In the context of the conceptual and analytical discussion of operationalising sustainable development, institutional sustainability has so far not played a major role. The UN Commission for Sustainable Development decided in 1995 to develop indicators for assessing the progress which UN members...

In an attempt to meet growing environmental challenges resulting from 30 years of rapid industrialisation, China is devising new incentives to motivate cities to meet higher environmental standards aiming at a more sustainable path of development. In this article, we seek to throw light on these...

Although the need for new systems of production and consumption is constantly stressed in policy discussions, the sustainable consumption concept has not been largely translated into practice. The efforts of environmental policy makers to pay more attention to the consumption side are still...

Six years after the UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, an effort to give a new boost to its implementation in the field of science was made during the Sixth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD6, held in New York in April 1998). This paper recalls the context...

Although the need for new systems of production and consumption is constantly stressed in policy discussions, the sustainable consumption concept has not been largely translated into practice. The efforts of environmental policy makers to pay more attention to the consumption side are still...

Following conferences in Pignans, Maastricht, Vienna and Cologne and many e-mail exchanges, the participants of the GoSD-research initiative have identified a path for future research that describes not only governance and sustainable development but also how governance can be *for* sustainable...

The EU recently emphasised the need to speed up the pace of reforms to improve the state of the environment both in Europe and internationally. This becomes in particular challenging, as the "Lisbon Strategy" defines the general goal of an annual economic growth rate of 3%. Decoupling of...

This paper examines the progress made towards forging a Sustainable Development Strategy of the European Union on the basis of three structures of the global economy: Trade, Investment and Knowledge Generation. It identifies deficits in all three, and cites alternatives for improvement such as...

Sustainable development represents a major governance challenge of the 21st century. If societal development trajectories are to be realigned on to more sustainable pathways major changes will be required to existing processes and practices of governance. This essay considers the nature of these...

Social sustainability is 'one of the three legs of the sustainability stool' (the other two are environmental and economic). There is limited literature that focuses on social sustainability to the extent that a comprehensive study of this concept is still missing. As a result, there have been...