UNRISD Classics, Volume III: Revisiting Sustainable Development

Over five decades, a significant body of UNRISD research has examined the challenge of better integrating economic, social and environmental dimensions of development and understanding the relationship between social development and environmental change. From this body of work emerge numerous insights related to social, political and structural dimensions of environment and social change that can inform contemporary discussions and debates. This work is particularly important now, as the international development community is thinking about the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Contents
Foreword: Social Justice with Resource and Ecological Sustainability—Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Note from UNRISD Director: UNRISD Classics: Celebrating 50 Years of Research for Social Change—Sarah Cook
Introduction: Sustainable Development Revisited—Peter Utting

PART I: INTEGRATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1: Social Development and the International Development Strategy—UNRISD (1979)
Chapter 2: Why “Elusive” Development?—Marshall Wolfe (1996)
Chapter 3: Sustainable Development and Popular Participation: A Framework for Analysis—Michael Redclift (1992)
Chapter 4: Markets in Principle and Practice—Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara (1993)
Chapter 5: Rural Development and the Environment: Towards Ecologically and Socially Sustainable Development in Rural Areas—Solon Barraclough, Krishna Ghimire and Hans Meliczek (1997)
Chapter 6: Breaking the Mould: An Institutionalist Political Economy Alternative to the Neoliberal Theory of the Market and the State—Ha-Joon Chang (2001)
Chapter 7: Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development—Manuel Castells (1999)
Chapter 8: Social Dimensions of Green Economy—UNRISD (2012)

PART II: THE ENVIRONMENT AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 9: Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want: Social and Economic Implications of the Green Revolution—Andrew Pearse (1980)
Chapter 10: The New Frontier: Farmers’ Response to Land Degradation—A West African Study—Kojo Sebastian Amanor (1994)
Chapter 11: Ecological Conflicts and the Environmental Movement in India—Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha (1994)
Chapter 12: Gender, Environment and Poverty Interlinks in Rural India: Regional Variations and Temporal Shifts, 1971–1991—Bina Agarwal (1995)
Chapter 13: Parks, People and Professionals: Putting "Participation" into Protected-Area Management—Michel P. Pimbert and Jules N. Pretty (1997)
Chapter 14: Constraints and Opportunities for Sustainable Forest Use—Solon L. Barraclough and Krishna B. Ghimire (1995)
Chapter 15: Biodiversity and Human Welfare—Piers Blaikie and Sally Jeanrenaud (1996)
Chapter 16: Corporate Environmentalism in the South: Assessing the Limits and Prospects—Peter Utting (2002)
Chapter 17: Unsustainable Development: The Philippine Experience—Karina Constantino-David (2004)

UNRISD Classics is a set of three volumes—Social Policy and Inclusive Development, Gendered Dimensions of Development and Revisiting Sustainable Development—that bring together 50 selected essays from 50 years of UNRISD research. The contributions both highlight some of the Institute’s most influential and ground-breaking research and, through new introductions, demonstrate its relevance to today’s development debates.

Cover Art
The cover art was chosen from UNRISD's Visions of Change call, which encouraged creative thinkers from all over the world to submit artwork illustrating key social development values and themes of equity, sustainability, inclusion, and progressive social change.

The cover art for Volume III of the UNRISD Classics, Human Nature by Kuros Zahedi (Iran), is a 3-D collage that reflects his particular artistic language, addressing "the human being's connection to the natural world". According to Zahedi, "we are simultaneously one with nature and separate from it. We apprehend, quantify and classify the world and thereby gain mastery over it, but in a very real way, we are nature."

Zahedi’s piece consists of a circular disposition of nature elements with a human element in the middle, representing the equilibrium between them. It represents, in his own words, "a tension between the organic elegance of the natural elements and the ordered arrangement of the grid—culture, civilization, a city or agriculture from above—the intellect, empiricism and categorization."