Explaining Sustainomics

AuthorAnand Seth
PositionCountry Director South Central Europe World Bank
Pages50

Page 50

Mohan Munasinghe

Making Development More Sustainable Sustainomics Framework and Practical Applications

MIND Press, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2007, 650 pp., $40 (paper).

Having adopted the sustainable development label, most analysts initially struggled to agree on a good definition of what it means in practice. Other challenges quickly followed, including how to develop quantitative measures of relevant factors, how to find a common metric to deal with often conflicting objectives, and how to explain why so many obvious "win-win" solutions to further sustainable development have failed to gain traction. More recently, the big challenge has been to include climate change in an overarching analytical framework for sustainable development.

Professor Munasinghe, who recently shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in his capacity as Vice Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change together with other colleagues, is a long-standing champion for bringing together the economic, human, and environmental aspects of development. He has developed a new analytical framework for doing so, called "sustainomics." This book summarizes advances in the theory and practice of sustainomics and is the result of an extremely thorough literature survey, brought to life through case studies.

In the first part of the book, Munasinghe explains the complex relationships underpinning sustainomics. The not-so-surprising conclusion seems to be that there is no accepted measure of sustainable development on par with measures of economic development.

Munasinghe offers alternative-and less-than-perfect-mechanisms to help the analyst bring environmental degradation and social costs into the analysis. He discusses the analytical frontier of negative discount rates for long-term challenges and, at one point, even appears to anticipate the recent Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which seeks to build an economic theory as dictated by the science of climate change.

Applying the theory

Having told us about the limitations of sustainomics, Munasinghe brings much more excitement to the second part of the book, with its excellent and diverse case studies.

These studies demonstrate how the analytic framework has, in some instances at least, become robust enough to offer strong conclusions. For example, we learn that Bolivia is on an unsustainable development path and that a...

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