The Shift from Growth to Sustainable Development
Introduction
Within the global scale, the majority of the strategies that have been undertaken to achieve growth and reduce poverty while fostering development have managed to accomplish some of the objectives because, on a global scale, most people have gained access to essential services and opportunities for better participation and ease of mobility. However, other areas remain challenged due to unmet needs, broadening scales of inequalities, and other challenges associated with development (Donaldson, 2008). Some of these development-associated challenges include climate change, depletion of essential resources, and escalating natural disasters. The consequences of such happenings are detrimental both to humans, animals, plants, and various ecosystems. Therefore, in the wake of such persistent challenges and unmet needs, there was a need to shift focus from growth to sustainable development about poverty and development (Du Pisani, 2006). Initially, growth-focused entirely on attaining a level of growth, typical to solutions that could be applied to solving immediate problems provided they could address the issues at hand and work based on the specific scope of applicability. The paper will examine the implications of this shift in the mainstream debates on poverty and development.
The focus changed drastically, and instead of focusing merely on growth, the majority of strategies that have been developed in the recent past and those that are currently being developed have shown an increased focus on sustainability as the primary goal and not just growth (Mustunsir, 2015). There has been a relentless search for approaches that can fit the rapidly shifting economic, social, and environmental sphere of reality. The transformation……………………