The Ends and the Means of Development

Note: A keynote speech delivered on 19 September 2008 at the European Business School Symposium in Frankfurt. Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes The rejection by the Irish of the Lisbon Treaty has led to much soul-searching in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe. Putting aside the question how the EU got itself in this particular predicament, namely, allowing 1 million voters, accounting for 0.2 percent of the EU's total population to veto a 269-page treaty teeming with bureaucratese of mind-boggling opaqueness, the debate-still on going as we speak-is not likely to go very far. The fact is that it is not the Irish that are to be blamed-one should in general not put to referenda questions which cannot fit in less than one page and even that is risking it. It might be useful to review briefly here, at the outset, the content of some of this soul-searching. One can identify several schools of thought. • There are some...

Note : A slightly edited version of this article appears in the Spanish August/September issue of the journal Foreign Policy . A broadly accepted definition of “sustainability” is that put forward by the Brundtland Commission convened by the United Nations 25 years ago, which stated that sustainable development is development “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” One implication of the core idea embodied in this definition is that sustainability is not a goal to be reached, but rather a balance to be maintained across space and time in which there are complex interactions at play between the environment, the economy, human institutions and values. [ 1 ] Two central questions in this debate are: what has actually happened to development during the past half a century and are we on a sustainable development path? Development as a global objective for improving human welfare is a relatively recent concept. It ...