Sustainable Development - Has It Run Its Course?

The cornucopian paradigm of sustainable development eludes quantification and opens the door to advocacy and activism. Moreover, setting normative sustainability targets for an opaque development concept blurs assessment and analysis. Policy integration should focus, therefore, on what is measurable and comparable. Operational concepts of ecological and economic sustainability address the immediate interaction between environment and economy. Material flow balances and greened national accounts define and measure these sustainability concepts. Sustainable development carries some goodwill, but practical policy should tackle the environmental sustainability of economic performance and growth.