History of Sustainable Development

Over the past decades, there have been valiant attempts throughout all industries and governance bodies to distinguish how enterprises can establish and become more sustainable. Despite good intentions, a large amount of enterprises have failed to accurately determine the precise strategies to become and maintain a sustainable establishment. Largely underpinning the growing notion of a sustainable enterprise is the principal of sustainable development. Established in the 1980’s, Sustainable Development was developed to promote sustainable living through sustainable production of goods and services, to provide solutions for fulfilling elementary needs to improve the lives of people, now and in the future with least possible environmental impact and the highest possible economic and social yield (Christensen, Thrane, & Herroborg, 2009). Like sustainable development, governance is a concept that was first widely explored and embraced in the late 1980s. Furthermore, like sustainable development it was engaged because it encompassed a broad set of factors that were increasingly important and insufficiently recognised in conventional thinking and because it encouraged a more unified understanding of how these factors were, or should be, linked. Therefore Governance is how one gets to act, through types of environmental-related relations including deliberation, negotiation, self-regulation or authoritative choice and the extent to which actors obey to cooperative decisions (Gibson, 2005). It involves the level and scope of political allocation, the dominant orientation of state, and other institutions and their interactions.
This essay will distinguish and highlight the fundamental strategies that are significant in shifting to a sustai...

... middle of paper ...

... States Government, with this regulation can have a profound effect of the behaviour and actions of business through cooperation. To counter international environmental problems that may be identified as being transboundary, multilateral environmental agreements can be established. Traditionally Multilateral environmental agreements have the ability to mobilise the international community to address global and regional environmental issues. Finally, in order for enterprise to continue to evolve and expand its sustainable practices it is imperative for governance strategies to underline the potential benefits for business as well structuring strategies to be an exclusive win/win situation for all parties involved. If this is done the common goal as established through the notion of sustainable development can be achieved throughout all enterprises.