Environment, employment and development

It is generally recognised that the question of sustainable development is a global problem, emphasizing the increasingly interdependent nature of relationships among nations. Solutions to the problem are as much political as they are economic and technological. Notwithstanding the deepening and widening of the debate on sustainable development, its implications for employment - a major concern of the ILO under its World Employment Programme - have remained largely unexplored. This volume, therefore, has a very modest objective, namely to place the employment question on the policy agenda in the context of the current debate on environment and development. The design of environmental policies should allow for the differences that exist between countries with a high level of development and technological dynamism and those with a low level of development and low technological capability. One must also recognize the costs imposed by adjustment and the consequent distributional impact. In the long term, technology choice plays a crucial role in promoting sustainable development in both industrialized and developing countries. It is not only environment-friendly technologies that need to be developed and diffused; in the case of the least developed countries, technological transformation needs to be accelerated in order to minimise their dependence on natural resources for economic growth. Refs, figs and tabs