The challenges of sustainable development (SD) can be organized around three themes: 1) Modernization has been unsustainable because it relies upon a use of limited resources, which damages the environment. 2) Political consensus and bureaucratic mobilization will be more difficult as declining faith in “progress” and growth make the hard choices clearer. Western science is no longer viewed as a panacea, and the decline of the belief in progress has enhanced opportunities for non-Western cultures to define development for themselves. 3) We are shifting from a mechanical to a co-evolutionary understanding of systems, which helps explain why development has been unsustainable and what we must do to attain sustainability.
