Die Definition für Nachhaltige Entwicklung

• Unterschiede in Interessen der beteiligten AkteurInnen
  
  
• Unterschiedliche Werthaltungen
  
  
• Unterschiedliches wissenschaftliches Verständnis
  
  
• Unterschiede im räumlichen und zeitlichen Fokus
  
  

• L. Schumacher 1997
  "Die Umweltschützer verstehen darunter die Versöhnung mit der Natur, die Demokraten die Durchsetzung der civil society, die Ökonomen sehen ihren Glauben an das ewige Wachstum bestätigt, die Menschenfreunde erhoffen sich eine bessere Verteilungsgerechtigkeit und die Abkehr vom Konsumwahn und der Amerikanisierung aller Kulturen."
  
  
• Goodland/Leddec 1987
  "Ein Modell für soziale und struktur-ökonomische Umgestaltung, welche die ökonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Vorteile der jetzt lebenden Menschen optimiert, ohne das wahrscheinliche Potential für ähnliche Vorteile in der Zukunft zu gefährden."
  
  
• Akademie für Technikfolgenabschätzung
  "Eine nachhaltige, auf Dauer angelegte wirtschaftliche und soziale Entwicklung bedeutet, daß die natürliche Umwelt und der damit verbundene Kapitalstock an natürlichen Ressourcen so weit erhalten werden muß, daß die Lebensqualität zukünftiger Generationen gewährleistet bleibt."
  
  
• Cary 1998
  "Sustainability is not a fixed ideal, but an evolutionary process of improving the management of systems, through improved understanding and knowledge. Analogous to Darwin's species evolution, the process is non-deterministic with the end point not known in advance."
  
  
• William Rees 1989
  "Ein positiver sozio-ökonomischer Wandel, der die ökologischen und sozialen Systeme nicht schwächt, von denen die Gesellschaft und ihre Teilgruppen abhängig sind."
  
  
• IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) 1980
  "Sustainable use is applicable only to renewable resources: it means using them at rates within their capacity for renewal."
  
  
• Dennis Meadows 1992
  "A sustainable society is one that can persist over generations, one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support."
  
  
• K.H. Robert, "The Natural Step", 1991
  "A transition to sustainability involves moving from linear to cyclical processes and technologies. The only processes we can rely on indefinitely are cyclical, all linear processes must eventually come to an end."
  
  
• Presidents Council on Sustainable Development (USA), 1993
  "Here sustainable development means a program of domestic economic and political reform that (...) yields 'broad-based economic progress accomplished in a manner that protects and restores the quality of the natural environment, improves the quality of life for individuals and broadens the prospects for future generations.' It means, in other words, maintaining economic growth while producing the absolute minimum of pollution, repairing the environmental damages of the past, using far fewer non-renewable resources, producing much less waste, and extending the opportunity to live in a pleasant and healthy environment to the whole population."
  
  
• William D. Ruckelshaus, "Towards a Sustainable World", 1983
  "Sustainability is the [emerging] doctrine that economic growth and development must take place, and be maintained over time, within the limits set by ecology in the broadest sense - by the interrelations of human beings and their works, the biosphere and the physical and chemical laws that govern it (...). It follows that environmental protection and economic development are complementary rather than antagonistic processes."
  
  
• Edward Barbier 1987
  "Sustainable development implies to maximise simultaneously the biological systems goals (genetic diversity, resilience, biological productivity), economic system goals (satisfaction of basic needs, enhancement of equity, increasing useful goods and services), and social system goals (cultural diversity, institutional sustainability, social justice, participation)."
  
  
• Guiseppe Munda 1997
  "We can synthesise the main features of sustainable development as follows. First, an important charcteristic is the issue of distributal equity, both within the same generation (intra-generational equity, e.g. the North-South divide) and between different generations (inter-generational equity). Second, an economical ecological integration is needed, above all in terms of resources and pollution emmissions (...). Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept, but as multicriteria decision analysis teaches us it is impossible to maximise different objectives at the same time."
  
  
• Paul Hawken, "The Ecology of Commerce", 1993
  "Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations."
  
  
• Martin Muscoe, "A Sustainable Community Profile", 1995
  "The word sustainable has roots in the Latin subtenir, meaning 'to hold up' or 'to support from below.' A community must be supported from below - by its inhabitants, present and future. Certain places, through the peculiar combination of physical, cultural, and, perhaps, spiritual characteristics, inspire people to care for their community. Theses are the places where sustainability has the best chance of taking hold."
  
  
• Beth E. Lachman, Critical Technologies Institute, 1997
  "The focus and scale of sustainability efforts depend on local conditions, including resources, politics, individual actions, and the unique features of the community. The sustainable communities approach has been applied to issues as varied as urban sprawl, inner-city and brownfield redevelopment, economic development and growth, ecosystem management, agriculture, biodiversity, green buildings, energy conservation, watershed management, and pollution prevention. Many of these issues and other community problems cannot easily be addressed by traditional approaches or traditional elements within our society. Many people feel it is better to address such problems through a more collaborative and holistic systems approach because such problems are diffuse, multidisciplinary, multiagency, multistakeholder and multisector in nature."
  
  
• The Florida Center for Community Design & Research
  "Sustainability is the optimal balance of natural, economic, and social systems over time."
  
  
• The Florida House Institute for Sustainable Development
  "Sustainable development is a process of continuous improvement."
  
  
• Worldwatch Institute
  "A sustainable society is one which satisfies its needs without diminishing the prospects of future generations."
  
  
• International Institute for Sustainable Development
  "For the business enterprise, sustainable development means adopting business strategies and activities that meet the needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders today while protecting, sustaining, and enhancing the human and natural resources that will be needed in the future."
  
  
• Karmal Hossain 1995
  "A sustainable society implicitly connotes one that is based on a long-term vision in that it must foresee the consequences of its diverse activities to ensure that they do not break the cycles of renewal; it has to be a society of conservation and generational concern. It must avoid the adoption of mutually irreconcilable objectives. Equally, it must be a society of social justice because great disparities of wealth or privilege will breed destructive disharmony."
  
  
• Munasinghe/Shearer 1995
  "Biogeophysical sustainability is the maintenance and/or improvement of the integrity of the life-support system on Earth. Sustaining the biosphere with adequate provisions for maximizing future options includes providing for human economic and social improvement for current and future human generations within a framework of cultural diversity while: (a) making adequate provisions for the maintenance of biological diversity and (b) maintaining the biogeochemical integrity of the biosphere by conservation and proper use of its air, water and land resources. Achieving these goals requires planning and action at local, regional and global scales and specifying short- and long-term objectives that allow for the transition to sustainability."
  
  
• David Pearce 1993
  "Sustainable economic development is continuously rising, or at least non-declining, consumption per capita, or GNP, or whatever the agreed indicator of development is."