PART 1 INTRODUCTION AND APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY APPRAISAL

Document begins: PART 1 INTRODUCTION AND APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY APPRAISAL 1 2 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Study background and rationale For more than a decade, there have been repeated calls for the design and application of an integrated approach to implement sustainable development. The road from Rio to Johannesburg, from the Earth Summit (UNCED 1992) to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD 2002) is posted with them, marked by Agenda 21 and its Plan of Implementation as major milestones. In this last document, for example, there is frequent reference to the importance of taking an `holistic and inter-sector approach' to implement sustainable development. However, there is relatively little discussion of what this approach entails or how it should be introduced. There are numerous perspectives and entry points from which such an approach can be constructed but they all converge around the same problem encapsulated in the following statement: "Many streams of knowledge have a contribution to make in bringing the ideas of sustainability from theory to practice: economics, ecology, systems theory, the health sciences, engineering and applied science, community planning, law, business managemen, performance measurement and progress assessment, and so on. Each of these can provide a doorway into ...