Seven Dimensions of Sustainable Development

Center For Alternative Development Initiatives
[Promoting Sustainable Development Through Threefolding Including Threefolding Partnerships]

The following discussion on sustainable development is drawn from Philippine Agenda 21, the Philippine's official framework for sustainable development. This framework has been validated and re-affirmed through numerous consultations, conferences, dialogues and workshops throughout the Philippines.

From the Philippine perspective sustainable development is a multidimensional concept, involving no less than seven dimensions. Sustainable development is viewed as the mutually beneficial interaction between the legitimate interests of business and the economy, government and the polity, and civil society and culture. However, these societal interactions do not exist in a vacuum. On the physical and material side, society is bounded by the carrying capacity of the varied ecosystems, landscape ecology, and ultimately the biosphere of the earth, of Nature. On the psychological and spiritual side, the threefold functional differentiation of society is contextualized by the caring capacity of individuals.

From this perspective, five dimensions of sustainable development are clearly visible. These are—the human being, culture, polity, economy, and Nature. However, to this five, we need to consider society as a separate dimension. Society can be understood as the integrative result of interactions of the different activities in culture, polity, and the economy. The population issue, for example, is a development issue that can only be addressed from a societal perspective, not just from culture alone, or the economy alone, or polity alone.

One must not confuse the societal dimension with the individual dimension. Ontologically, in the physical world, only individuals exist as such. Society, in effect, is an idea. Society is a cognitive construct arising from an individual’s or several individual’s perception of the differing patterns of interactions among human beings. It is within this context that the whole debate between Western and Asian values, between rights versus community and responsibility, can be understood. It is also within this context that the harmonious integration between human and social development is to be achieved.

With society, we therefore have the six dimensions of sustainable development before us. But these six are not enough. We need to add a seventh that pervades all the other dimensions. This seventh is the dimension of Spirit. Unless we see and explicitly acknowledge the spiritual in nature, human beings, and society in our framework of development, we can never do justice to the strong sense of Philippine spirituality that permeates Philippine Agenda 21.

These seven dimensions of sustainable development are the keys to understand the structure and substance of PA21. The definition, vision, principles, and parameters of the Principles of Unity as well as the Action Agenda of PA21 are all basically drawn out from the key concerns of these seven dimensions of sustainable development.

• Philippine Agenda 21 (PA21) – Long-term development plan finalized in 1996 to fulfill the Philippine commitments to the 1992 Earth Summit. Endorsed as the country’s blueprint for sustainable development, the Principles of Unity of PA21 is also considered one of the most widely consulted documents ever produced in the Philippines.
• Principles of Unity – Consensus portion of Philippine Agenda 21 that presents a holistic assessment of the Philippine development condition, and provides a responsive framework for Sustainable Development in the Philippine context, including fifteen principles and numerous multidimensional parameters and strategies for achieving sustainable development.