Sustainable development in industrial countries: environmental indicators and targets as core elements of national action plans - the German case

Five years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the hesitancy of developed countries is turning out to be the main impediment to implementing an effective policy for sustainable development. Alongside the further development of international environmental regimes, setting up national action plans is necessary to close the action-gap in the North. However, this can only succeed if the action plans include binding objectives that can be monitored and evaluated. Current national strategies for sustainable development only meet this criterion in exceptional cases; in most cases only qualitatively and legally nonbinding objectives are included. In the present paper, a suggestion for a cluster of environmental policy targets is put forth, which-using Germany as an example-establishes the sustainability concept at the national level. Particular emphasis is placed on the normative dimension of target setting. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.