An alternative definition of sustainable development using stability and chaos theories

Abstract

This paper is an endeavour to give an alternative definition for sustainable development (SD). It reviews the previous works in this area, and finds common grounds of these works, namely dynamism and quantification of the system. The paper then discusses dynamic stability and relates it to the concept of sustainability. It constructs an analogy between sustainability objectives and dynamic stability. The discussion continues to introduce chaos as one inherent characteristic of socio-economic systems because of their nonlinear behaviour. A new definition of SD is then proposed. It is applied to the dynamic models that describe the inter-relationships of environmental, economic and social variables. Finally, an example system has been employed to show the applicability of the definition. Policy-related parameters have been chosen to show the conditions in which the system is sustainable. This exercise shows that the presented method of identifying the conditions of sustainability could be usefully exploited in making decisions at macro levels. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.