Growth and development

Economic growth defined by increasing gross domestic product (GDP) has been advanced as the key process required to facilitate development, but it has failed to distribute wealth equitably and has ignored encroaching problems of planetary limits, instead relying on the “decoupling” of economic expansion from environmental impacts. Economic growth has functioned as the bedrock of international development practice – still embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015. The SDGs now include explicit environmental objectives, but core contradictions exist between these goals and the social and economic goals that involve increasing material flows. The development successes seen in China have come at significant environmental cost while, in India, the mainstream Gujarat model contrasts with Development Alternatives, a social enterprise in central India, which pursues livelihoods and real human needs rather than GDP growth.