Limits to Growth and Sustainable Development: Grappling with Ecological Realities

Abstract The paper has three main sections. The first discusses the ‘limits to growth’ debate of the 1970s, identifying concern with three potential kinds of limits: ecological limits to the physical scale of economic activity, limits to the economic welfare to be derived from growth of economic activity, and social limits to economic growth. The second section explores the same issues through the sustainable development literature of the late 1980s and the 1990s to date. The principal change over the 20 years concerned, a period also framed by the Stockholm Environment Conference and UNCED, is far greater acceptance of the existence of threatening environmental damage and the need for active policy to address it. No consensus has yet emerged, however, on the relationship between economic growth and welfare or ecological or social sustainability. The third section indicates the scale of the task if global economic growth is to be reconciled with ecological sustainability, and advocates a strategy for sustainability that principally involves differentiating between North and South and forging new economic relations between them.

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