‘The Labyrinth of Sustainability’ offers the first comprehensive effort to analyze corporate sustainability systematically in the Latin American context—and to extract lessons for companies across the developing world. Featuring an introduction by the prizewinning author and Yale professor Daniel Esty, the book starts off with examining the “sustainability imperative”—the notion that businesses must work toward sustainability to be successful in today’s marketplace. The 12 chapters that follow present a collection of carefully developed and tightly framed case studies from companies across Latin America highlighting how they are addressing this imperative. Contributions from leading experts around the region bring a freshness and authenticity as well as a nuanced and grounded approach that make this volume a must-read for business leaders, government officials, non-governmental organization advocates, journalists and academics in Latin America and across the world.

Exposing the limitations of conventional approaches to the engineering and regulation of technology, Vanderburg suggests that the solution lies in a preventive strategy that situates technological growth in its human, societal, and biospheric contexts.

This book addresses legal aspects of sustainable development and offers the latest thinking on a wide range of current themes. By taking a cross-cutting approach, it adds considerably to the exploration of this emerging scientific field. Twenty-nine original contributions present innovative thoughts and replicable ideas from this exciting, new area, which will be of value to practitioners and researchers alike.These contributions are allocated into a horizontal and sectorial part. The section covering horizontal policies has five sub-parts: 1) general aspects; 2) human and intellectual property rights; 3) communication and social enterprise governance; 4) public participation and 5) assessment tools. The second part on sectorial policies also has five sub-parts: 1) forest and water management; 2) renewable energy; 3) cities, waste and material management; 4) biodiversity, nature conservation, oceans and spatial planning and 5) agriculture and rural policy. It offers a multifaceted discussion of sustainable development and law by authors from five continents and from both the public and the private sectors. This selection guarantees a broad view that presents the more theoretical arguments from the academic as well as the practical perspective. Furthermore, the authorship includes senior, highly experienced academics and practitioners as well as those at the start of their career. This ensures thoughtful expansions of established theories as well as the emergence of innovative ideas. Moreover, the ten sub-parts bring together likeminded thoughts, resulting in an exchange of different viewpoints on a similar theme. This allows the readers to concentrate on individual chapters, while at the same time discovering a variety of thoughts and ideas.

‘The Labyrinth of Sustainability’ offers the first comprehensive effort to analyze corporate sustainability systematically in the Latin American context—and to extract lessons for companies across the developing world. Featuring an introduction by the prizewinning author and Yale professor Daniel Esty, the book starts off with examining the “sustainability imperative”—the notion that businesses must work toward sustainability to be successful in today’s marketplace. The 12 chapters that follow present a collection of carefully developed and tightly framed case studies from companies across Latin America highlighting how they are addressing this imperative. Contributions from leading experts around the region bring a freshness and authenticity as well as a nuanced and grounded approach that make this volume a must-read for business leaders, government officials, non-governmental organization advocates, journalists and academics in Latin America and across the world.

A comprehensive primer on the history, evolution and future of the movement toward sustainability.

Subsistence farming, a widespread phenomenon in developing countries, emerged as well in Central and East European and former Soviet Union countries during their transformation process from a centrally planned to a market economy. Romania is one of the Eastern European countries with a large share of subsistence farmers where the commercialization of agriculture could be a means of reducing rural poverty and increasing the competitiveness of agriculture, although with possibly detrimental effects on the environment. The study examines which constraints should be addressed to promote commercial orientation and how commercial orientation and ecological sustainability are related. Based on an agricultural household survey in 2003 and with the help of econometric analysis, the research finds that, against the conventional wisdom, in the current Romanian context commercial orientation and ecological sustainability are positively related. Moreover, commercial orientation is negatively influenced by high transaction costs related to the lack of demand from processing factories and wholesalers as well as lack of cooperation.

This annotated bibliography introduces readers to preventive approaches for making the energy requirements of modern ways of life more sustainable. Since a society can neither create nor destroy energy, all energy is temporarily borrowed from the biosphere and returned to it in degraded form. The activities of a way of life of a society that involve energy flows may be represented as a network for which the biosphere acts as the ultimate source and sink. This network and therefore the energy basis for a modern life style will be sustainable when the biosphere can perform these roles indefinitely. The present bibliography regards the preventive approaches related to energy as a capital component of preventive approaches for improving the sustainability of contemporary civilization. This book, as well as the two companion volumes, Sustainable Production and Healthy Cities, is the result of a twelve-year research project carried out at the Center for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto. The research findings led to the development of a new conceptual framework and strategy aimed at converting technological and economic growth into development that would gradually become more sustainable.

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