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Sustainable development is capturing the attention of planners, politicians and business leaders. Within the academic sphere its study is increasingly breaching disciplinary boundaries to become a focus of attention for natural and social scientists alike. But in studying such a key concept, it is vital that there is a clear definition of what it means, how it is applied on the ground, and the influence it exerts upon people's perceptions of change in the physical environment, economic activity and society.Exploring Sustainable Development is a major new text which provides a multifaceted intr

A model is described which proposes that a government's actual forest policy should shift in favour of sustainable forest management and control of deforestation when the effective strength of pressures on policy-makers from internal protectionist groups approaches that of exploitative groups. Effective strength depends on the strength of a group, how well it transmits its pressures and the level of public support, all of which are linked to progress in democratization and pluralization. External pressures may change stated policy but not actual policy. Forest policy evolution is divided into three phases: exploitative (when both actual and stated policies promote exploitation), ambiguous (stated policy promotes sustainable management but actual policy remains exploitative) and sustainable management (both actual and stated policies promote sustainable management). The model is tested by applying it to the Philippines, where a sharp rise in the relative power of protectionist groups and their ability to exert pressures on government, and a significant increase in democracy and pluralism, coincided with a major change in forest policy in 1986. Progress in controlling deforestation and managing forest more sustainably throughout the tropics may therefore depend on similar political changes occurring on a larger scale. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

To overcome the limitations of existing aggregated national deforestation models in explaining the impact of changes in agricultural technological on deforestation a two-zone national political economy model is outlined and illustrated by examples from the Philippines and Thailand. It suggests that deforestation trends depend on where and when new technologies are adopted and by whom. In particular, they are sensitive to the balance between adoption in the highly productive Core and the less fertile Periphery where remaining forest concentrates as a country develops. Without parallel adoption in the Periphery, rising yields in the Core alone may not control deforestation. State intervention can help to overcome adoption bias but is still limited by state-élite-corporate links. Five criteria are proposed to assess the likely effectiveness of agricultural policies to control deforestation: (1) improve sustainable farm productivity in the Core, (2 improve sustainable farm productivity in the Periphery, (3) generate sufficient manufacturing/service jobs for ex-farmers, (4) reform land tenure and (5) decentralize state agriculture departments to promote the participation of farmers in the design of appropriate technologies. Deforestation is likely to continue if criteria 1-3 are not met. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Niger Delta wetlands are of international importance for their biodiversity, and support a large human population. The value and distribution of wetland ecosystem service benefits and costs across the three main stakeholder sectors (local community, government and corporate) were investigated. Results show that the net monetary value of the wetlands is $11,000 per delta household of which $9,000 was generated as cash income supporting household activities such as education and healthcare. The total annual value of provisioning services to local people is approximately $25 billion, about three times the value of oil production in the region. However, local communities also bear about 75% of the environmental costs of oil extraction, equivalent to about 19% of the oil industry profit. Local people, who experience considerable economic hardship and lack alternative income sources, receive little compensation from the oil sector. These results highlight the importance of understanding not only the benefits provided by Niger Delta wetlands, but also the distribution of the environmental costs associated with their use. We conclude that ecosystem service valuation studies should give greater attention to the social distribution of identified values. Such distributional analyses, rarely available, provide insight into how sustainable natural resource management policy and practice could be better aligned to social justice concerns.