Reframing "sustainable development" - sharing our recent paper

[Chirag Dhara]

Dear friends,

 

I would like to share a recent paper of ours since it will be of interest to the members of this group: 

Soumyajit Bhar and Chirag Dhara (2025). “A Scalability-Centric Perspective on Global Human Development within Environmental Limits.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 21, no. 1: 2454062. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2025.2454062.

In this work, we reframe the question of “sustainable development” asking which countries’ lifestyles could, in principle, be scaled globally to provide a dignified life to all humanity, within biophysical limits. Our findings highlight countries like Panama, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Peru, and Albania as top performers from this perspective. In so doing, we also critique the conceptual flaws in the UNDP’s recently proposed “PHDI” metric. 

 

We believe that our work is especially relevant for shaping developmental pathways for the Global South, and can help shape dialogues on how “sustainable development” is understood and measured.

 

We have explained our concepts and findings in an accessible manner in a popular piece in 360info, titled “Why sustainable development ought to look more like Costa Rica and less like Norway”. I have also attached a op-ed we wrote for The Hindu.

 

We warmly welcome your thoughts. We are continuing to deepen this line of research in uncovering policy strategies and systemic factors that enable scalable development, extensions to intra-country inequalities, proposing new development typologies, among other ideas. 

 

We would be happy to open a dialogue on any of these issues.

 

Warmly,

Chirag