The Dawn of Sustainable Development

About the lecture

In this module, we think about the incorporation of environmental concerns into global development policy through the concept of sustainable development. We focus on: (i) the emergence of arguments in the 1990s that the dominant economic growth-centred model of development was environmentally unsustainable; (ii) the consequent emergence of sustainable development as an attempt to marry the need to improve living conditions with environmental sustainability; (iii) the 2015 adoption by the UN of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the key moment at which this concept came to the centre of global development strategy; (iv) the four core imperatives which the SDGs seek to balance - economic prosperity, social inclusion, environmental sustainability and good governance; (v) two key perspectives on the SDGs amongst development scholars - one which argues that they represent an opportunity to radically rethink global development strategy, and another which argues that they merely represent “business as usual”.

About the lecturer

Dr Dinah Rajak is a Reader in Anthropology and Development at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the role of corporations in global development and the concept of corporate social responsibility. She is author of In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (2011) and co-editor of The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility (2016).