When India spectacularly burst into the headlines via its nuclear explosions in May 1998, then US president Bill Clinton had openly vented his fury before aides in the White House. "We are going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks," he had remarked. Clinton's "volcanic fit" found its echo in the White House statement that expressed "distress" and "displeasure", culminating in Washington imposing a slew of sanctions against India.

These images from the past, culled out from Engaging India, then deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott's book, appear incredible now. Especially as India readies itself to accord a warm reception to US President George W. Bush next week. The entente, the product of laboriously conducted diplomacy as much as geopolitical shifts that yoked the two together as 'natural allies', is now taking deep root. Sure, there will be protest rallies, strident voices will rail against Bush's hegemonic designs, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be cautioned against any tight clinch with Bush. Yet even these voices arise from the awareness that there's a growing relationship between the US and India, realized through knots of strategic partnership and cooperation in every conceivable field - from economy and nuclear technology to education, space and agriculture.

Bush's visit next week prompted Karl Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the Clinton administration, to say, "All of this represents a refreshing degree of continuity in US foreign policy, based on a recognition by the last two American presidents that India is a country that will be a key player in the 21st century." Similarly, Robert Hathaway, of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, is impressed that "two successive Indian governments representing different political views and parties... both came to the same conclusion that it is in India's interest to forge a better relationship with the US."

From imposing sanctions against India to laying out a blueprint for nuclear cooperation, both New Delhi and Washington have come a long way in an inordinately short time. Ironically, it was Clinton who provided the impetus for this transformation. Talbott says the former president, after coming to terms with the Pokhran II realities, found it "downright distasteful and counterproductive" to impose sanctions against a country he was trying to improve relations with. Consequently, Talbott, Inderfurth and senior director in the National Security Council Bruce Riedal were entrusted with the task of pulling out Indo-US relations from the abyss in which it had been languishing from the beginnings of the Cold War era.What followed was a dialog between foreign minister Jaswant Singh and Talbott, both seeking to convey to each other the security and strategic interests of their respective countries.

The dialog started yielding dividends immediately, even during the Kargil conflict. Clinton's confrontation of then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif at their July 4, 1999, meeting in Washington took trust patterns between the US and India to a new level. "Throughout this period, we kept the Indian government informed of what we were doing to try to ease the crisis," recalls Inderfurth, who played a key role in the dialog with Sharif. "All of this turned into an important confidence-builder in our new relationship with India."

"The July 4 meeting was the turning point," agrees Michael Krepon of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. "It demonstrated that US engagement in the India-Pakistan imbroglio would not be detrimental to New Delhi's interests, and it shifted the Clinton administration's focus from proliferation to engagement." The trust was manifest in Clinton's spectacularly successful visit to India in March 2000. An enabling factor in the budding Indo-US romance, says former ambassador Richard Celeste, was the now-forgotten Y2K factor. "The crisis introduced India's enormously talented manpower to our business leaders. Today, the 24/7 bond between companies in the US and service providers in India is the stuff of books and myth-making."

The budding romance acquired a new meaning with the advent of Bush in the White House. His most perspicacious decision was to appoint confidant Robert D. Blackwill as ambassador to India. Blackwill appealed to the popular imagination; his unequivocal pronouncements against Pakistan for fomenting terrorism in India further bolstered the trust between New Delhi and Washington. More importantly, he sought to impart a new heft to the relationship by putting his formidable weight behind the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership", which envisaged cooperation between the two countries in civil nuclear energy, hi-tech trade, space and dual technology. "If Clinton was the pioneer of the new relationship, Bush is its architect," says Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The impulse for the new relationship is linked to the question: why has India started to matter to the US? Inderfurth cites three reasons: India will become the world's most populous nation, it may well have the world's fastest growing economy by 2020, and it is the world's largest democracy. Krepon adds one more to the list: intellectual capital. "The world expects India to do more heavy lifting," he says.

Ultimately, a relationship in international affairs hinges on convergence of interests. Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who's now advising under secretary of state R. Nicholas Burns, listed a string of "common interests" at a congressional hearing last year. These included:

preventing Asia from being dominated by any single power that has the capacity to crowd out others and which may use aggressive assertion of national self-interest to threaten American presence, American alliances, and American ties with the states of the region; eliminating the threat posed by state sponsors of terrorism; protecting the global commons, especially the sea lanes of communications, through which flow not only goods and services critical to the global economy but also undesirable commerce such as drug trafficking, people smuggling and weapons of mass destruction technologies.

So, isn't China the "single power" that Tellis thinks could threaten American interests in Asia? He denied this assumption to Congress, but many feel China is indeed the factor behind Washington's attempts to assist India in becoming a major world power.As author Sunil Khilnani, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says, "Many current inhabitants of the Pentagon see an India allied to the US as a potential bulwark to a China whose ambitions are still difficult to read." Washington's long-term view is that since China will not support the US war on terror, it's a threat against which the US needs a counterweight. "Japan has proven it does not have the emotional and intellectual muscle to face China. Hence, India should play that role," explains Rafiq Dossani of Stanford University.

The Bush regime's keenness on India also springs from the disaster his other foreign policy initiatives have been. "Bush would like to leave at least one foreign policy achievement as his legacy. He'd like to claim that he 'delivered' India to the US, just as Nixon could earlier claim the same about China," says Khilnani.

These reasons apart, the relationship has gathered great momentum from business-to-business links over the last decade. Says Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation in Washington, "India's abandoning of its social democratic economic model, derived from the Nehru period, in favor of globalization and free market economics has made it much more attractive to investment and ideologically sympathetic to the US." Indeed, the more the two countries deepen their economic interdependence, the more each will have a stake in the other. And this economic interdependence can deepen, says Stephen P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution, through the removal of obstacles to US investments. "Infrastructure, (inadequate) liberalization, and education are three real obstacles. These (improvement in the three areas) will make it easy to implement the strategic relationship."

That India matters to the US is no longer a promise of the future. At a recent conference, former state department official Walter Andersen pointed out two US decisions that underscored India's enhanced importance. First, the four-country tsunami relief efforts involving the navies of the US, Japan, Australia and India. Two, the Bush administration's efforts to exempt a nuclear-capable India from exports restrictions on nuclear and dual use technology.

The blossoming ties have enabled significant partnerships in the international arena too. India has supported the war on terror in Afghanistan; its navy protected high-value US cargoes through the Straits of Malacca; more recently, India voted with the US at the International Atomic Energy Agency to declare Iran in "non-compliance" with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

All this doesn't mean the US and India will automatically collaborate on every problem dogging them. "Nobody expects a perfect alignment ever, but increasing alignment is something we hope will come naturally," says Schaffer. Partly this alignment can be brought about through changes in the conduct of foreign policy. For instance, the US, Hathaway admits, needs to recognize that India expects to be treated on a basis of equality. Similarly, Khilnani contends, a section of Indian political elites need to shed its instinctive anti-Americanism. "This does not mean renouncing a critical position, or an independent assessment of our own interests. It means engaging more deeply and confidently, and picking battles more selectively and prudently," he says.

Obviously, like any two countries, there will be disagreements. "Indeed, there have been over the past few years on a number of issues, including the war in Iraq," says Inderfurth. But, he adds optimistically, "the fact that this has not disrupted the upward trajectory of our relationship is a good sign and a promising one for future relations."

The United States and India have gone a long way from Cold War days of wariness and suspicion to genuine friendship and incipient global partnership. The visit of President Clinton to India in 2000 marked a breakthrough in Indo-U.S. ties, which had been set back by India's decision to conduct nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

President Bush, to his credit, broadened the road opened by Clinton and paved it with a more solid foundation. Cooperation in a range of areas, from military ties to joint scientific work, is well established. A presidential visit puts a personal seal on that budding partnership -- even if it is a couple of years late.

When it comes to Indo-U.S. relations, however, there are three pitfalls to avoid: the India card; democracy matters; and it's the economy, stupid!

The India card

Washington has a surplus of geo-strategists. As Kissinger famously played the "China card'' against the Soviet Union, the strategists imagine cleverly using an India card against a rising China.

There is one small rub in that grand design -- India isn't interested in being an instrument of an American containment strategy against China. As Robert Blackwill, former Bush administration ambassador to India, put it recently: "There's no way better to empty a drawing room in New Delhi of Indian strategists than to start talking about this idea.''

Indians eagerly compete with China for economic leadership in Asia. They have a legacy of tensions, from border wars to nuclear rivalry. But Indian policy is to engage China and create the best relationship possible.

The president is avoiding India card talk. But it is no secret that some inside the administration harbor these illusions. Let's hope they keep their mouths shut for at least this week.

Democracy matters

Beyond cliches about the world's two largest democracies, both governments have a habit of forgetting that democracy really matters. Witness the up-to-the-last-minute effort to salvage a deal from July to open India's civilian nuclear program to international inspection in exchange for access to nuclear energy technology and fuel.

The Bush administration did little to sell that deal in Congress, either ahead or afterward. Opposition has mounted on both sides of the aisles from those who fear it would undermine nuclear proliferation controls, particularly when Iran is claiming its own right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.

The United States has now toughened its requirements. But the coalition government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces rising resistance in parliament, encouraged by the prestigious nuclear establishment, to any deal that would significantly restrict India's ability to develop and build nuclear weapons.

I favored the July deal and support any reasonable new agreement that would separate a significant part of India's civilian nuclear program from its military one. Hopefully, the negotiations will succeed, but even if they do, both governments need to do a much better job selling it in their feisty democratic systems.

It's the economy, stupid

The biggest threat to this emergent partnership is to forget what brought the two countries together -- not geopolitics but shared interests. Some of those are security-driven, not least a common foe in Islamist terrorism. But the real driver has been economics.

Since India decided to open its protected economy in the early 1990s, the country has taken off, producing sustained growth rates nearing double digits. Led by the high-technology industry, foreign investment and trade with India is rising rapidly. The Indo-Americans who thrive in Silicon Valley form a powerful cultural and economic bridge between our two countries.

India's billon people include a middle class of 200 million to 300 million, equal to the population of this country, with an increasingly sophisticated appetite for Western consumer goods. In contrast to China, India has a young population, half of them under 25 years old.

For the United States, there are added opportunities -- and competitive challenges. As is evident from the Saturday morning phone calls from telemarketers in Chennai trying to sell me a new mortgage, India has a great resource in its English-speaking educated elite. That has meant job loss in the United States but also openings to create new businesses and new jobs.

Both governments need to focus on what is needed to accelerate the kind of virtual integration between India and the United States we see in Silicon Valley. If we do that right, the geopolitics will follow naturally. If we mess that up, all the strategic castles in the sky will come crashing to Earth very soon.

A FASHIONABLE NOTION

The concept of sustainable development first emerged from academic seminar rooms two decades ago, thanks to a best-selling report called Our Common Future. Put together by the World Commission on Environment and Development, the report argued that boosting the economy, protecting natural resources, and ensuring social justice are not conflicting but interwoven and complementary goals.

A healthful environment, the theory goes, provides the economy with essential natural resources. A thriving economy, in turn, allows society to invest in environmental protection and avoid injustices such as extreme poverty. And maintaining justice, by promoting freedom of opportunity and political participation, for example, ensures that natural resources are well managed and economic gains allocated fairly. Civilizations that have ignored these connections have suffered: consider the Easter Islanders, who by denuding their forests triggered a spiral of economic difficulties and strife that eventually led to their civilization's collapse.

Yet even as sustainable development has become conventional wisdom over the past two decades, something has gone horribly wrong. Because the concept stresses the interconnection of everything, it has been vulnerable to distortion by woolly thinking and has become a magnet for special interest groups. Human rights watchdogs, large chemical companies, small island nations, green architects, and nuclear power plant operators have attached themselves to the fashionable notion only to subvert it for their own ends. Instead of bringing together nature, the economy, and social justice, sustainable development has spawned overspecialized and largely meaningless checklists and targets. Particularly harmful has been a series of consensus-driven UN summits that have yielded broad and incoherent documents and policies. Sustainable development, the compass that was designed to show the way to just and viable economics, now swings in all directions.

This deterioration was probably unavoidable. But the slide matters, and not only because sustainable development has become a cover for inaction and a black hole for resources; it is also a wasted opportunity. The concept has gained such a powerful following over the past two decades that if it recovered its original meaning, it could become a guiding force for governments, firms, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). fixing this mess requires understanding how it came to be and recalibrating the compass so that it can reliably point in a single direction again.

THE PRICE OF FAME

One way to trace the slide of sustainable development is to follow the idea's degradation through the UN. After all, its earliest high-profile proponent, the World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, operated under a UN mandate. The UN General Assembly and the UN Secretariat were always at the forefront in championing Brundtland's vision. And today, the conferences, commissions, and task forces that constitute the sustainable development apparatus all find their focus within the UN system. What happens there is worth observing -- not because the UN is solely responsible for what has gone wrong, but because the organization reflects the aspirations and flaws of the players that are.

The trouble began at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which involved more than 100 heads of state, 170 governments, 2,400 representatives from NGOs, and nearly 10,000 journalists. The attention generated by the meeting kindled demand for more conferences. The result was a decade of summits, with one held almost every year, that covered a range of topics, including demographics (in 1994), the rights and roles of women (in 1995), social development (in 1995), and the expansion of urban habitats (in 1996). Most of these gatherings, the culminations of arduous negotiations, produced two documents: a detailed action plan for insiders and a crisper statement of principles for outsiders. At Rio, these were called, respectively, Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration.

Action plans tend to be sprawling documents that offer something for everyone. They are crafted through a consensus process in which the easiest way for special interests to get what they want is to agree with everyone else. The result is often an incoherent and costly wish list. The secretariat of the Rio summit estimated that implementing Agenda 21 might cost $600 billion a year in new spending, of which $125 billion would have to come as foreign assistance from the industrialized countries. Since then, summit negotiators have not even bothered to tally the costs of their plans. And in the meantime, the international community has continued to behave like a child crafting his dream order of Christmas presents out of the Bible-size FAO Schwarz catalog.

Statements of principles have not had much effect either. The documents are usually drafted in lawyers' false poetry: they are meant to inspire without offending any specific interest group. Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, for example, purported to offer a fresh interpretation of the conflict between a nation's sovereignty and its international responsibilities: "States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction." Nobody really knows what the sentence means. Advocates for sovereignty (especially in developing countries) claim that it endorses sovereign freedom of action, whereas advocates for environmental responsibility (notably ngos from rich industrialized nations) claim that it establishes international duties.

The Rio process, moreover, bred a set of new institutions. Two new secretariats were created to oversee the implementation of two new treaties, one on climate change, the other on biological diversity. Summit participants also set up the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), which holds an elaborately prepared meeting every year and is charged with the impossible task of monitoring the implementation of the Agenda 21 commitments. The CSD, in particular, has accomplished very little.

DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

Governments and the UN system have also marginalized sustainable development by failing to articulate serious objectives and coherent strategies for its implementation. Agenda 21 embraced every goal offered up in anticipation of the Rio summit, but it set no specific priorities or targets, making it impossible to mobilize support for any strategy or to measure progress. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the process reached its lowest point with a sprawling and incoherent plan. Participants endorsed eight broad Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) -- including the eradication of extreme poverty, the provision of universal primary education, and the assurance of equality for women -- that had been crafted at the UN's Millennium Summit two years earlier. Since then, the UN Secretariat has parsed these broad objectives into 18 specific targets and 48 indicators. But the MDGS are already losing traction because governments have limited power to directly affect these outcomes. Most of the world is closer to meeting the MDGS now than it was a decade ago, but that is largely because human welfare has generally been improving. (The most striking exceptions are found in the many African countries that score worse today on most measures of human welfare.)

The MDGS, targets, and indicators do not constitute a strategy that informs the actions of governments, companies, and NGOS. Most of what the MDGS envision is beyond the power of any enterprise to deliver. Consider, for instance, the efforts that would be needed to meet the mdg to "develop a global partnership for development." The indicators designed to measure compliance with this goal include some activities that governments do control, such as the amount of untied official development assistance (ODA) they offer, which, in the right settings, can help alleviate poverty. But they also include special targets for ODA to small island nations and landlocked states that serve no strategic purpose -- reflecting these nations' special ability to manipulate UN commitments to their narrow advantage. And regarding the indicators on which progress has been most remarkable -- access to phone services, computers, and the Internet -- advances have been the fortuitous byproduct of technological development and have often reflected the accidental wisdom of governments' decisions to let the market work on its own.

The trouble with sustainable development and the MDGS is that they reflect a diplomatic process that has devoted too much effort to lengthening the international community's wish list and not enough to articulating and ranking the types of practical measures that are the hallmark of serious policymaking. Governments might have wondered whether any given dollar in aid would be best invested in water treatment, poverty alleviation, or structural adjustment, or if it would be better to treat the causes of underdevelopment, such as corruption, or its symptoms, such as inadequate health care. Yet these crucial questions were left unanswered -- and often even unasked.

THE POVERTY PRIORITY

The only way to fix the mess with sustainable development is to return to Brundtland's fundamentals. Sustainable development must be viewed afresh, as a framework for every aspect of governance rather than as a special interest. It can be revived by following four courses of action: making a priority of alleviating poverty, dropping the environmental bias that has hijacked the entire movement, favoring local decisions over global ambitions, and tapping into new technologies to spur sustainable growth.

First, and most fundamental, progress on sustainable development requires more success with economic development, in particular poverty alleviation; the other two prongs of sustainability, environmental protection and social justice, will lack force until basic living standards are improved. Development experts do not know exactly which policies best boost development, and without a well-accepted theory, many have tended to embrace grand schemes, such as the MDGS, that are politically unrealistic and unlikely to deliver results. But these uncertainties should not mask a growing canon of good sense about the policies that offer the best chances for eradicating poverty. One place to start is with some of the careful studies conducted over the last decade, especially those done by the World Bank. They show that a few key institutional factors -- such as fiscal discipline, openness to market competition, strong investment in education, political freedom, and low levels of corruption -- largely explain why some countries flourish while others wither. The breadth of consensus on these points is reflected in the comprehensive 2005 Human Development Report by the UN Development Program (UNDP), which endorses a similar institutional focus for alleviating poverty.

Yet very few of these factors, such as openness to competition or investment in primary education, appear among the MDG indicators. Equally vital levers for development -- including anticorruption measures, the protection of private property, and the containment of civic strife -- do not appear, because the soft-spined corps of believers in sustainable development has been unwilling to advocate policies that some view as intrusions into national sovereignty. Getting serious about sustainable development requires redrawing the lines of sovereignty; if sustainable development is a universal concept, then governments have a universal responsibility to promote it.

In the United States, some of this advice is already being put into practice through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (mcc), a governmental organization whose origins lie in President George W. Bush's promise to provide new development assistance to the countries that can best use the money. The plan was to offer a $5 billion annual increase in development assistance by fy2006. Unfortunately, as with so many of this administration's bold projects, progress on the idea is being hobbled by halfhearted implementation and perennial underfunding -- the partial result of a budget crunch brought on by unsound tax policies and the ballooning cost of the Iraq war. The mcc has run into trouble implementing its funding strategy. Countries with the best conditions for making effective use of mcc money are those best able to attract private investment on their own. On the other hand, countries with conditions that are least conducive to development -- and thus the least eligible for mcc aid -- are also likely to be the poorest and those in the greatest need of a hand. This Catch-22 most affects Africa, which includes, according to the UNDP's most recent tally, 14 of the 18 countries in the world whose human development has regressed since 1990. The United States has voluntarily increased foreign aid by $8 billion since 2000 and is the largest single supplier of aid to Africa. Other donors have also redoubled their efforts in Africa. But on most of the continent, governments have no viable plan to ensure economic growth, and sustainable development remains far from reach.

GREEN WITH ENVY

It is also necessary to challenge the environmental bias that has dominated the sustainable development agenda. From the outset of the Brundtland commission's work, developing countries have rightly feared that the developed world's concern about the environment would overshadow their interest in development. They insisted that the Rio summit be called the UN Conference on Environment and Development, but diplomats from the industrialized countries (even the conference's secretary-general, Canadian Maurice Strong) nonetheless referred to it informally as the Earth Summit. The two treaties signed in Rio, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, mostly reflected the environmental priorities of the industrialized world. A treaty on protecting the world's forests was also considered. The developing countries, rich in forests and wary of intrusion, organized to kill it, but because nothing really dies in the diplomatic world, the stillborn convention has been resurrected as a set of new principles and institutions known as the UN Forum on Forests. So far, the forum has had little effect on forests -- except to further deplete them by generating a prodigious number of documents.

The tactical success of environmentalists, especially well-organized multinational NGOs based in industrialized countries, in moving their issues to the top of the sustainable development agenda is unhealthy -- even for environmentalism. Easy pickings in the UN have distracted environmentalists from the more urgent need to articulate ways in which they can contribute to the other pillars of sustainability: development and social justice. And this lapse has alienated them from an important base of potential partners in the developing world. Notably, the 2004 report of the high-level UN panel (which included Brundtland) convened by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to articulate new visions for world security was strikingly thin on environmental matters -- evidence that such issues have not sufficiently permeated mainstream policymaking in much of the world.

After being hoodwinked at Rio, the developing countries made sure that the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development did not include the word "environment" in its title. Nonetheless, the multinational environmental lobby has continued to score tactical victories in many areas that the industrialized states control, especially funding. The Global Environment Facility (GEF), which was created in 1991 to provide funds for the then nascent sustainable development apparatus, now finances projects in six areas: climate change, biodiversity, pollution in international waters, land degradation, ozone depletion, and persistent organic pollutants. These areas largely match the leading environmental priorities of diplomats from the industrialized nations, not the most pressing concerns of the states that GEF funds were intended to address. Climate change and biodiversity are top priorities for most industrialized countries and also, therefore, for the GEF: the two issues alone consume two-thirds of the GEF's resources. However, these concerns are disconnected from the real developmental priorities of the poorest populations in developing countries. In the area of climate change, for example, the GEF's funding strategy is to push for the development of technologies such as solar and wind-generated energy, which emit no carbon dioxide, a leading cause of climate change. These are darlings of environmentalists in the North, who claim that these exotic technologies, although currently expensive, will become cheaper with time. That argument is of dubious relevance to the 1.6 billion people who lack electricity today. For them, real progress usually comes in the form of less sexy but more cost-effective options, such as diesel generators and grid extensions.

THINK LOCAL

The third step toward recovering sustainable development is remembering that the theory works only if it is approached as a hardheaded calculation about tradeoffs, rather than as an amalgam of sacrosanct principles. The cocktail-party version of sustainable development gleams with promises of harmony and globalism: economic growth, environmental protection, and social justice can be achieved fully and simultaneously; because the ecosystems and economies of nations are interdependent, the problems they face require global solutions. In fact, however, the concept has practical relevance only if it can accommodate local preferences and capabilities. Cocktail-party visions of sustainability properly laud the benefits of electricity, for example, as a cure for darkness and a substitute for costly candles. Yet the diesel generators that bring electric lighting to the most remote areas are, in some respects, a paragon of unsustainability: diesel, which is derived from oil, is an exhaustible and polluting resource. Poor communities love diesel-generated electricity nonetheless: it has brought them television, high-quality lighting, and refrigeration, which were unavailable before. Similarly, whenever multinational environmentalists have sought to ban DDT worldwide, developing countries have resisted, wisely pointing out that the pesticide is crucial to controlling mosquitoes and other disease carriers in poor regions such as West Africa.

The last decade of UN summits propagated the myth that sustainable development can promote international harmony through "global action plans" and "universal principles." In fact, providing sustainability is a highly political activity governed by interests and resources that vary widely from one place to another. Advocating MDGS that apply equally to Latin America (where reaching them is fortuitously at hand) and Africa (where development is largely stagnant) makes little sense. The only way to craft serious goals is from the bottom up, focusing on responsible systems of government rather than disconnected global processes to do most of the work. But this approach, although pragmatic, is less satisfying ideologically and more demanding -- and therefore ignored by cocktail-party globalists.

The current disconnect between global ambitions and local realities helps explain why efforts to curb climate change, for example, have achieved so little. Although the problem's effects are inherently global, its causes are resolutely local. In most of the world, including many developing countries, domestic authorities choose what energy system to use, and because they decide how much fossil fuel to consume, they effectively control emissions of carbon dioxide. Globalists in industrialized countries are clamoring for "engaging" the governments of developing countries by pressing them to accept caps on emissions. But every major developing country has rejected the demand as an unfair limit on their development, leaving reform at an impasse.

So how can countries be compelled to enforce policies that deviate from their immediate interests in order to pursue the global good? Partly by allowing them to interpret the mandates of international agreements according to their local priorities. Take, for instance, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou -- three of China's most rapidly growing cities -- which are all struggling with local air pollution. To cut down on noxious emissions, they have (at least) two options. They can either move power plants and heavy industry outside their borders and import the goods and electricity they need, or they can change their primary fuel from coal to natural gas or nuclear energy, both of which are much cleaner. Although either solution would provide China's cities with the energy they need, each one has its drawbacks. Whereas the first would do little to curb China's total effluent of carbon dioxide -- the country as a whole would still burn prodigious amounts of coal -- the second would force Chinese officials to rely more heavily on a less carbon-intensive fuel (gas) that they have little experience using and would have to import in large quantities. To convince Chinese officials to adopt the second strategy even though it seems less favorable to them, the international community could offer a package of measures, including assurances to secure China's gas supplies and agreements to share related technology. In other words, industrialized Western countries could align their objective to slow global warming with China's domestic interests.

The primacy of local interests applies to highly industrialized countries as well. In Europe, governments are implementing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change by customizing it to local and regional needs: they are creating an emissions-trading system that lets individual companies trade credits for their carbon dioxide emissions, thus allowing greater flexibility in meeting the treaty's targets. Meanwhile, governments elsewhere are also developing their own locally tailored trading systems. The authors of the Kyoto Protocol envisioned a single global trading system with a single global price. But such a uniform system is not being implemented because the institutions that allocate credits, monitor compliance, and enforce agreements operate mainly at the local and national levels. Instead, a host of emissions-trading systems are emerging from the bottom up. (The United States, meanwhile, has refused to ratify the agreement for the compelling reason that it cannot satisfy the treaty's core commitment to bring down U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to an average of seven percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. Although abandoning the protocol was a wise decision, Washington has not offered any credible plan to manage emissions in the United States.)

TECH SAVVY

Any serious effort at sustainable development will also need to harness the technologies that most affect economic growth and mediate the consequences of growth for the environment. Unfortunately, the sustainable development apparatus has been strikingly ineffective on technological matters. The only technological area in which governments have set specific goals is "technology transfer," the handing over of hardware to developing countries -- a gesture often espoused in UN talks but rarely witnessed in the field. Such goals are largely pointless anyway because most technologies spread through markets rather than thanks to transfers between governments.

Some efforts to harness technological progress for the benefit of sustainable development are under way. They include a long-overdue attempt to promote innovation in areas that matter to very poor countries -- such as developing a vaccine for malaria -- but that have been overlooked by private firms that normally focus their efforts on creating products to combat the diseases of wealthier consumers.

Governments have found it particularly difficult to set credible policies for the development and application of technologies that have long commercial lives. The problem is especially acute for investors in energy infrastructures who are contemplating new technologies that might help address the problem of climate change. In Europe, where the rules on emissions trading are in flux, utility companies have been wary of building new power plants in the absence of greater fiscal certainty, increasing the risk of severe electricity shortages. And in the United States, where there is no meaningful federal policy on greenhouse gas emissions, investors in long-term energy assets such as power plants (the single greatest emitters of carbon dioxide) must make multibillion-dollar commitments without knowing what regulatory regime may exist in the future. A few years ago, this problem was not particularly serious because nearly all new power plants in the United States were fired with natural gas. But today, natural gas costs five times what it did in the 1990s, there are no new gas plants under construction, existing plants are running at only 30 percent of capacity, and dozens of new coal plants are being designed. Unless the U.S. government soon announces a credible plan for the future regulation of emissions, utilities will invest in conventional coal-fired power plants. Within a few years, the country could be saddled with far more carbon dioxide emissions as a result of these plants than if the government had given investors a reason to fund less carbon-intensive sources of energy.

Governments and companies must find ways to keep sometimes tyrannical public opinions from blocking the development and use of certain essential new technologies. Today, there is latent public discomfort regarding carbon sequestration, a technology that entails injecting deep underground large volumes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise go into the atmosphere. Elements of the technology are already widely used in oil and gas operations, but carbon dioxide injection projects are under way at only two facilities in the world. This fix holds the promise of an elegant engineering feat, but the technology is not without danger. There are risks of leaks, some potentially catastrophic, and some countries (notably the United States) still lack adequate regulatory regimes for controlling underground disposal. The industry would do well to keep early demonstration projects at remote and especially safe sites in order to quiet public alarmism.

Worries that even ill-advised public resistance could stymie such worthy projects are not far-fetched: other promising technologies have run afoul of misguided opinions and poor regulatory policies. Across Europe, for example, public opposition to genetically engineered foods has prompted regulations to keep some of those foods off the market despite growing evidence that they are good for both consumers and the environment. Some of the key technologies for controlling carbon dioxide pollution may face a similar fate. Nuclear power, for example, is probably favored as a low-carbon means of generating electricity. Yet in many countries, it remains politically untenable.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Despite its beginnings as a powerful animating concept, over the last two decades sustainable development has become meaningless. It has fallen prey to a collection of special interest groups that have both hollowed out the concept and lost track of what they can best do to implement it. When it has been applied, the theory has often distorted the real priorities of development.

Fixing the concept will require going back to its origins, and especially stressing the integration of economic and ecological systems while leaving it up to competent local institutions to decide how to set and pursue their own priorities. Advocates for sustainable development should not promote false universal goals. Because local needs and interests will necessarily vary, sustainable development must be redefined repeatedly, from the bottom up, wherever it is to be put into practice. Sustainable development can have worldwide relevance and appeal, but only if its original purpose of helping the poor live better, healthier, and fairer lives on their own terms is restored.