Mathur Ritika Passi
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ONE<br />
Sustainable Development:<br />
Emergence of a Paradigm<br />
Vikrom <strong>Mathur</strong>, Senior Fellow, ORF | RITIKA PASSI, Associate Fellow & Project Editor, ORF<br />
Sustainable development(SD) is a<br />
Trojan Horse of an idea. SD has,<br />
over the years, subsumed within<br />
it multiple meanings advanced by<br />
multiple actors—meanings that<br />
have often masked underlying normative<br />
orientations, worldviews and interests. The<br />
definition of the Brundtland Commission—<br />
development that meets the needs of the<br />
present without compromising the ability of<br />
future generations to meet their needs—is<br />
the most frequently cited definition. No<br />
one can dispute such an aspiration. But an<br />
agreement on the notion of sustainability<br />
often breaks down when we begin thinking<br />
of how to implement development that is<br />
sustainable. With the world having formally<br />
adopted the post-2015 development<br />
agenda, the set of 17 goals and 169 targets<br />
known as the Sustainable Development<br />
Goals (SDGs), developing countries such<br />
as India need to unpack and interpret<br />
the development framework to ensure its<br />
relevance to their development needs and<br />
interests.<br />
It is therefore a critical moment, between<br />
adoption and execution, to underscore<br />
the importance of a national lens through<br />
which to understand and implement these<br />
goals. To this end, this edited volume:<br />
Unpacks the tensions inherent in various<br />
interpretations of SD by eliciting debates<br />
given varied value systems and national<br />
interests (introductory chapter); offers a<br />
framework through which to localise global<br />
goals like the SDGs (Chapter 2); focuses<br />
on 10 SDGs that are India’s primary<br />
concerns (Chapters 3 to 12); and ends<br />
with an evaluation of the strengths and<br />
weaknesses of institutional architecture for<br />
implementing the SDGs in India (Chapter<br />
13).<br />
This introduction sets the stage.<br />
First, we situate the concept of SD by<br />
briefly looking back at its emergence<br />
in local environmental movements to<br />
the globalisation of ‘sustainability,’ its<br />
spread in public discourse and eventual<br />
institutionalisation. Second, we discuss<br />
three sets of normative tensions the<br />
SD framing engenders: 1) Poverty and<br />
environment degradation as two ends of<br />
a mutually reinforcing cycle on the one<br />
hand, and consumption-based lifestyles<br />
in developed nations depredating the<br />
environment on the other; 2) collective<br />
response through promotion of efficiency<br />
gains and improvements in technology<br />
versus changes in social attitudes and<br />
value systems to counter environmental<br />
degradation; and 3) global processes<br />
and institutions versus local voices<br />
and knowledges. We make current the<br />
discussion on each of these tensions<br />
by unpacking the norms implicit in the<br />
SD Trojan Horse, i.e., we ask which<br />
interpretations have been favoured in the<br />
SDG agenda that has been adopted. We