Bøger i Routledge Studies in Sustainable Development serien

Based on case-studies in eight Latin American countries, this book investigates the extent to which there have been elite shifts, how new governments have related to old elites, and how that has impacted on environmental governance and the management of natural resources. New groups are emerging related to political and economic shifts, and the rise of new cadres of technocrats, while old economic and political elites struggle to remain influential. However, the combination of opposition from old elites, the commitment to social distribution of resource-rents, and the prerogative of state construction has often hampered initiatives to ensure a more sustainable and equitable governance of natural resources. Yet, in other cases constraints related to structural inequalities and entrenched elites have been overcome.

The book presents a social sciences¿ perspective on sustainable development contributing thus to transdisciplinary sustainability research, which means that it is oriented toward current problems, and not toward the established academic boundaries. The key aspect here is not the natural-scientific, but rather the humanistic aspect. This book advocates viewing sustainable development, not only as the establishment of a permanent, globally practicable and future-capable mode of life and economics, but rather as a complex array of problems, involving a wide range of social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ¿ law, political science, sociology, economics, theology, psychology, philosophy.

This book makes the case for a critical turn in development thinking around universities and their contributions in making a more equal post-2015 world. It puts forward a normative approach based on human development and the capability approach, one which can gain a hearing from policy, scholarship, and practitioners dealing with practical issues of understanding policy, democratising research and knowledge, and fostering student learning - all key university functions.