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In the ten years since the publication of the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future (WCED 1987), the concept of sustainable development has emerged as an important principle in international law and policy analysis. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example, calls for the stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations "to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner" (Article 2). And at this writing, the International Society for Ecological Economics-which promotes the interdisciplinary field that Costanza (1991) describes as the "science and management of sustainability"-has grown to encompass some two thousand members.
The rising stature of sustainable development constitutes an important and evolving challenge for natural resource and environmental economics. Is sustainability best achieved through the use and extension of conventional criteria for optimal resource allocation? Or does the concept involve a more substantial shift beyond methods such as present-value maximization and nonmarket valuation? These questions quickly found their way into leading textbooks following the publication of the Brundtland Report (Pearce and Turner 1990; Tietenberg 1992).
At the heart of this challenge lie questions concerning the precise meaning that should be attached to the phrase "sustainable development," and how this concept may be operationalized in the formal structure of economic theory and the more prosaic setting of applied policy analysis. A diversity of views exists on this subject. On one side of the debate are critics such as Dasgupta and Miler (1995, 2393), who allege that the literature on sustainable development exhibits "intellectual regress" and that questions regarding the coordination of economic development and environmental management are largely subsumed by the growth-theoretic tools introduced to resource economics in the 1970s. The papers presented in this volume, in contrast, support a rather different conclusion: In a range of contexts-social choice theory; national accounting; and the analysis of decision problems involving long time horizons, scientific uncertainty, and potentially catastrophic risks-sustainability concepts force the clarification, revision, and expansion of the textbook wisdom of the pre-Brundtland era.
Contributors to this special issue were invited to comment on the problem of sustainability and its relevance to natural resource and environmental economics, with a specific focus on the following themes:
the role of natural resources in economic growth;
notions of intergenerational fairness;
environmental accounting;
ecological stability and...