The necessary reduction of the human footprint demanded by Sustainable Development can be measured by the entropy flow of the society to the environment. The classic tools of process evaluation as e.g. exergetic or life cycle analysis are able to evaluate existing solutions. But their use during...

Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which it is justified and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of...

Sustainable development may be defined as a non-declining value of capital stocks (social, natural, built and human) over time. The ability for substitution between and within each stock over time has been widely debated, resulting in the identification, and then preservation of ‘critical...

This article challenges the notion that energy efficiency and ‘clean’ energy technologies can deliver sufficient degrees of climate change mitigation. By six arguments not widely recognized in the climate policy arena, we argue that unrealistic technology optimism exists in current climate...

This paper, in the first step, presents an overview of the origination and formulation of sustainable development (SD) concept and the related policy making frameworks. The frameworks include Pressure–State–Response (PSR), Driving Force–State–Response (DSR), Driving...

Sustainable Development (SD) has played a major role as a foundation of several policy making frameworks developed mainly by international organizations. In this paper, some critical points regarding the origination and formulation of the SD concept are discussed. It is argued that the SD...

The discussion to widen access to modern energy services has been influential in shaping some of the discussions on energy at the international level. The practice of widening modern energy services access to the poor in Africa is complex, and exacerbated by the dual nature of the energy system...

The emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the extractive industries represents a bid to legitimize the sector after decades of environmental disasters and the trampling of indigenous rights. But whilst the rise in CSR has meant safer technologies and better stakeholder...

Despite its real difficulty to disseminate and profoundly change the dominant economic regulations, sustainable development has given rise to significant new practices both public and private. In this overview article, which also introduces this thematic issue of the journal, we focus on two...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie multinationale Unternehmen den Diskurs ueber nachhaltige Entwicklung gestalten. Es wird gezeigt, dass sich Unternehmen an den diskursiven Auseinandersetzungen beteiligen, um privatwirtschaftliche Ideen zu legitimieren. Zudem laesst sich in dem Diskurs ein...