At the turn of the millennium, the world’s political leadership adopted sustainable development as a leading model for societal development. However, the terms “sustainable development”, “sustainability” and “sustainable” are sometimes over- and misused despite wide consensus about...

This paper offers a comprehensive critical review on digitalisation in rural areas, drawing on international and EU policies, scientific and grey literature and real-life examples from two European H2020 research projects. In doing so, it aims at providing a basic conceptual framework...

The new century opened with an unprecedented declaration of solidarity and determination to rid the world of poverty. In 2000 the UN Millennium Declaration, adopted at the largest-ever gathering of heads of state, committed countries — rich and poor — to doing all they can to eradicate...

The 1998 Report investigates the 20th century's growth in consumption, unprecedented in its scale and diversity. The benefits of this consumption have spread far and wide. More people are better fed and housed than ever before. Living standards have risen to enable hundreds of millions to enjoy...

Politics matter for human development. Reducing poverty depends as much on whether poor people have political power as on their opportunities for economic progress. Democracy has proven to be the system of governance most capable of mediating and preventing conflict and of securing and...

A notable aspect of sustainability is its holistic and cross-cutting nature—it cannot be achieved by any single rule, statute or agency. Instead, sustainability must be institutionalized across the legal system and government as a whole. In this paper, we propose and examine five mechanisms...

In the early 1990s the countries of Central Asia started their transformation to a market economy. Uzbekistan is in the throes of change and facing a huge restructuring task and a need to improve governance. Decades of central bureaucratic allocation of natural resources left national...

The world’s coastal ecosystems are among the most complex on Earth, and they are currently being governed unsustainably, by any definition. Climate change will only add to this complexity, underscoring the necessity of finding new ways to govern for these ecosystems’ sustainable use. After...

In this introduction to the special issue of <em>Sustainability</em> on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue’s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to...

The continuous expansion and change in Asia is attracting increasing attention from the rest of the world. Thus, the papers from the Sustainable Asia Conference 2014 (SAC 2014) could provide a platform to examine outperforming governance factors and mechanisms in this dynamically growing region....