A holistic human ecology approach to sustainable agricultural development

This article discusses the possibility of sustainable agricultural development and how it could be put into effect. It is argued that sustainable development must be implemented in accordance with holistic and autonomous principles, and that it must comply with the laws of the natural and sociocultural environment in which it is embedded. Two examples of the holistic human ecology paradigm are given, in the contexts of sustainable agrarian and developmental policy.     

Scenario workshops: A participatory approach to sustainable urban living?

Cities have increasingly become a focus for environmental action, and many governments are in the process of devising strategies for sustainable development in urban areas. However, dissatisfaaction with traditional approaches to environmental policy making has led to the rise of interest in involving the public in the process of plan and policy formulation. This paper provides a brief review of the rationale for increasing public participation in policy making, and focuses on one attempt to do this through the use of scenaario workshops. The experience of the UK town of Preston is used to look at the effectiveness of this approach both in bringing about sustainable urban living, and as a truly participatory approach to policy making.     

Towards sustainable development: A case in the Eastern Himalayas

This article is concerned with three areas of park conservation management in the eastern Himalayas in the context of the social and cultural effects on local peoples. Conservation areas can be protected only when local people benefit from the scheme or are no longer dependent on the protected resources. Buddhist cultural principles should be embraced in the system of park management in the eastern Himalayas to provide the basis for a people-oriented development process. Material welfare and spirituality are not mutually exclusive but can serve as principles for development based on Buddhist values in this region.     

Accounting and sustainable development: An exploration

As the social and environmental impacts of human activity have become more evident, the role of sustainable development as an organising principle in a variety of policy contexts and over multiple scales has become central. There are, at least, two implications that emerge from this observation. First, morally infused problems that need to be addressed have become more intractable, requiring innovation in our modes of thinking. Second, new spaces have emerged where the academy might explore how knowledge is created, validated and translated (or not) alongside policy and practice settings. One outcome of these trends has been the emergence of a stream of work (sustainability science) which investigates how disciplines might develop knowledge that progresses sustainable development. The aim of this paper, in line with the focus of the special issue, is to explore what possibilities emerge for accounting in light of a sustainability science approach. To achieve this end the paper starts with an exploration of the frustrations expressed in the literature over the perceived lack of progress made by social and environmental accounting towards addressing sustainable development. The paper then introduces sustainability science with the aim of imagining how an accounting for sustainable development might emerge. The paper closes with two illustrations of how a sustainability science approach to accounting could develop.     

政策性金融理论基础的一种扩展——兼论中国政策性金融的可持续发展

政策性金融理论继政策性金融实践而产生。基础性和弱势性（高风险低收益）矛盾基础上的信贷配给现象使政策性金融作为市场补充具有了其客观现实性。对于信贷配给现象的源泉的理论拓展，为政策性金融存在及其演变提供了一个新的考察视角。针对中国实际，多种因素要求中国政策性金融必须针对可持续发展问题采取必要策略。     

Enacting the vision for sustainable development

Utopia, as a concept, is now used with varying intentions, engendering semantic confusion. When substituted with the notion of visioning, it can be also problematic, if sometimes for different reasons. An implicit engagement in visioning is examined in a community-based futures process for creating a strategy for the sustainable management of natural resources in the Mary River catchment, in Queensland, Australia. It is found that visioning, if it can be binding and impelling for common-interest groups, can be just as unrealistically utopian, or as slippery as the scaly creatures it is trying to protect, when applied afresh to a community exploring change from a variety of initial ideals and needs. It may be seen as an emergent property of active learning.     

Domestic futures and sustainable residential development

Domestic ‘futures’ have been a long time coming. This paper questions the extent to which futuristic ‘vision’ linked to the rhetoric and sentiment of ‘sustainable development’ and the ‘livable city’ inform town and regional planning in England and Canada. Despite official commitment to ‘environmental’ objectives and media interest in ‘ecotech’ residential development, markets institutions and behaviour lag behind what is technically possible. Planning guidance encourages homes with less environmental impact. But this message has not reached most residential consumers. Is lack of mass markets in low impact housing a flaw in Government regulation, evidence of the cynical nature of official rhetoric, or proof of gradual product development as society redefines what is expected of living spaces? Or is it unwise to expect too much change in attitudes to property, or for innovation to come soon?     

Economics, equity and sustainable development

As a fashionable catchword, ‘sustainable development’ has provoked a large but nebulous literature. In the interests of communication and relevance it is necessary to narrow down the various definitions that have been given and show how a revised conception of sustainable development can be integrated into practical decisionmaking. This article suggests one approach. Sustainable development is categorized by economic change subject to ‘constancy of the natural capital stock’—the stock of environmental assets is held constant while the economy is allowed whatever social goals are deemed appropriate. Such a rule, which has its own difficulties, accommodates the main concerns of the advocates of sustainability—equity between generations, equity within a generation, economic resilience to external shocks, and uncertainty about the functions and values of natural environments in social systems. It may also accommodate some of the concerns of the ‘deep ecology’ movement by respecting rights in nature.     

"适足经济理论":泰国可持续经济发展的新路线

适足经济理论是可应用于个人、家庭、社区、国家等各个层次的处世哲学和治国理念.它包含三项基本原则,即适度、合理和有内在的免疫力.该理论指导人们重视正直、诚实、勤奋、知识、智慧、敏锐等方面素质的培养.     

构建富有韧性的可持续城市发展路线图

世界银行最新报告《城市规划、连接与融资——现在：城市的优先重点》称,如果现在所做的基础设施、住房与公共服务投资实现高效率和可持续性,快速城市化就能给发展中国家带来长期的经济、社会和环境效益。     

A more rational approach to new-product development

Companies often treat new-product development as a monolithic process, but it can be more rationally divided into two parts: an early stage that focuses on evaluating prospects and eliminating bad bets, and a late stage that maximizes the remaining candidates' market potential. Recognizing the value of this approach, Eli Lilly designed and piloted Chorus, an autonomous unit dedicated solely to the early stage. This article demonstrates how segmenting development in this way can speed it up and make it more cost-effective. Two classes of decision-making errors can impede NPD, the authors say. First, managers often ignore evidence challenging their assumptions that projects will succeed. As a result, many projects go forward despite multiple red flags; some even reach the market, only to fail dramatically after their introduction. Second, companies sometimes terminate projects prematurely because people fail to conduct the right experiments to reveal products' potential. Most companies promote both kinds of errors by focusing disproportionately on late-stage development; they lack the early, truth-seeking functions that would head such errors off. In segmented NPD, however, the early-stage organization maintains loyalty to the experiment rather than the product, whereas the late-stage organization pursues commercial success. Chorus has significantly improved NPD efficiency and productivity at Lilly. Although the unit absorbs just one-tenth of Lilly's investment in early-stage development, it delivers a substantially greater fraction of the molecules slated for late Phase II trials--at almost twice the speed and less than a third of the cost of the standard process, sometimes shaving as much as two years off the usual development time.     

The argument against a reductionist approach for measuring sustainable development performance and the need for methodological pluralism

Both sustainability and sustainable development continue to remain elusive concepts even now, 20 years after the Brundtland Commission report that brought them into prominence. This situation most likely stems from the fact that sustainability science encompasses the need to address a wide set of issues over different time and spatial scales and thus inevitably accommodates opinions from diverse branches of knowledge and expertise. However, despite this multitude of perspectives, progress towards sustainability is usually assessed through the development and utilisation of single sustainability metrics such as monetary tools, composite sustainability indices and biophysical metrics including emergy, exergy and the ecological footprint. But is it really justifiable to assess the progress towards sustainability by using single metrics? This paper argues that such a choice seems increasingly unjustifiable not least due to these metrics’ methodological imperfections and limits. Additionally, our recent awareness of economies, societies and ecosystems as complex adaptive systems that cannot be fully captured through a single perspective further adds to the argument. Failure to describe these systems in a holistic manner through the synthesis of their different non-reducible and perfectly legitimate perspectives amounts to reductionism. An implication of the above is the fact that not a single sustainability metric at the moment can claim to comprehensively assess sustainability. In the light of these findings this paper proposes that the further elaboration and refinement of current metrics is unlikely to produce a framework for assessing the progress towards sustainability with a single metric. Adoption of a diverse set of metrics seems more likely to be the key for more robust sustainability assessments. This methodological pluralism coupled with stakeholder involvement seems to offer a better chance of improving the outcome of the decision making process.     

Does sustainable development lead to sustainability?

The shortcomings and contradictions of the present understanding of sustainable development as a concept and a strategy suggest that the very idea of sustainable development must be subjected to the most thorough-going reevaluation. In rejecting simplistic versions of sustainable development strategy, this paper offers the strategy of sustainable cities both as an alternative strategy and as a catalyst to long-term global sustainability. In so doing, it seeks not to replace all components of the strategy of sustainable development but instead to place them within a restructured strategic framework locating the design and building of sustainable cities at its centre.     

传承清洁理念，让发展可持续—2012清洁发展国际融资论坛暨2012十大绿色创新企业颁奖典礼举行

2012“十大绿色创新企业”的评选活动从《国际融资》杂志评选项目工作组征集、筛选到20家入围企业的推出,最终由41位评委评议、5．fA独立评审专家复议,评选出2012“十大绿色创新企业”。对这些当选企业,《国际融资》杂志主编李路阳评价说：“这是一群脚踏实地、以坚忍不拔的毅力从事高尚事业的企业。上苍给了人类纠错的机会,而这些绿色创新企业就是人类纠错的领航者”     

Planning for sustainable development: Strategic alignment in Peruvian regions and cities

This paper explores the application of the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) to the formulation of strategies for sustainable development in regions and cities. SAM was created during the 90s in order to bridge the gap in terms of objectives, competences and culture between business and IT professionals. The present study applies SAM to align economic development and environmental sustainability and identifies concepts such as industrial ecosystems, sustainable lifestyles, eco-business, and environmental services as integrative strategies. Previous to this research, alignment has been studied in terms of public participation process, policy innovation and adoption of best practices. This paper proposes a new framework to represent alignment in a way that multiple strategies and pathways can be recognized, favoring dialogue and coordination. Likewise, a strategic analysis of Peruvian Environmental Action Plan 2010-2021 is presented.     

Policies and strategies for sustainable development in Bangladesh

The concept of sustainable development, its relevance for Bangladesh, and policies and strategies for promoting it in Bangladesh are discussed. Economic growth, population growth, mobilization of resources, the role of women, devolution and decentralization, equity and protection of the environmental base are treated as key issues, with emphasis given to the effective implementation of strategies for promoting sustainable development.     

Utopian thought and the politics of sustainable development

This article argues that utopian thought is a necessary condition for the politics of sustainable development. Since utopian thought has so far been constrained by some typically Western features from the era of modernity, this requires a shift that transcends the following three fundamental aspects: the notions of fixed truth, fixed territoriality and fixed final goals for politics. The article argues that the concept of global sustainable development can entail three new elements of utopian thought: the disintegration of fixed territoriality, a never-ending story, and prismatic blueprints. Using these elements, utopian thought can provide transformative power, so that politics and policymaking can meet contemporary global challenges to development and the environment.