30. Definition of Sustainable Development

Lead Papers

Raghbendra Jha and K.V. Bhanu Murthy, Germain Dufour, Marin R. Mehandjiev (Professor) and Krassimira R. Mehandjieva, Mukhamedjanov Ozod, Daniel Sotelsek, DSc. Professor William M. Zadorsky

The concept of Sustainable Development was presented for the first time in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development, in the report Our Common Future . The commission was created by the United Nations, and was made of 21 nations, including Canada. The commission, headed by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, said that the planet needs " a new era of environmentally sustainable sound economic development. Dr. Brundtland also said that government must strongly support "a new political approach to environment and development, where economic and fiscal policies, trade and foreign policies, energy, agriculture, industry, and other sectorial policies, all aim to induce development that is not only economically but ecologically sustainable."

Beginning in 1987, the author of the present paper has researched and developed the complete definition of Sustainable Development as well as creating a method of measurement. The technical definition of Sustainable Development was given as being:

"a sound balance among the interactions of the impacts (positive and/or negative), or stresses, on the four major quality systems: People, Economic Development, Environment and Availability of Resources."

The non-technical definition was given as being:

"a sound balance among the interactions designed to create a healthy economic growth, preserve environmental quality, make wise use of our resources, and enhance social benefits."

Mehandjiev and  Mehandjieva proposed  a contemporary clear and practically applicable definition of the notion "sustainable development" can be build, in accordance with the principle and approaches of the Bulgarian Association of Environmentalists and Ecologists - ABEECOL.

  In thinking about and developing a framework for analyzing sustainability it is best to begin from first principles(Raghbendra Jha and K.V. Bhanu Murthy). Some of these principles are listed below. 1. Individual behavior of members of the current generation should not completely determine the fate of future generations. 2. Future generations must be ensured the required minimum level of consumption. 3. The purview of sustainability must be expanded to include the possibility of divergence between social and private costs and the existence of public goods. Sustainability should not be narrowly interpreted in terms only of tradeoffs in intertemporal consumption. 4. The price path of natural resources and property rights to future consumption must be so defined as to avoid over-exploitation by the present generation. 5. In some situations the market may not have a solution. 6. Hence, there may be a rationale for non-market intervention. 7. The design of this intervention is an important aspect of a strategy to attain sustainability. It is the contention of this paper that an appropriate strategy for the attainment of sustainability would involve a change in behavioral patterns and a clearer definition of certain property rights.

Marin R. Mehandjiev and Krassimira R. Mehandjieva described a definition that includes "the sustainable development of a region, country, town, enterprise, etc., during a certain time-period t, is the totality of their state changing process effects, expressed by the increase (or decrease, or constancy at least) of the values of economic-social-environmental factors (criteria), recognized by the majority of the respective citizens as favourable (or unfavourable, respectively) ones, if the value changes are not less than 0.1% and not bigger than 2.5% compared with the same factor values for the previous t-period; that alteration value should be restorable after the removal of some harmful influence in a time course less than that of influence duration".