Challenges of Sustainable Development
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Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Augusto Lopez-Carlos, Challenges of Sustainable Development, bahai-library.com.
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Challenges of Sustainable
Development
AUGUSTO LOPEZ-CLAROS*

If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of
goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation.
——Bahá’u’lláh

Abstract
This paper examines some of the building blocks of sustainable development.
Economic growth is seen as having contributed to global prosperity in the post-
war period, but there are emerging concerns that growth may soon conflict with
environmental constraints. The role of and the interactions among conservation,
technology, international cooperation, and human values are analyzed. Whether
we find the collective will to act now to stem the tide of future crises or we wait
for catastrophe to force change upon us is seen as the central question of our time.
A move toward sustainable development could well usher in a new stage in the
evolution of the human race, one likely to involve a quantum leap forward in
terms of our collective achievements as a human family.

* The author is Director of Global Indicators and Analysis, World Bank. The
views expressed in this paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect
those of the organization for which he works. The author is indebted to Arthur L.
Dahl for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Arthur has been
a mentor to the author on these issues and for this the author is deeply grateful.
Words of appreciation are also due to the late William S. Hatcher for the count-
less hours of delightful conversations on these and related issues during the many
years we lived in Russia, and to Ali Nakhjavani, for his warm, constant encourage-
ment and wise counsel over the years. Neither of them, nor Arthur, is responsible
for this paper’s limitations.
26              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

Résumé
L’auteur examine certains des éléments qui servent de fondement au développe-
ment durable. La croissance économique est perçue comme ayant contribué au
développement d’une prospérité mondiale durant la période de l’après-guerre;
cependant, des préoccupations croissantes se font sentir selon lesquelles la crois-
sance pourrait bientôt se heurter à des contraintes environnementales. L’auteur
analyse les rôles respectifs de la conservation de la nature, de la technologie, de la
coopération internationale et des valeurs humaines, ainsi que leurs interactions
réciproques. Allons-nous développer une volonté collective suffisante pour dès
maintenant tâcher d’endiguer la vague de crises qui s’annoncent ou allons-nous
attendre que des catastrophes nous contraignent à changer nos façons de faire?
Cette alternative est vue comme étant la question centrale de notre époque. Un
changement de cap vers le développement durable pourrait bien marquer une
nouvelle étape dans l’évolution de la race humaine, une étape susceptible de con-
stituer un progrès décisif en ce qui concerne nos réalisations collectives en tant
que grande famille humaine.

Resumen
Este ensayo examina algunos de los elementos fundamentales para edificar el
desarrollo sostenible. El crecimiento económico se observa como haber contribui-
do a la prosperidad global en el periodo post-guerra, pero hay preocupaciones
emergentes de que el crecimiento pronto podrá estar en conflicto con restric-
ciones ambientales. El rol de y las interacciones entre la conservación, la tec-
nología, la cooperación internacional y los valores humanos, son analizados. Sea
que encontremos la voluntad colectiva por actuar en este momento para refrenar
la marea de futuros crisis o que esperemos que la catástrofe obligue que cam-
biemos, es visto como la pregunta central de nuestro tiempo. Un movimiento
hacia el desarrollo sostenible podría marcar el comienzo de una nueva etapa en la
evolución de la raza humana, una que probablemente envuelva un salto cuántico
en términos de nuestros logros colectivos como una familia humana.

A SENSIBLE DEFINITION

A broadly accepted definition of “sustainability” is that put forward by the
Brundtland Commission (formally known as the World Commission on
Environment and Development) convened by the United Nations a quar-
Challenges of Sustainable Development                   27

ter of a century ago, which states that sustainable development “meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future genera-
tions to meet their own needs” (Report 43). To those who attempted to
give operational meaning to this intuitively sensible definition in the fol-
lowing years, it soon became clear that sustainability was not a goal to be
reached, but rather a balance to be maintained across space and time, in
which there are complex interactions at play between the environment,
the economy, institutions, and human values.
A good practical example of sustainability at work can be seen in the
Nordic countries’ approach to budgetary management. These countries
have been running budget surpluses for many years because they face the
emerging problem of an aging population. If the state is to provide pen-
sions and social protections in the future that will be broadly equivalent
to those enjoyed by its citizens today, it must begin to save now. Citizens
of Nordic countries have agreed to have their governments spend less
than they collect in taxes today so that the standard of living of future
generations will not be jeopardized. Thus, contrary to the habits of many
other industrialized countries, which over the past twenty years and with
particular intensity during the latest financial crisis have sometimes run
sometimes large budget deficits and accumulated rising levels of public
debt, the Nordics have firmly integrated into public financial management
the policy that present generations cannot compromise “the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs” (Report 43) and have done so
with the full support of voters. This example highlights the importance of
good governance that has earned public trust in finding solutions appro-
priate to specific problems of sustainability.
More recently, environmental concerns have figured prominently in dis-
cussions about sustainability and sustainable development, with econo-
mists and policymakers highlighting the importance of economic growth
for promoting rising living standards and further reducing poverty, and
environmentalists arguing that the benefits of growth should be viewed
against the background of pressures on limited resources. A senior British
economist recently wrote: “With the environmental situation reaching
crisis point, however, it is time to stop pretending that mindlessly chasing
28            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

economic growth is compatible with sustainability” (Jackson 43). This
debate raises a complex set of issues concerning sustainable consumption
and production, the distribution of wealth and increasing income dispari-
ties, the distinction between growth and development, and the extent to
which growth is necessary for prosperity. Underlying all of these factors
is the issue of governance, how we manage the planet we live on within
the diverse societies and cultures into which humanity has evolved, and
the globalized economy that provides for our material needs, in all their
complexity and at their multiple levels of operation, to go from the pres-
ent situation toward a sustainable and equitable future.

TWO KEY QUESTIONS ABOUT DEVELOPMENT

Two questions are at the heart of the debate on the meaning and the impli-
cations of sustainable development. Taking as a starting point the period
immediately following the creation of the United Nations in 1945, the
questions are: What have been the fruits of economic development, and is
humanity better off today according to some objective criteria? The first
one deals with the issue of what has actually happened to development
during the past half century.
There are several reasons why 1945 is a sensible starting point to
address these questions. As noted below, this was the time when econom-
ic and social development began to be perceived as a special responsibili-
ty of the international community. This realization is partly reflected in
the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the two premier international financial organizations charged with
the task of promoting development. For instance, the Articles of
Agreement of the IMF state that its aim is “to facilitate the expansion and
balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the
promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income
and to the development of the productive resources of all members as pri-
mary objectives of economic policy” (Article I, section ii).
It was only under the auspices of the United Nations that a system of
national accounts was created, which made it possible to compile interna-
Challenges of Sustainable Development                         29

tionally comparable economic output statistics based on common method-
ologies. This achievement, in turn, allowed the expansion of the debate on
development from heated and often misinformed ideological struggles
based on faith and opinion to more objective exchanges anchored in hard
numbers and quantitative indicators.
The second question relates to the more fundamental issue of whether
humanity—notwithstanding progress achieved during the postwar peri-
od—is presently on a sustainable development path, as defined by the
Brundtland Commission. As we shall see below, while the answers to these
two questions are unusually complex, the debate has acquired a renewed
urgency in recent years, with many voices suggesting that the entire
future of the planet is “in the balance” (Gore).

DEVELOPMENT SUCCESSES?

Development as a global objective for improving human welfare is a rela-
tively recent concept. It was first embodied in the United Nations Charter,
which stated: “The United Nations shall promote higher standards of liv-
ing, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and
development” (Chapter IX, Article 55). In time, at least among practicing
economists in academia and policymakers in government, “development”
came to be seen as improved economic opportunity through the accumu-
lation of capital and rising productivity. The implicit assumption was that
economic growth would lead to a rise in living standards, increases in life
expectancy, reduced mortality, a reduction in the incidence of poverty, and
so on—all worthy social goals.
Between 1950 and 2011, world gross domestic product (GDP) per capi-
ta expanded at an annual average rate of 2.1 percent, and this expansion—
although with considerable regional variations1—was associated with a
1. For instance, Asia grew at 3.4 percent, but sub-Saharan Africa at 1 percent.
Other regions include: Western Europe (2.8 percent), Latin America (1.6 percent),
Eastern Europe (2 percent), the former Soviet Union (1 percent), and United
States, Canada and Australia (2.2 percent). For a comprehensive set of economic
and social indicators see, for instance, World Development Indicators, a series issued
30              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

remarkable evolution in three key indicators of human welfare. In the half-
century between 1960 and 2011, infant mortality fell from 140 to 37 per
1000 live births; average life expectancy at birth rose from fifty-three to
seventy years, a 32 percent increase which is nothing short of spectacular;
and adult illiteracy fell from 53 to 16 percent. Equally impressive was the
sharp drop in the incidence of poverty. Data from a World Bank study
show that between 1981 and 2010—a period that includes the globaliza-
tion phase of the twentieth century—the share of the world’s population
living in extreme poverty fell from 52 to 21 percent.2
While this progress still left about 1.3 billion people living under harsh
conditions,3 the existence of a positive trend was undeniable and, against
the low expectations of the late 1940s, was a welcome development. As
noted by Richard Cooper, performance “in the period 1950–2000 can only
be described as fantastic in terms of the perspective of 1950, in the literal

periodically by the World Bank, available online at www.worldbank.org and pub-
lished annually in hard copy. The GDP is a measure of the market value of all
goods and services produced within the country in one year. GDP growth, there-
fore, is no more than the rate at which this variable increases in value from one
period (typically a year) to the next.
2. See Chen and Ravallion, “More relatively-poor people in a less absolutely-
poor world.” World Bank, Development Research Group, Policy Research
Working Paper 6114, available at www.worldbank.org. The poverty data can be
found at <http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/WDI-2013-ebook.pdf >
3. Poverty is defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2 per day; for
extreme poverty the threshold is lowered to $1.25 per day. The number of people
living in extreme poverty in 1981 was 1.94 billion, or 660 million more than in
2010. Nevertheless, while accepting such figures, Joseph Stiglitz makes the valid
point that “life for people this poor is brutal,” with malnutrition endemic, life
expectancy well below the global average, and medical care scarce or nonexistent.
See Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, p. 10).
Challenges of Sustainable Development                      31

sense that if someone had forecast what actually happened he would have
been dismissed by contemporaries as living in a world of fantasy …. There
is, to be sure, much work to be done, since too many people still live in
poverty. But it is also necessary to note success when there has been suc-
cess, to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions” (39).4 The observation that
economic growth had been the main engine of poverty reduction and
other improvements in human welfare has led many to ask themselves
what could be done to accelerate growth everywhere, particularly in
Africa, where the incidence of poverty actually rose during this period.5
The question acquired particular urgency among policymakers in the
developing world, given the pressing needs to continue to make progress
in improving living standards, against the background of rising expecta-

4. Many critics of development practices during the past half-century will tend
to focus on the unfinished agenda, the fact that, notwithstanding the gains made
during this period, there is still too much poverty in the world and that this pover-
ty coexists uncomfortably with rising income disparities. Some of these critics call
into question the very approach to development taken by such institutions as the
World Bank, the IMF, and aid agencies of the large donor countries, which also
happen to be the largest shareholders of these two development organizations.
Often calls are made for “a new development model,” although it is not spelled out
what that development model should consist of and, equally importantly, whether
such calls have any practical, conceptual, and political underpinnings. For a par-
ticularly incisive, well-thought-out, non-dogmatic, and unusually pragmatic
analysis of the problems of the fifty-eight poorest countries in the world and what
the international community can do about them, see Paul Collier’s The Bottom
Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
5. A report prepared by the United Nations Development Program for the 2008
United Nations General Assembly shows that the Millennium Development Goal
of halving world poverty between 2000 and 2015 is within reach, largely because
between 1990 and 2005 China brought 475 million people out of poverty, com-
pared to an increase of 100 million during the same period in sub-Saharan Africa.
See “Number of poor rises,” The London Financial Times, 12 Sept. 2008.
32              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

tions among their respective populations.
In a highly influential book published in 2002, the American economist
William Easterly states that he cares about economic growth because “it
makes the lives of poor people better . . . [and] frees the poor from hunger
and disease” (8). He then proceeds to show that growth improves infant
mortality, that, for instance, in Africa 500,000 deaths could have been
averted if growth in the decade of the 1980s had been 1.5 percent higher.
The above insights, in turn, contributed to an intense debate among pro-
fessional economists and policymakers about the relative importance of
various factors, policies, and institutions in creating the conditions for sus-
tained growth.6 What is their relative importance? How do they interact
with each other? How successful have countries been in identifying and
adopting them?
A recent and impressive contribution to the ongoing debate is the 2008
study published by the Commission on Growth and Development of the
World Bank, chaired by Michael Spence, Nobel economics laureate.7 Two
aspects of this report make it a particularly valuable source of insight.
First, the twenty-one commissioners who prepared this study brought
together a rich variety of perspectives, drawn from decades of experience
in government, academia, and the business world, both in a developed-
and developing-country context. Second, the report benefitted from a
wide-ranging process of consultation with leading experts on a broad
array of issues, including the role of fiscal policy, education, geography,

6. One area that has received particular attention has been the role of technol-
ogy and innovation. Economic output is no longer just a function of capital and
labor but, increasingly, knowledge and the acquisition of new knowledge, a point
of view eloquently supported in the Bahá’í writings. As early as 1875 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
placed “the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge” at the basis of “Europe’s
progress and civilization.” See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 10.
7. See The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive
Development, released in May 2008 and available at www.growthcommission.org.
The Growth Report was funded by the World Bank, several industrial country aid
agencies (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom), and some private foundations.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                33

trade, technology, institutions, and interactions with the environment.
The commission examined the experiences of thirteen countries in which,
beginning in 1960, the annual average rate of economic growth was
recorded to be at least 7 percent over a period of twenty-five years or
more, and identified those factors, common or country-specific, that con-
tributed to such remarkable economic performance.
An economy that grows at an average annual rate of 7 percent doubles
in size roughly every ten years. The thirteen economies examined were
those of Botswana, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia,
Malta, Oman, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. During the
periods of high growth, these economies exhibited some common features,
including full exploitation of the opportunities afforded by the world
economy through trade, foreign investment and inward technology trans-
fer, macroeconomic stability, and high rates of saving. On the whole, their
reasonably competent governments were able to avoid some of the terri-
ble mistakes that have been so costly in other countries, such as subsidiz-
ing energy consumption, using the civil service as “employer of last
resort,” neglecting infrastructure, imposing price controls, and underesti-
mating the importance of education as a key driver of the development
process.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith and the head of
the Bahá’í Faith during the period 1892–1921, was an extremely percep-
tive observer of the contemporary economic and political challenges con-
fronting Middle Eastern societies. In an insightful treatise examining a
range of development issues written in 1875, He is explicit in His support
of the benefits of interaction with the rest of the world. He chides nine-
teenth-century Iranian society for its inwardness and suspicion of the
“new systems and procedures” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 13) and “progressive enter-
prises” (13) that have made such an enormous contribution to the devel-
opment of other nations. “Were the people of Europe harmed by the adop-
tion of such measures? Or did they rather by these means reach the high-
est degree of material development?” (13) He asks searchingly. He is
equally compelling in His recognition of the importance of good gover-
nance, saying in reference to “ministers of state and representatives” that
34            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

“administrative skill and wisdom in the conduct of their office raises the
science of government to new heights of perfection” (20–21).
The commission is unambiguous in the benefits it attaches to economic
growth: “Growth is not an end in itself. But it makes it possible to achieve
other important objectives of individuals and societies. It can spare people
en masse from poverty and drudgery. Nothing else ever has. It also creates
the resources to support health care, education, and the other Millennium
Development Goals to which the world has committed itself. In short, we
take the view that growth is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for
broader development, enlarging the scope for individuals to be productive
and creative” (Growth Report 1). The report continues by saying that “in a
very poor country, it is arithmetically impossible to reduce poverty with-
out growth. There is no one to redistribute from. Conversely, if everyone
is poor, growth will reduce poverty regardless of how it is distributed. But
some kinds of growth reduce poverty more effectively than others … The
expansion of smallholder farming, for example, cuts poverty quickly, rais-
ing incomes of rural cultivators and reducing the price of the poor’s food
bill. Growth in labor-intensive manufacturing also raises the incomes of
the poor. The expansion of capital-intensive mining industries, on the
other hand, can result in jobless growth, making little impression on
poverty” (1).
Professor Spence was even more direct in his public pronouncements at
the time that the report was released, saying that “The Growth Report also
kills off once and for all the misguided notion that you can lift people out
of poverty in the absence of growth” (1). He also noted that India needed
“to grow at a fast pace for another 13–15 years to catch up to where China
is today,” and that it was expected that some six hundred million people in
China presently working in agriculture would need to move into more
productive jobs in urban areas and that, therefore, as has happened in the
past twenty years in China, “growth will lift many more people out of
poverty in the coming decades” (14).
Notwithstanding the unanimous consensus among the distinguished
authors of The Growth Report, their views are by no means universally
shared, particularly among scientists and experts laboring on environ-
Challenges of Sustainable Development                 35

mental issues. This is how the editors of a special issue of New Scientist put
it: “Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe: it is,
they claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty, feed-
ing the world’s growing population, meeting the costs of rising public
spending and stimulating technological development—not to mention
funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no limits to that
growth, ever” (Daly 46). The essence of the arguments put forward by
environmentalists is that “our economy is now reaching the point where
it is outstripping Earth’s ability to sustain it. Resources are running out
and waste sinks are becoming full. The remaining natural world can no
longer support the existing economy, much less one that continues to
expand” (46).
A more cogent statement of conventional economists’ view on natural
resource use reads as follows:

Production uses up natural resources, in particular energy. Is it true,
as is sometimes alleged, that exponential growth in the economy will
eventually use up the fixed stock of resources? Well yes, it is true in
the limited sense that current theories suggest the universe will one
day run down. However, this seems more of a concern for a course in
astrophysics, or perhaps theology, than for a course in economics.
Over any interesting horizon, the economy is protected from
resource-depletion disasters by two factors. First, technical progress
permits us to produce more using fewer resources. For example, the
energy efficiency of room lighting has increased by a factor of 4,500
since Neolithic times. Second, as specific resources come into short
supply, their prices rise, leading producers to shift toward substitutes.
(Dornbusch et al. 89)

This logic notwithstanding, the economic impact of the sustained rise
in energy prices as fossil fuel extraction becomes more expensive, and
comparable rises in prices for food and raw materials, as well as the rising
cost of natural disasters linked to climate change, suggest that global
resource limits are producing shortages that now require some rethinking
36             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

about the basic assumptions that have justified our focus on growth in
recent decades. As the head of the European Central Bank stated in 2009:
“We live in non-linear times: the classic economic models and theories
cannot be applied, and future development cannot be foreseen” (Seager
1–2). In this context, it is understandable that efforts are underway to
explore prosperity without growth,8 or the implications of a steady-state
economy.9

A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PATH?
In parallel to the encouraging trends in development noted above, scien-
tists began to ask themselves whether the processes underlying our devel-
opment path were sustainable. Even if one accepts that remarkable
progress has been made during the past half century in improving the lot
of vast segments of humanity, are the processes and the policies that have
produced these trends sustainable?
Regrettably, the answer increasingly seemed to be negative. Among
environmentalists, the focus was on climate change, biodiversity loss, and
pollution. That fact that the earth has self-correcting mechanisms, and
that the physical processes underpinning changes in the environment have
huge inertia, does not invalidate the growing consensus in the scientific
community that, at the margin, the trends are not sustainable. For exam-
ple, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have sharply acceler-
ated since 2000, reflecting a quickening in the pace of growth of the glob-
al economy,10 a sharp rise in energy consumption in China, and the weak-

8. See Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.
9. See Dietz and O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a
World of Finite Resources, 2013.
10. According to World Economic Outlook, published by the IMF, the average
annual global economic growth between 2000 and 2003 was 3.3 percent before
accelerating quickly to 5.0 percent during the period 2004–2007. This pickup in
the pace of economic growth was associated with a remarkable increase in the
price of oil and other commodities.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                    37

ening of natural carbon sinks, such as forests and seas.11 Not surprising-
ly, large volumes of the Arctic ice have melted, and accelerated ice-sheet
flow in Greenland glaciers is contributing to a rise in sea levels. Satellite
observations of the Arctic ice cap show a significant reduction in the ice
cover, with a record decrease in 2012 to less than half the area typically
occupied four decades ago.12 In 1996 the volume of ice melted in
Greenland was 22 cubic miles (92 cubic kilometers). By 2005 this figure
had risen to 53 cubic miles (221 cubic kilometers).13
Even when world economic growth came to a halt in 2009 because of
the global financial crisis, these perturbing environmental trends were not
reversed since the present scale of human activity was only marginally
and temporarily affected, and world economic growth has again taken off.
In the absence of other measures aimed directly at reducing emissions,
only a sustained, deep economic depression such as that experienced dur-
ing the 1929–1933 period might have had an impact on the pace of accu-
mulation of carbon dioxide emissions. However, even the most pessimistic
analysts do not forecast a return to the severe economic dislocations of the
Great Depression that, as is well known, were greatly intensified by poli-
cy mistakes on the part of the economic authorities. Furthermore, expect-
ing an economic depression to help temporarily mitigate the challenges of
global warming is hardly a commendable solution considering the incal-
culable social costs involved.
But even beyond purely environmental concerns, there are other forces
at work that are already having a major impact on our system’s institu-
tional underpinnings, forces that have been at the center of the progress

11. In the twenty-year period 1980–2000, CO2 emissions rose at an average
rate of 1.6 percent per year. By 2004, however, they were rising by 5.4 percent,
with Asia and North America leading the way.
12. See Vidal and Vaughan, “Arctic sea ice shrinks to smallest extent ever
recorded,” The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2012.
13. For some impressive photos of declining ice cover see <http://www.nasa.
gov/arcticice_decline>. The Arctic ice cap has diminished from 7.5 million square
kilometers in 1980 to only 4.3 million in 2007.
38            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

achieved during the past half-century. Key among these factors is popula-
tion growth and its corresponding pressures on resources. According to
World Energy Outlook 2012 published by the International Energy Agency,
energy demand will grow by a third by 2035, reflecting the addition of 2.2
billion people to the world’s population and the corresponding needs for
housing, transportation, heating, illumination, food production and waste
disposal, as well as the push for sustained increases in the standards of liv-
ing.14 Because the mothers who will bear these 2.2 billion children are
already alive today, this expected increase in the world’s population—bar-
ring some unexpected calamity—will materialize and will be largely con-
centrated in urban environments in developing countries.
Beyond the inevitable pressures on resources, rapid population growth
in the next couple of decades will lead to a broad range of challenges for
governments, businesses, and civil society. For instance, in the Middle
East and North Africa, high fertility rates and the highest rates of popu-
lation growth in the world will put enormous strains on labor markets.
These countries already suffer from the highest rates of unemployment in
the world. Simply to prevent these levels from rising further it will be
necessary to create well over 100 million new jobs within the next decade
and a half, an extremely tall order. The failure to significantly increase the
number of jobs so far has led to major political and social instability in the
region.15 In sharp contrast, the populations of countries such as Italy,
Japan, and others in the industrial world will continue to shrink, a demo-
graphic trend which, in turn, will put a huge strain on public finances as
states attempt to cope with growing numbers of pensioners putting major
pressures on budgetary resources.
Powerful demonstration effects are also at work. The spread of instant
communication through the Internet has led billions of people in China,
India, Latin America, and other parts of the developing world to aspire to
lifestyles and patterns of consumption similar to those prevailing in the

14. See World Energy Outlook 2012, Executive Smmary, p. 1. <www.iea.org.>.
15. This was anticipated in Lopez-Claros and Pletka, “Without reforms, the
Middle East risks revolution,” International Herald Tribune, 8 Apr. 2005.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                 39

industrial world. Furthermore, these populations are often unwilling to
postpone such aspirations and increasingly expect their governments to
deliver rising levels of prosperity, implicitly pushing for a more equitable
distribution of the world’s resources. At present, 20 percent of the world’s
population, living in the thirty richest countries, consume over 80 percent
of the world’s goods and services.
As if these demand pressures were not enough, there are emerging sup-
ply constraints as well. World cereal production per person has been on a
downward trend since the late 1980s. It is estimated that by 2025 the
number of people living in regions with absolute water scarcity will have
risen to 1.8 billion. Climate change, soil erosion, and overfishing are
expected to diminish food production and are known to have been a driv-
ing force in the major surge in food prices during the past years.
Thus, the fundamental development question we face is how to recon-
cile the legitimate aspirations of citizens in the developing world with the
high economic growth rates that in the postwar period have led to such
remarkable improvements in the global standards of living, and with the
challenges of an economic system under severe stress as a result of the
pressures put on it by that very economic growth. Paul Collier persuasive-
ly argues that “development is about giving hope to ordinary people that
their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the
world. Take that hope away and the smart people will use their energies
not to develop their societies but to escape from it—as have a million
Cubans” (12).

SEARCHING FOR A SOLUTION
Not surprisingly, there is a raging debate in policymaking circles, in the
pages of academic journals, and in the international press about how to
confront the challenges of economic development. In particular, how can
resolution be found between the tensions caused by pressures on the envi-
ronment resulting from scarce resources associated with economic
growth, and the unsatisfied needs of millions of poor people all over the
40              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

world?16 One popular approach in this debate argues roughly as follows:
“The planet is not salvageable as long as international capitalism prevails,
with its focus on growth and profits at all costs and predatory resource
capture. If we are truly concerned about helping the poor rather than the
rich, we need a new development model.” (George 50)17 Susan George,
for instance, advocates “ecological Keynesianism” (50), drawing parallels
with the Allied response to fascism during the Second World War and the
swift transformation of the economy to a war footing. A massive shift of
resources and priorities by governments to deal with the upcoming envi-
ronmental catastrophes is necessary, a sort of third way “between red-in-
tooth-and-claw capitalism and a worldwide uprising as unlikely as it is
utopian” (50).
Too often the debates about the enormous limitations of the present
economic system take place against complete ignorance of the awful his-
torical record of the alternatives tried during the past century. This point
was well made by John Gray, a professor emeritus of economics at the
London School of Economics and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of
Global Capitalism, during a fascinating online conversation sponsored by
the Templeton Foundation titled “Does the Free Market Corrode Moral
Character?” Gray writes:

The moral hazards of free markets do not mean that other economic
systems are any better. Centrally planned systems have corroded
character far more damagingly and with fewer benefits in terms of
efficiency and productivity. The planned economies of the former
Soviet bloc only functioned—to the degree they did at all—because

16. The Growth Report addresses this issue thus: “Preventing climate change (or
’mitigation’ as the experts call it) is better than palliating its effects. But how can
we cut carbon emissions to safe levels by mid-century while also accommodating
the growth of developing countries? At the moment, the debate has reached a con-
ceptual impasse” (p. 10).
17. For further insight see, for instance, the articles by Susan George and
Andrew Simms, New Scientist, spec. issue. 18 Oct. 2008.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                  41

they were riddled with black and grey markets. Corruption was ubiq-
uitous. In the Marxian model, the greed-fuelled anarchy of the mar-
ket is replaced with planning based on altruism. But actual life in
Soviet societies was more like an extreme caricature of laissez-faire
capitalism, a chaotic and wasteful environment in which each person
struggled to stay afloat. Homo homini lupu—man is wolf to man—was
the rule, and altruism the exception. In these conditions, people with
the most highly developed survival skills and the fewest moral scru-
ples did best. (Gray n. pag.)

Equally insightful are the comments by the French philosopher
Bernard-Henri Levy:

First, if the market corrupts, the various negations of the market cor-
rupt absolutely. Look at fascism. And look at that other hatred of the
market that preceded and followed it: Communism. I doubt that any-
one would posit Communism as the fulfillment of character and soul
for its victims or agents. Second, if it is necessary to choose, if these
corruptions must be ranked, it is patently obvious that the
Communist or the fascist corruption through the negation of the
market is significantly deeper, deadlier, and more irreparable than the
first. That was obvious for fascism from the start, and it eventually
became obvious for Communism too. I think back to the long journey
I made through Central and Eastern Europe just after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. I can still hear my Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian,
and East German friends explaining to me that the Communist era,
those long decades in a society not at all governed by the rules of the
market, had caused them, in their hearts and souls, to develop a cer-
tain number of vices, even defects—and that they themselves did not
know how long it would take to get rid of them. (Levy n. pag.)

As someone whose work took him to Russia within a few months of the
collapse of the Soviet Union and who lived and worked there for the next
four and a half years, I can fully support the assessments made by Gray
42             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

and Levy. Of course, the Bahá’í writings themselves are unequivocal in
highlighting the inadequacies of communism as a system for the organi-
zation of human affairs. Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith
during the period 1921–1957, writes eloquently about the huge costs for
humanity associated with theories and policies “which deify the state and
exalt the nation above mankind, which seek to subordinate the sister races
of the world to one single race, which discriminate between the black and
the white, and which tolerate the dominance of one privileged class over
all others…” (Promised Day 113).
It is imperative that we refrain from fruitless debates about the relative
merits of particular economic “systems” and not succumb to the tempta-
tion of seeing contemporary problems (for example: poverty, income dis-
parities, and climate change) as being purely manifestations of systemic
failure. The reality is considerably more complex. Countries which have
been successful in boosting income per capita, in broadening the range of
available opportunities for their respective populations, and in reducing
the incidence of poverty are those where successive governments have
taken a pragmatic approach to policy formulation and implementation,
taking the best of an otherwise rich menu of options and doing so in a con-
text fairly free of useless, tired debates about whether the approach being
followed was faithful (or not) to a particular ideology� capitalist, Marxist,
or otherwise.
One can characterize as “unjust” the fact that South Korean citizens
today have an income per capita that is fifteen times higher than that of
their fellow brothers and sisters in Ghana, but one cannot neglect the
equally sobering fact that as recently as 1960, Ghana was actually ahead
of South Korea in this key indicator.18 To attribute these differences to

18. In 1950, income per capita (in 1990 US dollars) in Ghana was equivalent to
$1,122, but only $770 in South Korea. By 1998, income per capita in Ghana was
$1,244, but had risen to $12,152 in South Korea. By 2012, the gap had widened at
a rapidly accelerating pace. (See Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial
Perspective). No reliable data is available for the Democratic Republic of Korea
(North Korea), the last and longest centrally planned totalitarian nightmare. With
Challenges of Sustainable Development                      43

“injustice” or to try to explain them in light of some inherent flaw in the
“capitalist” system is misleading and not particularly helpful. It is mislead-
ing because it fails to explain why some economies, such as those of Chile,
Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and all
the Nordics—the list is much longer—have done so well, “capitalism”
notwithstanding.19 This approach is unhelpful because it neglects the
role of good governance and policies in precipitating constructive process-
es of change. For example, to say to any of the heads of state of Bolivia
during the past thirty years that the country’s poverty is the result of
grave injustices in the capitalist system begs the question of why its next-
door neighbor, Chile, has done so much better in improving living condi-
tions. Furthermore, the comparison completely sidesteps the issue of poor
governance and corruption and the extent to which those factors are
largely responsible for Bolivia’s poverty.20
South Korea is a developed country, and Ghana and most of the sub-
Saharan African countries are not. The human beings living in these
countries are all God’s creatures. But the key challenge of development is
identifying the factors, policies, and institutions that have led, in the case

famine estimated to have caused in excess of three million casualties during the
past decade and a half and thousands of young women sold into prostitution
across the border in China, the contrast with South Korea is painfully eloquent.
19. I deliberately use the word in quotes because I am not sure that the term
can be defined meaningfully, just as I cannot say, for example, if Sweden is a “cap-
italist” country.
20. According to a report in The Economist (“Chile: Destitute No More,” 18 Aug.
2007), “poverty has fallen further, faster, in Chile than anywhere else in Latin
America. Sustained economic growth and job creation since the mid-1980s are the
main explanations, though it helps that poorer Chileans are having fewer children
than in the past.” The data show that while poverty rates in Latin America
between 1990 and 2006 fell from about 48 percent to 39 percent, the drop in Chile
over the same period was far more dramatic: from 38 percent to 13 percent. The
authors add: “Chile has a chance of all but abolishing poverty in the next few
years.”
44             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

of South Korea, to high levels of per capita income, highly educated pop-
ulations with skilled labor forces that are able to operate on the frontiers
of technology, where economic activity takes place in a context of relative
openness and transparency, with clear and predictable rules, where cor-
ruption is relatively rare, and where the government is periodically legit-
imized through the electoral process. In the case of Ghana, the opposite of
the foregoing factors has led to all the ills and tragedies that are in full evi-
dence when one travels throughout the “developing” world. It is useless to
pretend that there is no difference. It is important to distinguish between
the individual (all are equal before God as Bahá’u’lláh wonderfully
expresses in the phrase, “The earth is but one country and mankind its cit-
izens,” 250) and the policies or systems they live under, which range from
the enlightened to the deplorable, and which go a long way to explaining
why some countries are rich and prosperous and others are poor and lack-
ing in opportunity. From this perspective, poverty and underdevelopment
have little to do with culture and more with what happens when
economies malfunction or when the technological infrastructure that
drives them has broken down or is no longer relevant for the time and the
place.
The problems of poverty, lack of opportunity, and lack of concern for the
environment have little to do with the presence or absence of “capitalism”
and much more to do with weak institutions and systems of incentives
that often misdirect resources or create huge, wasteful distortions.
Honest and thoughtful leaders are needed who will have credibility with
the public and who will build institutions, improve the regulatory frame-
work, manage scarce resources more effectively, and so on. The following
example is a useful illustration. The primary mechanism of distribution in
most modern societies is the government budget and the tax policy that
underlies it. One of the more interesting experiences in this area is how
the Nordic countries have managed to develop an economic model based
on the provision of an extensive safety net (which involves relatively high
levels of taxation) and managed to remain among the most competitive
economies in the world, thereby disproving the fallacy that “less govern-
ment” is always better because high taxes will discourage private initia-
Challenges of Sustainable Development                  45

tive. Not at all; what matters is how the collected taxes are used. If they
are often stolen or otherwise misused, then, yes, high taxes will kill the
private sector which, in turn, will find ways not to pay them. But if, as in
the Nordics, the tax revenue goes to supporting education, to improving
the country’s infrastructure, to enhancing the skills of the population, and
to providing basic services, then not only will people and businesses pay
the taxes, but societies will flourish, as the case of South Korea illustrates.
While good governance is obviously critical at the national level, the
issue does highlight one significant institutional failure in the globalized
economy of today. There is no international mechanism to define ethical
parameters or otherwise regulate the behavior of multinational corpora-
tions at the global level. Since the economies of the largest companies and
financial institutions are larger than those of most national economies,
this lack of regulation is a significant gap as it leaves room for rapacious
resource extraction, neglect of the environment, tax avoidance, and
exploitation of poor workers, among other vices. The power of business
lobbies is even hard for the governments of large countries to resist, not
to mention for governments that are weak, ineffective, or open to corrup-
tion. As a result, the private sector is often excluded from participation in
governance mechanisms. Yet business needs a level playing field at the
global level for its innovation and competitiveness to work effectively in
support of sustainability.21
It is simplistic just to call for a new development model. Quite aside
from the practical problems associated with giving operational meaning to
such calls, we have learned by now that not only is there no “magic bullet”
to ensure sustainable development, but the ingredients of success are
many in number, vary from country to country in their relative impor-
tance (depending on their stage of development), and evolve over time.
Furthermore, the issue has nothing to do with “capitalism”—a useless and
stale concept in terms of its ability to help us understand better how to

21. See Dahl, “The competitive edge in environmental responsibility,” pp.
103–10, in Lopez-Claros et al., The Global Competitiveness Report 2004–2005.
46            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

tackle world poverty or many of the large number of global problems we
currently face.
A more promising approach to this subject is to frame the discussion of
world poverty—how to reduce it and how to do so in a context of respect
for the environment—in terms of the identification of critical factors
needed to generate processes of growth for the poor within a sustainable
framework, without entering into a largely fruitless debate about the role
of “capitalism” in helping (or not helping) us to get there. That debate may
have been relevant and perhaps even interesting thirty years ago, but the
world has moved on and governments are increasingly judged by voters
not for the extent of their ideological purity but rather for the real results
of their policies, just as Shoghi Effendi suggested they should be. This we
should all celebrate. His eloquent call for setting aside ideological disputes
in discussion of social and economic development in favor of pragmatism
and common sense is captured in his statement that “legal standards,
political and economic theories are solely designed to safeguard the inter-
ests of humanity as a whole, and not humanity to be crucified for the
preservation of the integrity of any particular law or doctrine” (World
Order 42).
In the longer term, we do need research into new economic policies that
are more altruistic and cooperative, create meaningful employment, and
reduce poverty. Such principles imply a profound transformation, not so
much in the mechanisms of the economy but in the values that underlie it
and in the institutions, both private and public, through which it operates.
At the moment, a greater focus at the community level, with new econom-
ic models and experiments for development and poverty elimination driv-
en from the bottom up, may be more fruitful than the present aid approach
to development that is driven from the top down.

A CREATIVE AGENDA

At present, creative solutions are far more likely to focus on practical
actions that can be taken to address the core challenge of sustainable
development as defined earlier in this article. In particular, in our view,
they are likely to involve actions on at least four fronts.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                     47

CONSERVATION

First, we will have to invest in conservation and in redressing some of the
damage done to the environment through decades of neglect. According
to the Earth Policy Institute, about US$100 billion should be spent annu-
ally to protect topsoil in croplands, to stabilize water tables, to restore
fisheries, and to protect biological diversity. This sum of money is not par-
ticularly large in relation to the size of the global economy—it is less than
one-seventh of 1 percent of world GNP—and it is certainly not large in
relation to the huge amounts of money made available by governments in
some of the largest countries to deal with the short-term effects of the
2008–2009 global financial crisis. It is also less than 6 percent of annual
world military expenditure.22
A key finding of the latest scientific work on climate change is that the
annual cost of introducing control measures for greenhouse gases is far
smaller in comparison to the potential cost of uncontrolled climate
change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the
United Nations estimates that stabilizing greenhouse gases by 2030
would slow global economic growth by slightly more than 0.1 percent per
year. The risks of inaction, however, are huge, and estimates of the eco-
nomic cost associated with an increase from 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in
temperatures suggest economic damage approximating 1.5 percent of
global GDP annually by 2100, with some estimates going even higher.23
Furthermore, the impact is significantly different across some regions,
with India and Africa being most affected. There will also be a need to
invest in energy infrastructure not only to replace aging capacity and to
meet growing global energy demand but also to boost efficiency.

22. The United States accounts for 57 percent of total world military expendi-
tures. Between 1998 and 2012, its military spending rose from $280 billion to
$682 billion.
23. For instance The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review commis-
sioned by the United Kingdom government concluded that a rise in temperatures
of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius could reduce global economic output by 3 percent,
whereas a rise of 5 degrees Celsius would result in up to 10 percent of global out-
put being lost, with the losses in developing countries being even higher.
48             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

TECHNOLOGY

Obviously, technology can play a key role. More efficient use of energy has
reduced the size of energy consumption in global GDP by more than 30
percent in the past 20 years. Much more can be done in this area, particu-
larly by resorting to new technologies of energy renewal and conserva-
tion, including greater use of solar and wind power and alternative fuels.
There is encouraging evidence that the auto industry is finally catching up
to rapidly changing consumer demand as evidenced by an increasing num-
ber of electric and hybrid cars on the market, since the rewards could
potentially be very large. Simultaneously, a number of studies, under the
general heading of “geo-engineering,” are underway in leading research
centers to identify human interventions that could either remove carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere or reduce the amount of sunlight that comes
to the earth. These new technologies have a strong potential for unintend-
ed consequences, but could, after careful assessment, play a necessary,
complementary role in other measures aimed at precipitating inevitable
changes in human behavior that have been too slow in coming.24
Of course, given the magnitude of the challenges we face—particularly
climate change—care must be taken not to overstate the case for new
technologies and the time it will take for these new technologies to have a
measurable impact. Indeed, many in the scientific community think that it
is quite misguided to think that a combination of greater energy efficien-
cy and the development of appropriate green technologies will allow eco-

24. Among the many novel alternatives being explored is the use of peridotite,
a carbon-eating rock that, in the case of the Omani desert, for instance, is known
to absorb tens of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide every year. Scientists at
Columbia University argue, in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, that drilling and fracturing of the rock could increase its
absorption rate 100,000-fold. (See “Eating Carbon,” The Economist, p. 87).
Challenges of Sustainable Development                       49

nomic growth to continue unimpeded in coming decades.25 There is the
additional danger that undue emphasis on “technological fixes” will result
in complacency, since politicians will always be receptive to solutions that
do not appear to involve sacrifices on the part of voters, unlike carbon
taxes, or changes in patterns of consumption or lifestyles.
Defining progress in terms of technological breakthroughs that only
benefit privileged minorities at the expense of the well-being of humanity
as a whole and the planet itself is not only unjust, but it ignores the poten-
tial that can come from making science and technology accessible to the
poor and from empowering them to set their own priorities and to use
technological innovation to resolve their own problems. Clearly, there is
tremendous potential associated with indigenous technologies that will
help communities create their own technological breakthroughs in keep-
ing with local conditions. Strengthening communities at the grass roots
has enormous potential to stimulate myriad forms of development from
the bottom up.
The Growth Report lucidly defines our challenge: “We do not know if lim-
its to growth exist, or how generous those limits will be. The answer will
depend on our ingenuity and technology, on finding new ways to create
goods and services that people value on a finite foundation of natural
resources. This is likely to be the ultimate challenge of the coming century.
Growth and poverty reduction in the future will depend on our ability to
meet it” (12). In this respect it is noteworthy to highlight Shoghi Effendi’s
allusions to the scope of further advances in “human inventions and tech-
nical development” (World Order 204) including those aimed at “the
exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet” (204).

25. See the interview with environmental activist David Suzuki, who unhesitat-
ingly states: “They [the economists] believe humans are so creative and produc-
tive that the sky’s the limit, that if we run out of resources, we’ll go to the moon,
mine asteroids or harvest sunlight in space and microwave it to Earth. They think
the whole universe is there as a potential resource.… Limitless resources are a
fool’s dream that we can never achieve.” (“We Should Act Like the Animals We
Are,” New Scientist 44).
50            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

He makes specific reference to the earth’s “unimaginably vast resources”
(204), which “[a] world federal system … liberated from the curse of war
and its miseries” (204) will be able to exploit and put at the service of
mankind. He also refers to “the exploitation of all the available sources of
energy on the surface of the planet” (204), acknowledging the essential
role that energy plays in economic development, and thus the challenge to
our present economy from the rising costs and risks of shortages from our
over-dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels.
While this technological potential undoubtedly exists in the long term,
its development will require global institutional arrangements, efficiencies
of governance, financial resources, and a culture of change in political and
social systems, all of which are lacking at the present time. The immedi-
ate issue for sustainability is not so much the ultimate limits and techno-
logical possibilities, but rather it is our present slow pace of change when
faced with growing social and environmental challenges. There are tech-
nological solutions for most environmental problems, but they are not
being applied at anywhere near the speed necessary to avoid future crises.
Environmental degradation continues and social tensions are rising, espe-
cially among the young.

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

The third crucially important element of a strategy aimed at generating a
sustainable development path will have to be a significant strengthening
of the current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have
turned out to be completely inadequate to the global challenges that we
face. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent
progress in the creation of an international institutional infrastructure
that can support it and enhance its potential for good. There is no global
environmental authority. Policy in this area is being set via ad hoc
approaches involving elements of international cooperation, voluntary
compliance, and large doses of hope.
In the absence of a body having jurisdiction over the global environ-
ment with corresponding legal enforcement authority, the international
Challenges of Sustainable Development                 51

community has, de facto, abdicated management of the world’s environ-
ment to chance and the actions of a few well-meaning states. The global
economy has no lender of last resort. There is no reliable, depoliticized
mechanism to deal with financial crises. Whether a country receives or is
refused an IMF bailout in the middle of a financial meltdown is a function
not of a transparent set of internationally accepted rules but rather of sev-
eral other factors, including whether the IMF’s largest shareholders con-
sider the country to be a strategic ally worth supporting. Furthermore,
there is no international legal framework to ensure that global business
enterprises are socially, environmentally, and economically responsible.
There is no agency charged with the responsibility for giving legal mean-
ing to the noble principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. According to the United States Department of State, there
are forty-four nations with the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear
proliferation remains yet another example of global institutional failure.
Whether we focus our attention on climate change and the broad range
of associated environmental calamities, nuclear proliferation, the work-
ings of the world’s financial system, or focus on growing income dispari-
ties, the fact is that major planetary problems are being neglected because
we do not have effective problem-solving mechanisms and institutions
strong enough to deal with them. Or, put differently, a range of inherent-
ly global crises cannot be solved outside the framework of global collec-
tive action involving supranational cooperation and a fundamental
rethinking of “national interest.”
The reality is that existing institutions are incapable of rising to the
challenges of a rapidly changing world because they were designed for
another era. Indeed, the United Nations itself and its associated infra-
structure of specialized agencies, which were created to attend to a variety
of global problems, find themselves increasingly unable to respond to
crises, sometimes because these agencies lack the appropriate jurisdiction
or mandate to act, at times because they are inadequately endowed with
resources, and often because they simply do not know what to do. Shoghi
Effendi characterized this dilemma with penetrating insight when he said,
as far back as 1931, that “the fundamental cause of this world unrest is
52            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

attributable . . . to the failure of those into whose hands the immediate des-
tinies of peoples and nations have been committed, to adjust their system
of economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly
evolving age” (World Order 36).
The nation state is in deep crisis. At its core, the nation state is defined
by a geographical border within which elected governments—at least in
the context of democracy—are responsible for safeguarding the interests
of citizens, improving the quality of available services, managing scarce
resources, and promoting gradually rising living standards. However, as
made abundantly clear by recent events in the financial markets and, more
generally, by the onward march of globalization, the economic system is
now no longer confined to national borders but straddles them in a way
that is increasingly forcing governments to relinquish control in a grow-
ing number of areas. Indeed, one of the main lessons to emerge from the
2008-2009 global financial crisis, as noted by Peter Mandelson, a former
European Union Commissioner, is that “a global economy needs global
economic governance” (n. pag.). The same can be said for the environment.
Alongside the stresses put on institutions by the accelerating pace of
global change, people everywhere are showing growing dissatisfaction
with the inability of politics and politicians to find solutions to wide
ranges of global problems. This trend is likely to intensify and is giving
rise to a “crisis of governance,” the sense that nobody is in charge, that
while we live in a fully integrated world, we do not have an institutional
infrastructure that can respond to the multiple challenges we face.26
Shoghi Effendi summarizes this predicament: “The world, to whichever
continent we turn our gaze, to however remote a region our survey may
extend, is everywhere assailed by forces it can neither explain nor control”
(World Order 31).
Indeed, existing mechanisms to tackle global issues are woefully inade-
quate. Treaties and conventions—which are very much at the core of how

26. See the excellent discussion of these issues provided by Rischard, High
Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                 53

the international community has confronted global challenges in the
past—have proven generally ineffective to address urgent problems. For
example, the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 but only ratified in
2005. The United States, until 2008 the largest emitter of global-warm-
ing gasses in the world, now overtaken by China, is not a party to the
Protocol. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that the goals it set for
global emissions by 2012 would not be reached. Where enforcement
mechanisms exist at all, monitoring and enforcement of these treaties are
lax and painfully slow.
During the 1990s the United Nations took the lead role in organizing
major intergovernmental conferences, beginning with the Earth Summit
held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This was followed by conferences on social
and economic development (Copenhagen), women (Beijing), population
(Cairo), human rights (Vienna), and so on. These conferences, however,
while generally good for raising awareness of the underlying problems,
have proven to be inadequate for problem-solving. Long on declarations
and in some cases deteriorating into circus-like chaos (e.g., the 2001
Durban conference on race), they have long ceased to be mechanisms for
effective cooperation on the urgent problems confronting humanity. The
Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in
2012 was intended to reaffirm government commitments, to define a
green economy that would alleviate poverty and work for sustainability,
and to obtain agreement on new international institutional arrangements.
But this gathering only succeeded in making minor adjustments to exist-
ing institutions and in proposing a high-level political forum whose func-
tion is still being defined. This experience demonstrated once again that
governments are incapable of addressing urgent global problems effec-
tively within the present system.
Yet another attempt at reinforcing existing mechanisms of internation-
al cooperation was the creation in the mid-1970s of the G7, a club com-
prised of the world’s seven largest economies. The motivation was to cre-
ate a high-level body to discuss “major economic and political issues fac-
ing their domestic societies and the international community as a whole”
(“What Is the G8?”) The G7 has been a good forum for open debate about
54            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

global problems but not a particularly effective problem-solving group. In
the public imagination, its semi-annual meetings are largely perceived as
excellent photo opportunities, not as brainstorming sessions focused on
particular problems requiring urgent solutions. Unlike, for instance, the
1944 Bretton Woods conference, which lasted three weeks and resulted in
the creation of a new world financial system, G7 meetings are actually
intended to preserve the status quo. Its communiqués are negotiated by
deputies ahead of the Summit itself and much time is spent in getting the
wording of these declarations just right. Over time, critics have pointed
out some obvious deficiencies, the first being, of course, that now the G7
membership is no longer comprised of the world’s seven largest
economies. Italy, for instance, the industrial world’s slowest-growing
economy during the past twenty years, has now been overtaken by many
others, including China and India.27 In 1999, recognizing that the global
economy had evolved since the mid-1970s, a broader grouping was creat-
ed—the G20—but neither the Swiss nor the Dutch nor the Spanish were
particularly happy at being excluded. Switzerland is the world’s most
competitive economy; the Netherlands is one of the most generous donors
and, according to the Center for Global Development, one of the countries
with the most development-friendly policies.28 Spain, a country whose
economy is three times the size of that of Argentina (a member of the
G20), took great exception to being excluded from the G20 Summit,
which was called by President George W. Bush for November 14–15,
2008, to discuss the global financial crisis.

27. According to the World Bank’s development indicators (www.
worldbank.org), Italy’s GDP in 2012 is estimated to be US$1,834 billion, com-
pared to China’s (US$12,406 billion), India’s (US$4,184 billion), Russia’s
(US$2,513 billion), and Brazil’s (US$2,356 billion), using a purchasing-power-
parity measure.
28. See Commitment to Development Index 2012, issued by the Center for Global
Development, which reports that Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg,
Austria, and the Netherlands occupy, in that order, the top six ranks.
<www.cgdev.org>
Challenges of Sustainable Development                    55

Moreover, both the G7—or the G8 with Russia—and the G20 remain,
in fact, official government bodies. Their deliberations bring to the table
heads of state and a small coterie of civil servants, but there is no repre-
sentation from the business community, and civil society representatives
do not participate. Given the global nature of the problems being faced
and the increasingly shared perception that their solution will require
broad-based collaboration across various stakeholder groups, many of
these groups suffer from a deficit of legitimacy.29 They are not a fair rep-
resentation of humanity, and, as such, they cannot be expected to make
any important decisions on its behalf.
The multilateral agencies associated with the United Nations system
have acquired a critically important role in recent decades. These agencies
are repositories of knowledge and expertise and, in some cases, they have
essentially taken over jurisdiction in a central area of economic gover-
nance, such as international trade through the World Trade Organization.
However, they remain hampered in many other ways, including lack of
access to adequate resources to finance their activities and the reluctance
of many of the larger countries to cede national sovereignty in particular
areas. In this respect, the European Union has, without doubt, gone fur-
ther than any other country grouping in creating a supranational institu-
tional infrastructure to support an ambitious process of economic and
political integration.
Effective, credible mechanisms of international cooperation that are
perceived to be legitimate and capable of acting on behalf of the interests
of humanity—rather than those of a particular set of countries—are
absolutely essential if the world is to meet the challenge of striking the
correct balance between concern for the environment and the policies that
must underpin such concern. There is also the need to ensure that the
global economy develops in a way that provides opportunities for all, par-

29. The population of the G7—746 million, according to the latest World Bank
estimates—accounts in 2010 for 10.8 percent of the world’s population, that is, a
small minority.
56             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

ticularly the poor and the disadvantaged.30 It is an open question whether
the existing intergovernmental system of nation states is capable of
achieving this level of cooperation, or if such a system will require a more
fundamental restructuring of the relationships between countries and
peoples.

HUMAN VALUES

Finally, no strategy aimed at fostering the emergence of a sustainable
development path would be complete without a fundamental rethinking of
the human values that have driven much of the development process dur-
ing the past century. A considerable body of academic research in recent
years has examined the issue of the correlation between growing incomes
and human happiness. The question itself might have appeared slightly
quaint a couple of decades ago, when economists in academia and policy-
makers in government and international financial organizations more or
less accepted as an article of faith that higher growth and income would
always be desirable, would increase human welfare and, along with it, hap-
piness.
Several insights, however, have contributed to a gradual change of per-
spective. First, however beneficial the several decades of robust, postwar
economic growth might have been in improving living standards, the real-
ization grew that the global economy was beginning to confront environ-
mental constraints that could actually be measured. Second, psychologists,
newly empowered with analytical tools developed in other sciences, were
able to show that human happiness was correlated with income only up to
a certain level. Money seemed to be crucially important for happiness
when basic material needs had not been met. But once these needs had

30. For a sensible set of reform proposals aimed at enhancing the efficiency and
responsiveness of the United Nations to some of these global challenges, see
Turning Point for All Nations, a statement prepared by the Bahá’í International
Community on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, New
York, 1995.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                      57

been satisfied, the sources of happiness shifted to other concerns, reflect-
ing deeper spiritual aspirations, including friendship, love, relationships, a
sense of purpose in life, and security, among others. The level of income at
which the correlation with happiness disappears has been estimated at
around US$10,000 to US$13,000, using 1995 United States dollars and
adjusting for differences in purchasing power across countries.31
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen suggests that societies operate better on
some presumption of trust. Here we refer to the need for openness, “the
freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and
lucidity” (Sen 39). Trust is tremendously important for preventing cor-
ruption and other abuses, and it is behind the frequent calls for improved
transparency in governance. Experience has shown that where there is
trust, citizens and businesses pay their taxes, which, in turn, enables the
government to formulate policies to achieve various social ends because
the resources are available to invest in these areas. As societies see the
fruits of these efforts, trust in the government is reinforced and the coun-
try enters into what one can call a “virtuous cycle” of development. Of
course, “vicious cycles” are also possible, such as those that have occurred

31. The interested reader can see, among others, the work by Easterlin, “Will
Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?” Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization, 27 (1995), pp. 35–47; and Inglehart and Klingemann,
“Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness,” chapter 7 in Diener and Suh, ed.,
Culture and Subjective Well-Being, pp. 165–83. Further insightful discussion is pro-
vided by Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal
of Civilization, pp. 192–93, and McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of
Communities and the Durable Future, pp. 30–42, 109–12. For a more technical treat-
ment the reader may refer to Kahneman and Krueger, “Developments in the
Measurement of Subjective Well-being,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20.1,
(Winter 2006), pp. 3–24. Kahneman is a professor of psychology at Princeton
University and is the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics. The Earth Institute of
Columbia University and partners recently issued the World Happiness Report, ed.
Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs. The study of happiness (“subjective well-being”) is
now considered an entirely respectable academic discipline.
58            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

during the past half-century. Thirty years ago, there was very little debate
about the role of corruption in the development process. It was certainly
a taboo subject in the corridors of the IMF and the World Bank, where
there was a tendency to separate technical judgments about the intricacies
of macroeconomic policy from value judgments about the domestic polit-
ical dimension. Fortunately, there is now broad understanding that open-
ness and transparency are key drivers of prosperity, although there is no
need to frame the debate in moral, ethical, or religious terms. It is enough
to see this debate as an economic efficiency issue. Where corruption is
rampant, for instance, companies and individuals see paying taxes as a bad
business proposition. In contrast, as noted earlier, everybody pays taxes in
the Nordic countries, which have the lowest levels of corruption in the
world and the highest tax burdens, because the benefits of doing so are
immediately visible: superb infrastructure, a highly trained labor force, an
extensive social safety net, excellent education, and so forth.
Bahá’ís would argue that the above observations suggest the need to
broaden the definition of what constitutes “well-being” and investigate
more closely the relationship between increasing market activity and the
welfare of the people participating in the economic system. One starting
point would be to establish a clearer mental demarcation between the con-
cepts of “growth” and “development.” The first is essentially a quantita-
tive concept that captures the expansion in the scale of the economic sys-
tem, while the latter refers to qualitative changes in this system and in its
relationships with the environment and other aspects of life in the com-
munity. Properly understood, economics should concern itself less with
how to add to the physical dimension of the economic system and more
with the long-term welfare of the community whose interests the “sys-
tem” is ultimately intended to serve.
This distinction is quite fundamental. Herman Daly and John Cobb
argue that the global ecosystem will change in coming decades “because it
will be physically forced to change” (21). To give a sense of the scope for
additional expansion of the global economy, they observe that, as of the
early 1990s, human beings were appropriating 40 percent of the total
world product of photosynthesis. An additional doubling of the human
Challenges of Sustainable Development                    59

scale would leave very little energy for all nonhuman species. Since
“humans cannot survive without the services of ecosystems which are
made up of other species,” it becomes clear that another doubling of the
human scale would put unbearable pressures on the earth’s ecosystem, if
not actually become an ecological impossibility. The doubling time of
human population is projected to be about forty years. However, as cur-
rently formulated, the aim of development policy is to increase the average
per capita consumption of global resources, thus reducing, in the absence
of some major technological breakthrough, the length of time needed to
double the scale of the global economy and its claims on world resources.
Daly and Cobb conclude that “unless we awaken to the existence and near-
ness of scale limits, then the greenhouse effect, ozone layer depletion, and
acid rain will be just a preview of disasters to come, not in the vague dis-
tant future but in the next generation” (144).32
The deep interconnection between spirituality and care for the environ-
ment has been the subject of increasing exploration. James Gustave Speth,
retired dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale
University, believes the economy to be “an inherently rapacious and ruth-
less system” and that “it is up to citizens to inject values that reflect human
aspirations rather than just making money” (48). Al Gore dedicates an
entire chapter in his extraordinarily prescient book Earth in the Balance to
the role of spirituality in the cause of environmentalism and had this to
say about the Bahá’í view:

Perhaps because its guiding visions were formed during the period of
accelerating industrialism, Bahá’í seems to dwell on the spiritual
implications of the great transformation to which it bore fresh wit-
ness: “We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment
outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will
be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the

32. One should derive some comfort from the fact that depletion of the ozone
layer has ceased to be a serious global environmental threat, reflecting effective
international cooperation, as envisaged in the Montreal Protocol.
60            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

environment and is itself deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the
other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these
mutual reactions.” (262)

The challenges posed by the above are further elucidated in The
Prosperity of Humankind, a statement issued by the Bahá’í International
Community in 1995:

A culture which attaches absolute value to expansion, to acquisition,
and to the satisfaction of people’s wants is being compelled to recog-
nize that such goals are not, by themselves, realistic guides to policy.
(14)

As the experience of recent decades has demonstrated, material ben-
efits and endeavors cannot be regarded as ends in themselves. Their
value consists not only in providing for humanity’s basic needs in
housing, food, health care, and the like, but in extending the reach of
human abilities. The most important role that economics must play in
development lies, therefore, in equipping people and institutions with
the means through which they can achieve the real purpose of devel-
opment: that is, laying foundations for a new social order that can cul-
tivate the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness. (13)
(emphasis added)

NEW HOPES FOR A CHANGING WORLD

Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition that civilization, if carried to excess, “will prove
as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the
restraints of moderation” (World Order 194) is an eloquent statement of
mankind’s most pressing contemporary predicament. One’s assessment of
how far humanity has evolved in the path of progress and in creating the
conditions for the emergence of “an ever-advancing civilization”
(Bahá’u’lláh 215) depends on the choice of the starting point. Viewed in
the context of the past century, however, there can be no doubt that our
Challenges of Sustainable Development                 61

achievements have been without parallel and have set the basis for a new
stage of human development, one that will greatly test our will, our intel-
lectual resources, our ingenuity, the maturity of our political systems, and
our collective imagination.
The postwar period has witnessed a rapid expansion in the scale of the
global economy. This process has been fueled by rapid population growth,
by a significant acceleration in the pace of scientific and technological
development, and by our enhanced abilities to tap into the planet’s natu-
ral resources. An additional factor that, during the past three decades has
had a particularly powerful influence, has been the information and com-
munications revolution, which has boosted productivity and catalyzed a
remarkable process of global economic and social integration. Of course,
reflecting the absence of adequate mechanisms for international coopera-
tion, to say nothing of an infrastructure for global governance, these
processes have been disorderly, and have coexisted with a number of
trends that have brought humanity to its present predicament—the emer-
gence of environmental limits to the very economic growth that has con-
tributed to the alleviation of human suffering, to pulling hundreds of mil-
lions of people out of extreme poverty, and to creating greater opportuni-
ty for vast segments of the world’s population.33
Yes, the prevailing economic paradigm has serious flaws. Left to its own
devices, it can lead to episodes of instability and can coexist with other
perturbing trends, such as growing income disparities or the unsustain-
able use of non-renewable resources. There is little comfort in suggesting
that, notwithstanding its shortcomings, capitalism has proved to be a far
superior economic system—in terms of improving overall living stan-
dards—than its main competitor during much of the past century. The
mindless Marxist experiments, which ultimately collapsed with the Berlin
Wall in 1989, had turned the Soviet Union into a superbly efficient
machine for the destruction of wealth.
A “new development model” may indeed be necessary but, pending its

33. About 65 percent of the world’s population today lives in high-income or
high-growth economies, compared to less than 20 percent in 1978.
62            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

formulation, we would be well advised to work within the current system,
which has features that, while far from perfect, have proved resilient and,
it is not difficult to guess, would in any event transfer over to any new
development paradigm. Among these one would include respect for prop-
erty rights, progressive taxation, the use of the government budget as a
key mechanism for income distribution, universal primary education, gen-
der equality, and, most important, the maintenance and further develop-
ment of the institutions that underpin our increasingly complex global
economy.
In The Secret of Divine Civilization, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá draws a parallel be-
tween the world of politics and the physical evolution of man. Just as the
latter evolves from the embryo to higher stages of complexity, “the polit-
ical world in the same way cannot instantaneously evolve from the nadir
of defectiveness to the zenith of rightness and perfection. Rather, qualified
individuals must strive by day and by night, using all those means which
will conduce to progress, until the government and the people develop
along every line from day to day and even from moment to moment”
(107–8).
From a Bahá’í perspective, the starting point must be the consciousness
of the oneness of humankind, which will lead to the creation of laws and
institutions that are universal in both character and authority.34 In terms
of the evolution of institutional arrangements, the most immediate need is
to increase the level of trust among governments, many of which have
been remarkably untrustworthy in respecting their international agree-
ments. Without trust, international cooperation cannot advance. A focus
on transparency and reduction of corruption to achieve more effective
governance will also help governments to move in the right direction and
reduce the significant level of tax evasion among the wealthy and busi-
nesses. Within the economic system, a stronger focus on ethical behavior
and social and environmental responsibility needs to be included in corpo-
rate charters and government regulations in order to widen the account-
ability of business leaders. This standard then needs to be extended to the

34. See Bahá’í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind.
Challenges of Sustainable Development                       63

international level where multinational corporations and financial institu-
tions presently escape essential controls and much national taxation.
Recent efforts to develop social enterprises and alternative economic rela-
tionships are encouraging signs that change is taking root in many parts
of the world.
This article has argued that in confronting the challenges of climate
change and the other threats which cast a shadow over mankind’s future
prosperity, concerted action will be necessary on a number of fronts. Some
of these will demand political leadership, particularly those that may
require a reallocation of government-spending priorities (e.g., toward con-
servation, other forms of mitigation, greater investment in the develop-
ment of green technologies and alternative fuels). No strategy, however,
will bear fruit without the support of others outside government. The
twenty-first century has delivered a “new diplomacy,” one in which the
search for solutions to global problems will increasingly involve coalitions
of enlightened governments, civil society organizations, and the business
community.35
Of course, failure to act will increase our vulnerability to multiple,
interrelated crises with unforeseen costs for human welfare. Whether we
find the collective will to act now to stem the tide of future crises or wait
for catastrophe to force change upon us is, perhaps, the central question of
our time. While it is not clear today whether we will have the wisdom to
act now, a close examination of the vision of world order offered by
Bahá’u’lláh shows that we certainly have the capacity to move to a sustain-
able development path and that, in doing so, we could well usher in a new
stage in the evolution of the human race, one that is likely to involve a

35. In this respect it is noteworthy that the three most important initiatives of
international cooperation during the past decade and a half (the Kyoto Protocol
on global warming, the creation of the International Criminal Court, and the rat-
ification of the treaty to ban land mines) have all involved close collaboration
across these three key stakeholder groups. Without doubt, this will be the wave of
the future.
64            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012

quantum leap in terms of our collective achievements as a human family.
Shoghi Effendi provided a glimpse of that magnificent potential:

National rivalries, hatreds, and intrigues will cease, and racial animos-
ity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and
cooperation. The causes of religious strife will be permanently
removed, economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abol-
ished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterat-
ed. Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership
on the other, will disappear. The enormous energy dissipated and
wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to
such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical
development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the
extermination of disease, to the extension of scientific research, to the
raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and
refinement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and
unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human
life, and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the
intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.
(World Order 204)

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-- Challenges of Sustainable Development (Used by permission of the curator)