Sustainability politics

If one takes the Hague Opium Convention of 1912 as a starting point, the struggle against the drug problem has been long indeed. When it has been effective, and successes have been enumerated in previous editions of this Report, one of the pillars of success has been sustained political commitment and resource allocation at the national and international level. 

The Iraqi recalcitrance underscored the limitations of what can be legitimately expected of an inspection regime. In spite of the unprecedented powers of the inspectors, sustained political support, the imposition of extensive economic sanctions and flagrant violations of Iraqi sovereignty, UNSCOM officials were still not certain after two years that they had fulfilled their mission completely. As Rolf Ek us concluded, if there was anything to be learnt from this experience, it was that only intrusive, short notice, non-refusal inspections of declared or non-declared locations of the type which the United Nations Special Commission has carried out, would be effective against deliberate concealment and deter potential violators... 

The political arena is important in that it provides impulses and makes decisions that pave the way and prepare the market for innovations prior to profitability. In order to perform this task, poHticians rely on the expertise and neutrality of acknowledged experts. Discussions with experts, workshops, and status and strategy reports are invaluable in providing the political arena with information and evaluation findings, which are essential for appropriate and sustainable political... 

However, the goal of elimination is a continuing challenge. Sustained political will at both the people and the government level is necessary to bring the benefits to the many millions who suffer the effects of iodine deficiency. 

As we have seen, the concept of MSB emerged early in the 1950s and by 1960, it had become firmly established, as the result of a number of decisions in academe and in industry. In that year, as the result of a sustained period of intense discussion and political lobbying in Washington, another major decision was taken, this time by agencies of the US Government. The Interdisciplinary Laboratories were born. 

Solving practical problems such as the development of sustainable transgenic crops cannot be dealt with by making the planning process more science-based. Dealing with wicked problems is always political because of its deontic premises. Science only generates factual, instrumental and in the best cases, explanatory knowledge. 

The need to recognise that the issues will have to be resolved in a world where perception is reality and regulations are driven more than by political pressure and public sentiment than by scientific reason, technological practicality or economic feasibility. Perception may not be the whole of reality, but if we deny that it has become an important aspect of reality we will not understand how to devise a sustainable future for ourselves. 

For Marx, the task of establishing how a capitalist economy can reproduce itself is not limited to a particular period of production. The reproduction examples that he carves out in the final part of Capital, volume 2, show how balanced reproduction can take place over an extended number of years. Despite the limitations he faced, with a lack of formal modelling tools, computing power and waning personal health - the reproduction schemes were one of his last contributions to political economy - Marx was able to devise complex numerical examples, in which somehow a 10 per cent rate of growth is sustained in each period of production. It is not for nothing that he has been described as the father of modem growth theory. 

Augustus) on the other, was not about love, but about political power bought and sustained by Egyptian wealth. A modern analogy would be the key position held by the oil-producing Arab states in the 20th-century world economy. 

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