates as many as nine general
approaches to sustainability. However, Lafferty (1995:223-224, mentioned in Baker,