Contextualising Development in Sustainable Practices

The word “development” is used so routinely today – in policy papers, international summits, classroom textbooks, and government budgets – that its origins and assumptions rarely get questioned. Yet development as a global organizing concept has a specific history, a particular set of values embedded within it, and a track record that raises serious questions. When we speak of development, what exactly are we talking about? And who decided what it should look like?

How development became the world’s dominant idea
Development as a Western prescription
The ecological price of development
The shift: from growth to sustainable development
Why the Brundtland definition is still contested
Reevaluating development in the present moment

How development became the world’s dominant idea

Our modern conception of development was shaped after the end of World War II – specifically by the geopolitical climate of the Cold War and the Truman Doctrine, which became the defining framework of US foreign policy. After World War II, a number of countries attained independence from their former colonial rulers. Leaders of independence movements pointed to colonialism as the root cause of low living standards, and so economic development became both a policy objective and a political promise in newly sovereign nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In the postwar period, the idea of development became an organizing principle for broad and interrelated questions like postwar reconstruction, the fall of empires, and the Cold War. Development was no longer just about improving living standards – it was a geopolitical instrument. The Western world, particularly the United States, framed newly independent nations as “underdeveloped” and positioned Western industrial capitalism as the finish line every country should aspire to reach.

This framing was not neutral. The modern conception of development had its origins in the post-war period as part of a larger strategy to thwart the expansion of communism and to promote the interests of the US and its allies. Development assistance came bundled with ideological expectations. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF and GATT were inaugurated in this same historical context, providing the financial architecture for a particular vision of global economic order.

Development as a Western prescription

The concept of development has encompassed several separate ideas over the past sixty years: the modernization of economic and social institutions, sustained economic growth within national economies, improvement of material well-being, more extensive utilization of the world’s resources, and the replacement of traditional institutions and values with modern successors. Each of these ideas carries a very specific cultural and ideological orientation – one rooted in Western industrial capitalism.

International development emerged as an extension of the relationship between former colonized countries and Western colonizer countries, and was fueled by the competing powers in the Cold War who saw development as increasing their terrain of influence. In this environment, “development” meant something very specific: industrialization, market economies, GDP growth, and integration into Western-led global trade systems.

This top-down, one-size-fits-all model soon attracted fierce criticism. Scholars from Latin America voiced a strong counter-argument known as Dependency Theory, arguing that the global economic system was structured so that rich “core” countries became wealthy by extracting resources from poor “periphery” countries. Development, they argued, was not a benevolent process of progress – it was a system that reproduced inequality on a global scale. From a dependency theory standpoint, unsustainable practices in the Global South frequently result from core nations demanding cheap resources and manufactured goods, leading to localized environmental degradation driven by external economic pressures.

The ecological price of development

Perhaps the most glaring blind spot in the original development model was its relationship to the natural world. Rapid industrialization was treated as unambiguously good – a sign of progress. The environmental consequences were largely ignored or accepted as the necessary cost of growth.

Environmental degradation manifests in various forms including air pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, marine pollution, and biodiversity loss – changes proven to be linked to human activities such as energy production, consumption, and agriculture. The burden of these consequences has not been shared equally. Developing countries have repeatedly pointed out that Western nations, which industrialized much earlier and often at the expense of the Global South, are responsible for the bulk of the globe’s cumulative environmental damage and greenhouse gas emissions. The Global North, which drove the development paradigm for decades, accounts for an estimated 92 per cent of cumulative GHG emissions – yet pressures the rest of the world to curb industrial growth.

The economic consequences of continuing on this trajectory are severe. The World Bank projected that 51 countries – with a combined population of 1.6 billion people – would experience an overall fall in GDP of 10-20% by the end of this decade if vital ecosystem services collapse. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which contributed least to the environmental crisis, would bear the heaviest losses. This is not just an ecological problem – it is a profound injustice.

The shift: from growth to sustainable development

The 1980s marked a turning point in how the global community thought about development. Mounting evidence of ecological damage – deforestation, desertification, ozone depletion, and climate change – made it clear that unlimited growth on a finite planet was not viable. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development published a landmark report, commonly known as the Brundtland Report, which introduced and defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The Brundtland Report stated that critical global environmental problems were primarily the result of the enormous poverty of the South and the non-sustainable patterns of consumption and production in the North. This was a significant reframing – it acknowledged that both poverty and overconsumption were drivers of environmental destruction, and that any serious solution required addressing both ends of the global inequality spectrum.

Our Common Future placed environmental issues firmly on the political agenda, aiming to discuss the environment and development as one single issue – a conceptual shift that had enormous implications. It laid the groundwork for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the adoption of Agenda 21, and ultimately the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.

Why the Brundtland definition is still contested

While the Brundtland definition became the most widely cited formulation of sustainable development, it did not escape criticism. Several scholars maintain that the definition is vague and difficult to operationalize, and the Brundtland Report itself has been criticized for its continued primacy on economic growth as the path to achieving sustainable development. By keeping growth at the centre of the framework, critics argue, the report failed to challenge the very engine driving environmental degradation in the first place.

This critique is central to the degrowth perspective, which argues that the main problem with the idea of sustainable development is not with the idea of sustainability but with development itself. Rather than greening the existing model, this argument calls for a fundamental rethinking of what growth means, who it serves, and what alternatives exist. Indigenous philosophies and practices such as Buen Vivir from the Andean region or Ubuntu from sub-Saharan Africa offer different frameworks – ones that prioritize community well-being, ecological balance, and sufficiency over endless accumulation.

Reevaluating development in the present moment

The core problem is that “development” has for too long been treated as a self-evident good – a universal destination that all countries should be racing to reach. But the destination was designed with specific assumptions: that economic growth is inherently desirable, that industrialization is the primary engine of progress, and that Western societies represent the model all others should follow. These assumptions have produced real gains in material living standards for many, but they have also generated deepening inequality, widespread ecological damage, and the displacement and marginalization of communities and ways of life that don’t fit the growth model.

While economic expansion is crucial for improving living standards and reducing poverty, it often comes at the cost of environmental degradation – and the evidence now suggests that environmental degradation, in turn, retards long-term economic growth. The relationship is not linear, and there are no easy answers. But what is clear is that development can no longer be treated as a purely economic or technical project. It is a deeply political and ethical one.

The urgency of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality demands that we stop asking “how fast can we grow?” and start asking “grow towards what, for whom, and at what cost?” Contextualising development – understanding where the concept came from, whose interests it has served, and what it has cost – is the first step toward building something better.

What do you think? Has the global development model genuinely prioritized human well-being and ecological health, or has it primarily served the economic and political interests of powerful nations? And can sustainable development be achieved within the framework of continuous economic growth, or does genuine sustainability require a more fundamental rethinking of what progress means?

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Table of Contents

How development became the world’s dominant idea 🔗

Development as a Western prescription 🔗

The ecological price of development 🔗

The shift: from growth to sustainable development 🔗

Why the Brundtland definition is still contested 🔗

Reevaluating development in the present moment 🔗