Since 1945, the UN has been actively engaged in conceptualizing strategies for both economic development and a sustainable environment. From a broad historical perspective, Development without Destruction sketches the role played by organizations and individuals in the UN system in developing and consolidating principles of international law and international governance with respect to natural resource management. Nico Schrijver highlights the UN's efforts to generate and implement strategies to resolve tensions between economic development and environmental protection, conservation and exploitation, sovereignty and internationalism, and armed conflict and peaceful access to natural resources. Schrijver's thorough analysis is an indispensable guide to management of the critical environmental issues on today's global agenda.

This book is the outcome of a workshop on the conversion of tropical forest to pasture in Latin America convened in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1988. It examines the dynamics underlying this complex and destructive process and enlisted multiple perspectives in order to identify alternatives.

From one of the world’s leading economists and his coauthors, a cutting-edge analysis of what drives economic growth and a blueprint for prosperity under capitalism. Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the environment is suffering, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even the overthrow of capitalism. But the answer to our problems is not revolution. The answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction—innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined prosperity. To explain, Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel draw on cutting-edge theory and evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions, including the roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalization, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle-income traps, climate change, and how to recover from economic shocks. They show that we owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism. But we also need state intervention with the appropriate checks and balances to simultaneously foster ongoing economic creativity, manage the social disruption that innovation leaves in its wake, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them to thwart tomorrow’s. A powerful and ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success and a blueprint for change, The Power of Creative Destruction shows that a fair and prosperous future is ultimately ours to make.

Much has already been written about the effects of the changes of the Cold War on conflict. The ongoing disengagement of East and West from bipolar Cold-War politics has resulted in an unstable international political situation which is characterized by regional conflicts. Most analyses now concentrate on the consequences for Europe and the former communist Central and East European states. This book, however, explores the effects for the Third World. The contributors provide major theoretical analyses of the causes of conflict in developing countries. Four main factors are distinguished: the processes of state-formation and nation-building; the rise or return of ethnicity and nationalism; socio-economic factors; and the armaments-conflict nexus. The volume also provides in-depth regional analyses, as well as policy perspectives on the issue of conflict and development.

Looks at the impact of deforestation around the globe and in such specific places as Finland, Nepal, and Brazil.

Renewing Destruction examines how wind energy projects impact people and their environments. Wind energy development, in Mexico and most countries, fall into a ‘roll out’ neoliberal strategy that is justified by climate change mitigation programs that are continuing a process of land and wind resources grabbing for profit. The result has been an exaggeration of pre-existing problems in communities around land, income-inequality, local politics and, contrary to public relations stories, is devastating traditional livelihoods and socio-ecological relationships. Exacerbating pre-existing social and material problems in surrounding towns, wind energy development is placing greater stress on semi-subsistence communities, marginalizing Indigenous traditions and indirectly resulting in the displacement and migration of people into urban centers. Based on intensive fieldwork with local groups in Oaxaca, Mexico, this book provides an in-depth study, demonstrating the complications and problems that emerge with the current regime of ‘sustainable development’ and wind energy projects in Mexico, which has wider lessons to be drawn for other regions and countries. Put simply, the book reveals a tragic reality that calls into question the marketed hopes of the green economy and the current method of climate change mitigation. It shows the variegated impacts and issues associated with building wind energy parks, which extends to recognizing the destructive effects on Indigenous cultures and practices in the region. The book, however, highlights what to consider or, more importantly, what to avoid if one is working with industrial-scale wind energy systems.

Asian economic development and its effect on humans beings.