Sharachchandra Lele

Sustainable development: A critical review

Abstract Over the past few years, “Sustainable Development” (SD) has emerged as the latest development catchphrase. A wide range of nongovernmental as well as governmental organizations have embraced it as the new paradigm of development. A review of the literature that has sprung up around the concept of SD indicates, however, a lack of consistency in its interpretation. More important, while the all-encompassing nature of the concept gives it political strength, its current formulation by the mainstream of SD thinking contains significant weaknesses. These include an incomplete perception of the problems of poverty and environmental degradation, and confusion about the role of economic growth and about the concepts of sustainability and participation. How these weaknesses can lead to inadequacies and contradictions in policy making is demonstrated in the context of international trade, agriculture, and forestry. It is suggested that if SD is to have a fundamental impact, politically expedient fuzziness will have to be given up in favor of intellectual clarity and rigor.

Adapting to climate change in rapidly urbanizing river basins: insights from a multiple-concerns, multiple-stressors, and multi-level approach

ABSTRACT Much of the research on climate change adaptation in rapidly urbanizing developing regions focuses primarily on adaptation or resilience as the goal, assumes that climate change is the major stressor, and focuses on the household or the city as the unit of analysis. In this article, we use findings from two rapidly urbanizing sub-basins of the Cauvery River in southern India (the Arkavathy and Noyyal sub-basins) to argue for a broader analytic and policy framework that explicitly considers multiple normative concerns and stressors, and uses the entire watershed as the unit of analysis to address the climate–water interaction.