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This article provides information about the Dilemma of Sustainable Development !
With the increased internationalisation of environmental concerns, Lynton Caldwell notes that the “doctrines and dogmas of inalienable national sovereignty are being modified de facto to accommodate the imperatives of international environmental cooperation.”
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In his opinion, “nations need not lose their cultural identity and integrity by cooperating with other nations in matters of common necessity. Indeed, international environmental policy has been directed to protecting and restoring the cultural and ecological distinctiveness of nations.”
The question is not merely the linkage between international environmental cooperation and national identity and sovereignty. One perceives an increasing tendency of contentions and debates on ecological issues at the global level on significant matters of sustainable development.
The deliberations on sustainable development in various international for and conferences recently were compelled to deal with questions of the North- South divide and hierarchy. Wide-ranging differences persist due to a variety of issues like causes for global environmental degradation to the mechanisms of arresting ecological crises. While some perceive underdevelopment of developing countries itself as a major cause of environmental damage, many advocates from these countries argue that the very process of development along the lines of industrial progress has been instrumental in unleashing a global ecological crisis.
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Developing world spokespersons in international environmental negotiations demand that industrialised countries of the North should subsidise efforts of replacing environmentally polluting industries of the South. Responsibilities for global environmental crises like ozone layer depletion, green house effect, etc. are still contentious issues between the North and the South.
A critical international ecological perspective demands not only an urge to create newer and wider international environmental regimes to tackle specific problems but also a commitment to transformatory politics which addresses global unequal power relation. The challenges to the nation-state system emanating from various quarters provide an ambivalent realm of perspectives from an ecological angle. Environmental activists and theoreticians conventionally argued that since the State is an embodiment of coercive power and an instilment of accumulation of resources, it has to be replaced by local self-governing entities and ecologically sustainable communities.
The accelerated onslaught of globalisation forces on local and national lives of people and their environment pose new challenges to the development of a contemporary critical ecological perspective. In the changing global context, local communities find it extremely difficult to stop the plundering of their natural resource endowments by transnational corporations and agencies.
Ecology movements, while realising their own weakness due to their dissipated nature and the changing character of the nation-state are faced with the task of critically rethinking the linkage between micro-politics of movements and macro-politics of the nation-state and international affairs. Reinventing civil society and the state in new democratic ways is being proposed as the inevitable alternative route.
The International perspective on ecology and sustainable development envisages transformatory politics challenging the existing processes of accumulation and hierarchies of power from local to global realms. This politics of transformation envisions sustainability of nature and resources through the development of struggles to challenge forces, which exploit humans and nature. Such a perspective looks for meaningful and organic democratic local-global linkages with a bottom-up approach.