Development, sustainable or otherwise, is the distinctive process of a society’s movement through time, whether planned or unplanned. Since the Second World War and the Marshall Plan for Europe, however, development has become so closely associated with planning that the two terms have become almost synonymous. Global macroeconomic development models were created and studied, particularly by the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Australia and the United Nations, amongst others, and were particularly fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever development models were designed and/or adopted, the planning and implementation of the process meant primarily economic development and economic growth—and measurements of such development were made only in quantifiable, materialistic terms. The overriding context has been, and continues to be, economic.

Into this picture the concept of the ‘sustainability’ of development—the other half of the equation we are considering in this conference—was introduced. Sustainable development, especially as it was promulgated by the Brundland Commission, gained prominence because it added environmental and intergenerational dimensions to the original preoccupation with economic issues. The Rio Conference in 1992 gave it greater impetus. Today, in spite of the prevalence of its usage by the United Nations system as development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’, sustainable development is still an elusive term—not fully accepted by experts, policy and decision-makers or by the public.

Like culture, sustainable development is not a steady state-system but a dynamic one. Sustainability—whether of culture or development—changes form and levels with time and the use of resources available. As industrial countries went through stages of agricultural, industrial and now services and information revolution, so the basis and level of their sustainability changed. In the same way sustainability has different meanings and levels of expectations as we move from a fully subsistence economy to an increasingly cash-driven economy.

I regard sustainable development as development with a working rationale—one which stipulates that the interdependence of economic, intellectual, political, environmental and cultural dimensions must be considered together in the making of policies and plans for the future of peoples and nations. In essence it is development that can be sustained not only now but also in the future, given the social and physical resources available to a nation-state and the objectives it sets for itself.