Mortgaging our common future: The temporality of sustainable development

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of sustainable development, as institutionalized through the 1987 Brundtland report and the governance frameworks that followed, can be understood as a temporal fix: an attempt to reconcile the fundamentally incommensurable temporalities of Earth systems and capitalist economic growth by displacing ecological costs into a future where technological development and market forces were assumed to resolve them. The article traces how a particular economic temporality—oriented towards future efficiency, discounting, and market self-regulation—came to overwrite the temporality of the Earth system in international environmental governance from the late 1980s onwards. Empirically, the article examines the influence of neoliberal and neoclassical economic thought on the Brundtland Commission and its corporate reinterpretation by the International Chamber of Commerce in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the defeat of direct regulatory instruments such as the European carbon tax in favor of market-based mechanisms, and the role of backstop technology, integrated assessment models, and cost-benefit analysis in embedding temporal deferral into the institutional architecture of climate governance from the UNFCCC to the IPCC. The article shows that what sustainable development sustained was not the environment but the trajectory of economic growth, by mortgaging the future to maintain accumulation in the present.

Introduction

In 1987, the UN report Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report, was published by a group led by its namesake Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian prime minister and chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The group had been tasked in 1983 with solving an increasingly difficult and contradictory problem. As knowledge about anthropogenic impact on the global environment was mounting, the insights about human impact on the Earth system needed to be integrated into the trajectory of global economic development that had been pushed since the early postwar era by Western nations. In this article, I argue that sustainable development emerged as an attempt to reconcile fundamentally incommensurable temporalities—the deep, cyclical time of Earth systems and the accelerating, future-oriented time of capitalist economic growth—and that it did so by mortgaging the future: deferring ecological costs into a horizon where technological development and market forces were assumed to resolve them. The concept of sustainable development, I suggest, can be understood as a temporal fix—drawing on David Harvey's concept of a spatial fix (2003) through which capitalism displaces its crises of overaccumulation geographically, but operating along the axis of time rather than space—in which the contradiction between the pace of biophysical regeneration and the rhythm of capital accumulation is not resolved but displaced forward in time.

The argument builds on and contributes to a growing body of work on the politics of temporality in modern societies. Barbara Adam (1998, 2004) has shown how industrial modernity imposes a singular, linear clock-time on ecological processes that operate according to fundamentally different temporal logics—cyclical, seasonal, and intergenerational—and that this imposition is not merely epistemological but deeply political, as it renders invisible the temporal conditions of ecological reproduction. Nowotny's concept of the “extended present” captures a related dynamic: the way modern societies colonize the future as a space for projection and planning while simultaneously compressing the time horizon within which action is expected to occur (Nowotny, 1996). Doganova (2024) has shown how discounting, the calculative practice through which future costs and benefits are rendered commensurable and present-valued, is not a neutral technique but an active intervention that shapes which futures are made actionable and which are rendered negligible. Discounting produces a specific temporal politics: it systematically devalues distant consequences in favor of near-term returns, making it rational to defer ecological costs precisely when they are most certain to compound. Buller (2022) extends this analysis to the wider architecture of green financial capitalism, arguing that market-based environmental governance operates through the assertion of ownership claims over the future—treating unbuilt carbon sinks, unrealized efficiency gains, and speculative technological developments as assets that can be leveraged to justify inaction in the present. What these analyses share is an attention to how temporal structures are not neutral containers of social action but actively shape what counts as a problem and what registers as a solution. This article brings this insight to bear on the history of sustainable development, showing how a particular economic temporality—one oriented toward future technological development, market forces, and self-regulation, drawn from both neoclassical and neoliberal economic theory—came to overwrite the temporality of the Earth system in international environmental governance from the late 1980s onwards.

The concept of sustainability in nature is, however, centuries old, going back to mid-eighteenth-century German Cameralistic thought and attempts to make resources last and suffice for populations and demand over spans of time, following from the insight in Justus von Liebig's work that soil could be degraded by too intense use by humans (Warde, 2018). This very same insight led Karl Marx a century later to diagnose what he called a “metabolic rift” between humans and the Earth (Saito, 2023). The metabolic rift can also be understood in temporal terms: as the socioeconomic system exists within a larger biophysical world in which metabolic processes of exchange regenerate material over time, such as soil, and keep it fertile for agriculture (Clark et al., 2018; Clausen & Longo 2012). The capitalist intensification of resource extraction inevitably leads to a metabolic rift which undermines productivity itself in the longer run, as the time needed for regeneration is overstepped by technical means. As an idea—that to endure, a society needs to maintain the ecological functioning on which it depends—sustainability had much resonance with the 1970s debates about limits to growth and ecological degradation resulting from industrial capitalism and population growth. Yet its modern incarnation as sustainable development from the 1990s is remarkably compatible with the needs of late capitalism, and the key dimension here is temporality. In the notion of sustainable development, these political tensions were glossed over by simultaneously claiming a universal appeal with reference to the needs of the Global South and mortgaging the future through technological development as the solution to the incompatibility of resource uses in the present with what could arguably count as sustainable.

The institutionalization of sustainable development in the 1990s followed on decades of debates over the status of natural resources and human development. The temporal context for sustainable development should be understood in its relation to twentieth century, and particularly postwar, institutionalization of the concept of development and its division of the world into developed and developing nations. The United Nations played a key role in this conceptualization, where development on the one hand and environment on the other hand became keywords for understanding the world (Selcer, 2018; Robin et al., 2018). The 1960s was termed the first UN development decade, in which the growth-by-industrialization paradigm was firmly established as the guiding principle, based on the idea of technology transfer, in which Western nations in the Global North, now often termed “developed countries,” would help the less fortunate “developing countries” by exporting their science-industrial model. At the time of the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972, the knowledge about the massive and dangerous impact on the global environment clearly existed and was widespread (Sörlin and Paglia, 2024). Yet, half a century later, very few of the negative impacts of development have been remedied and have instead mostly continued to grow along with the global economy. Against those warnings, neoliberal and neoclassical economists launched a counternarrative based on the wisdom of the market and the ability of future technologies to deal more effectively with the environmental problems of the present.

At the heart of the process to develop sustainable development in the late 1980s was this clash of temporalities: the political, economic, and social on the one hand and the temporalities of the Earth and its systems on the other hand. In particular, the role of the future became integrated into the environmental politics of the present (Andersson, 2015). These temporal frameworks were seized upon by economists and business organizations as a means to ward off the threat of strict regulation and mandatory emission reductions, just when climate change was being elevated to the level of public concern roughly between 1988 and 1992. Nasa scientist James Hansen's 1988 testimony to the U.S. congress and the founding of the IPCC marked the emergence of climate change as a major public issue, which amplified calls for government action to mitigate carbon emissions. The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 saw the founding of the UNFCCC, which initiated the long negotiations on how climate change should be mitigated. Corporations acted concertedly through organizations such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the Global Climate Coalition to develop a counterstrategy (Dunlap and McCright, 2015).

The Brundtland commission was established in 1983 with *Resolution 38/161*, “Process of preparation of the Environmental Perspective to the Year 2000 and Beyond,” and was explicitly tasked by the UN General Assembly to develop long-term environmental strategies and define “shared perceptions of long-term environmental issues and of the appropriate efforts needed to deal successfully with the problems of protecting and enhancing the environment.” From the outset, the temporal framework of the long-term was established which, being a relative concept, was defined as the coming decades and was integrated with the notion of future technological development and discount rates. Policy frameworks have since followed a similar temporal rhythm, with target years set roughly two to three decades ahead—from the Kyoto protocol and Paris agreement to Agenda 2030 and the EU “Fit for 55” targeting 2050. This rolling horizon allows for enough openness in terms of imagining change yet to come by technological means, while the historical record shows a staggering lack of progress on targets and promises in the present and recent past (Stoddard et al., 2021). The 2023 UN Global Sustainable Development Report showed that out of the 169 subtargets, the only goals seeing good progress were internet coverage and telecommunications. The majority of CO₂ emissions have been released into the atmosphere since 1990, when climate policy frameworks were first put into place, and their continued rise a decade after the Paris agreement's 1.5° target—which is already being overshot—should perhaps inspire learning from failures. Indeed, a recent Nature commentary by climate scientists affiliated with IIASA and other institutions argues that the exceedance of 1.5°C demands not only forward-looking overshoot pathways but a backward-looking perspective that unpacks the historical decisions and factors that led to this failure, including what they call the “roads not taken”—counterfactual scenarios examining points at which more ambitious action was feasible but deferred (Ganti et al., 2026). Their observation that countries continue to justify inaction by relying on vague promises of future carbon removal is a striking contemporary expression of the temporal logic this article traces historically. The present article contributes to the kind of retrospective accountability they call for, by showing how the temporal framework of sustainable development has systematically enabled that deferral.

This article proceeds in three parts. The first section traces the intellectual and political relationship between sustainable development and neoliberal economic thought, showing how the rise of market-oriented ideology in the 1980s shaped the interpretation of the Brundtland report and its implementation in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The second section examines how markets and future technologies became the default framework for addressing environmental problems, focusing on the role of the ICC and its influence on both the Brundtland commission and the corporate reinterpretation of sustainable development. The third section turns to the specific temporal mechanisms through which climate change mitigation was deferred, tracing how concepts such as backstop technology, cost–benefit analysis, and emissions trading translated an economic temporality of future efficiency into the institutional architecture of climate governance from the UNFCCC to the IPCC. Throughout, the article shows how the clash between the temporality of the Earth system and the temporality of economic growth—the contradiction that sustainable development was meant to resolve—was managed not by reconciliation but by subordinating ecological time to economic time, mortgaging the future to maintain the trajectory of growth in the present.

Sustainable development and the temporality of the market

The modern concept of sustainable development was born out of the efforts to reconcile the conflicting temporalities of humans and the Earth, so as to be able to uphold and continue the trajectory of economic and industrial development. The project emerged as a way to build economic growth in spite of all the alarming reports and discussions of the damages of continued resource extraction and pollution over previous decades, such as Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's 1972 report The Limits to Growth or the 1972 UN conference on the Environment in Stockholm (Sörlin and Paglia, 2024). A number of influential books published around that time criticized mainstream economics for not taking into account the detrimental effect on the natural world of unregulated capitalist growth (Commoner, 1971; Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Illich, 1973; Meadows et al., 1972; Odum, 1971; Schumacher, 1973). In the 1980s, a response to this environmental obstacle to development emerged in the shape of the strong belief in the market economy and its ability to solve problems and allocate resources more efficiently than state-controlled planning. In sustainable development, this belief translated into a conviction that corporate self-regulation was preferable to governmental or legal measures.

While the focus in 1970s on population growth was misleading as to the causes of environmental degradation because of the uneven responsibility for it among the human population, the evidence that perpetual and unregulated economic growth would have a negative impact on the planet grew over the coming decades, and the need for environmental protection in light of this was well supported in the West. Support for government interventions to regulate the economy accordingly was growing, but as Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed in 1981, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is our problem.” He was addressing the crisis of inflation, but the proclamation became a hallmark for the burgeoning neoliberal deification of the free market, which if left unregulated, its proponents claimed, possessed a wisdom that could solve any problems facing humankind. At this time, public support in the U.S. for environmental protection was still strong, with opinion polls in 1984 showing that 61% of Americans were in favor of protecting the environment even at the risk of curbing economic growth, with similar views in the U.S. Congress (Oreskes and Conway, 2023). The Reagan administration launched a successful attack against these sentiments, starting with defunding environmental protection and then advocating for markets. The Secretary of the interior James Watt famously proclaimed that in the new administration “we will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.” Watt was one of the many antienvironmentalists appointed by Reagan, including for the Environmental Protection Agency, which was part of an overt strategy exploiting agency discretion (Layzer, 2009). Another one was Anne Gorsuch, who became head of the EPA and applied minimalist interpretations of what statues required while delaying or impeding environmental protection during her office. She framed these efforts of weakening environmental protection from the position of head of the agency not as a decrease but as an increase in pragmatism, efficiency, rationality, and economic realism. In this context, sustainable development presented a program that appeared to be able to achieve the difficult tradeoffs between human needs and environmental protection without damaging economic growth.

The concept of neoliberalism is notoriously slippery, and it should also be clear that there is overlap between neoclassical and neoliberal economics, as they share the fundamental belief in the ability of economic growth and marketization to solve social and environmental problems like climate change, but differ in their conception of how much the government should intervene to facilitate economic growth and markets. Neoliberal economics is best understood as an extension and intensification of neoclassical economic theory, which pushes for deregulation, market-based solutions and self-regulation of corporations. With regards to the argument pursued in this article, the temporality imposed on environmental problems by neoliberal and neoclassical economic theory overlaps.

Plehwe and Mirowski argue that a Neoliberal thought collective emerged from the Mount Pellerin Society around 1947 and has emanated from there since, with later incarnations in multiple partisan think tanks under the umbrella of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (Plehwe, 2009). The general focus of this collective was to combat state power and advocate for markets, which in the context of the Cold war became a particularly important mission for its advocates. What holds the neoliberal thought collective together and helps its rise to hegemonic power in the 80s and 90s is a set of epistemic commitments, rooted in economics, politics, and science but ultimately having to do with the status and use of human knowledge. For these intellectual economists, the market was not just a means to allocate goods but instead understood as “the greatest information processor known to mankind” (Mirowski, 2013) and the best way to handle the uncertainty of the future. This logic would be used to win any intellectual battle and even dismiss science, as they claimed that the market could understand the environment better than humans (Vettese, 2023). To a certain extent, the rise of neoliberalism was also the result of a battle for knowledge about the future, in which the environment would come to play a central role. When Hayek received the Bank of Sweden Prize in 1974, the so-called Nobel in economics, he called his lecture “The pretense of knowledge” and attacked the neo-Malthusians for their scientistic approach to knowledge. This epistemology would hold that even when faced with scientifically sound and conclusive evidence of environmental destruction in the present, humans would falter in creating regulatory frameworks to protect this environment in the future, because the market will do it better and more efficiently by means we do not yet possess.

Another approach to the study of neoliberalism is more focused on its practices, investigating privatization, deregulation and marketization from the 1970s onwards and with a less clear-cut origin story to the rise of this pervasive ideology (Offer, 2017; Peck and Tickel, 2002; Ward, 2024). In this branch, neoliberalism is understood to be embedded in its sociomaterial conditions such as institutions, industries, and infrastructures that shaped its conditions of possibility at various moments in time through an interplay of policies, politics, and ideologies. My analysis of sustainable development resonates with this understanding and exemplifies how a concept emerged as a response to the conflict between the needs for environmental protection and economic growth, soon became imbued with market-oriented solutions as a default modus operandi (Buller, 2022). Market-based solutions slowly but surely proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s and became the standard response to environmental problems from overfishing to carbon emissions. The point is not to show that specific persons who self-identified as neoliberals had their hands in the Brundtland commision's work or later applications of it but that an economizing and reductive thought system that rested on neoliberal ideology informed how the issues associated with sustainability, such as climate change, should be solved and what knowledge counted as useful. The conception of the future as mortgaged through technological development, in particular, is a widespread trope in sustainable development that can be traced to neoliberal economic theory.

Future technologies as solutions to environmental problems of the present

The neoliberal program had long been promoted in the postwar era by economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, but it was in the 1980s that deregulation and economic markets as a solution to problems including the environment started to become mainstream. Cornucopian economists like Julian Simon argued that the world should combat pollution with economic growth, as human resourcefulness and innovation would remedy whatever problems arose so that regulations would only be in the way (Oreskes and Conway, 2023). This was the basis of Simon's conception of resourceship, which would become an influential figure of thought to neoliberal environmental policy. Its basic idea was that the market, in its infinite resourcefulness, would always be able to overcome environmental problems caused by its actors, if not in the present then in the future through human ingenuity and technology. This was the ideological context for key concepts such as offsetting, which first emerged in the U.S. as a response to the 1970 Clean Air Act so that expansion could be allowed even in polluted areas so long as this increase was met with reduced emissions elsewhere at a later time (Simon, 1984). The concept would later become institutionalized in the shape of carbon offsetting as a global mitigation strategy in response to the failure of limiting the increase of atmospheric CO₂. The temporal framework of claiming that one harmful activity in the present should be allowed to be treated as remedied by a future hypothetical compensation is arguably one of the key moves in the integration of neoliberal market principles and conceptions of the future into environmental problems through the discourse of sustainable development.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal free market policies were established as the proper response not just to the global inequality but also to solve the looming environmental crisis. Climate change was, however, an example of textbook market failure according to many economists, as well as textbook environmental justice as it arose from the everyday economic activity of using fossil fuels, but produced a huge external cost for which no coverage was integrated. The response was therefore to see climate change as an externality that could be internalized by finding the right price of carbon, which will differ between actors and can be facilitated by trading on a market to achieve the least cost emissions reductions (Bryant, 2021).

In 1984, as the work of the Brundtland commission was getting started, the ICC and UNEP coorganized a World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM) at the Versailles castle. Following work by UNEP director Mostafa Tolba, there was a sense of redirection toward enrolling business and industry in environmental work, and the WICEM conference offered a good opportunity to test this new approach. This shift from within the UN toward more industry friendly approaches coincided with the Reagan administration seeking greater influence for corporations in forums and international policy on global development (Bergquist and David, 2023). In 1989, Bernthal, who was Reagan's recently appointed assistant secretary of state for Ocean and International Environmental Affairs, was also appointed to head the Working Group III of the newly established IPCC which would focus on response strategies to climate change. When he was questioned in congress about the strategy on climate change, Bernthal stated that “There need not be a conflict between global warming consideration and economic development. The concept of sustainable development is increasingly recognized as necessary in today's world.” (U.S. Dept. of State, 1989).

Gro Harlem Brundtland, William Ruckelshaus and other commission members attended the 1984 conference in Versailles, the latter both co-convenor and keynote speaker. In the conference report, Brundtland is cited as challenging what she perceives as a dichotomy between economic growth and environmental protection, “there is no choice of either or” she said, insisting that growth is necessary for sustainability and vice versa, while cautioning that restriction and regulations of markets could lead to less sustainable practices in the developing world (UNEP, 1984). The conference report further cites Robert Anderson, Chairman of the oil company Atlantic Richfield, who “was emphatic that the entrepreneurial system, and the benefits of competition, were essential ingredients of innovation and the generation of technologies that would be effective in environmental management” (Ibid., 7) Notably, Anderson was not a straightforward opponent of environmental action—he had long-standing relationships with prominent environmentalists and climate scientists, and Atlantic Richfield was also had a leading photovoltaic manufacturer in the 1980s. Yet his framing is revealing precisely because it shows how even environmentally engaged industrialists articulated solutions through the temporal logic of future technological innovation driven by market competition. As the report summarizes, “Time and again, industrialists confided that they had come to WICEM because the whole flavour of the environmental debate seemed to be changing” (Ibid., 20). To respond to the environmental issues raised, the industry would work with cost–benefit analysis, self-regulated guidelines and environmental impact assessment, all of which became dominant ways of responding to climate change and other environmental issues in the coming decades under auspice of Sustainable Development. All of these measures rested on a particular temporality, which held that future technologies and price signals from markets would alleviate environmental problems more efficiently and at a lower cost than any direct intervention in the present. The future-oriented dimension of the market as a way of dealing with uncertainty became hegemonic in sustainable development, in which economic growth works as the engine.

The common future staked out by the Brundtland report and later implemented in the concept of sustainable development was one in which externalities in the form of pollution or climate change would be integrated and harmonized with the needs of economic growth: “Economics and ecology must be completely integrated in decision making and lawmaking processes not just to protect the environment, but also to protect and promote development.” (p. 36). An assessment today makes clear that the economic pillar has been given far greater weight in most countries’ efforts to implement it as a policy (Bogert et al., 2022). While sustainable development is often touted as a way to protect the environment, the report makes clear that protecting and promoting development itself was of equal or more importance. This way of crafting a policy document makes it possible to interpret both as a call to environmental protection and as simultaneously as a defense and reinforcement of the dominant economic system of neoliberal market capitalism, just as the Cold War ended this economic-ideologic system triumphed across the world.

The development following on from the Brundtland report saw environmental governance shifting away from state and government-centered approaches to neoliberal environmental governance where corporations like the fossil industry were entrusted with self-regulation and market-based approaches to environmental reform (Bernstein, 2002). This shift in the late 1980s meant that biophysical limits to growth and government approaches to addressing environmental challenges were replaced with sustainable development built on faith and trust in markets and corporations as the main forces to address environmental problems like climate change (Borowy, 2014). What had been seen as the cause of the problem, unregulated capitalism and corporations, was now offered as its solution by embedding their positive effects into the future in the guise of technological change. The invention of sustainable development was directly related to the rise of neoliberal ideas in the time of its creation (Levy and Newell, 2004). In its wake, certificates and new accounting tools gave corporations the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their sustainability, which enhanced their value, as the boundaries of the concept of sustainability were stretched beyond its limits (Jones, 2017). At the same time, this was driven by a belief, associated with ideas in neoliberalism, in the superiority of market-driven policies to address environmental problems by focusing on their future dimensions. But instead of alarming reports of impacts on life on Earth, this future was imbued with technological innovation and market mechanisms to efficiently manage environmental problems in largely unspecified ways.

Where did this influence come from? Recent work suggests that the ICC was foundational as a partner to the UNEP in the lead up to the Brundtland commission's work with sustainable development (Bergquist and David, 2023). International Chamber of Commerce members were critical of early drafts of the Brundtland report which the ICC US council noted contained, “much biased and fallacious data and suggestions for massive over-regulation by governments and international organizations.” The ICC had access to members of the core group of the commission, like Susanna Agnelli from the auto manufacturing Fiat family, whose brother Umberto was an ICC representative, and William Ruckelshaus, who maintained direct contacts with ICC (Borowy, 2014). The ICC was also in regular contact with the commission member Jim Macneill, who pushed for market mechanisms in environmental policies and sustainable development (Borowy, 2017).

The ICC developed a dual strategy in the years between the Brundtland report in 1987 and the Rio Earth Conference in 1992. The ICC had a strong cooperation with UNEP who had ordered the Brundtland report, and worked intensively to push for an interpretation of it that entailed self-regulation by corporations and voluntary commitments, much like the U.S. would push in all subsequent UNFCCC negotiations. The other side of the strategy developed by the ICC energy committee within the Global Climate Coalition, a group formed by US National Associations of Manufacturers, with the goal to counteract evidence of climate change to weaken and delay policy within IPCC and beyond (Bergquist and David, 2024; ; Brulle, 2023). These crucial years of negotiating climate change and sustainability around 1990 should be seen against the background of several petroleum companies such as Exxon mobil, Shell, and Total, being well aware of the catastrophic impacts of climate change caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, already by the 1970s (Bonneuil et al., 2021; Franta, 2018, 2021).

Crucially, the ICC's courting of UNEP and influence on the Brundtland commission's work had the effect of shifting the temporal framework for how to address environmental problems by deferring them into the future. Through direct contacts with commissioners such as the US representative William Ruckelshaus and others (Borowy, 2014), the ICC maintained regular interactions and managed to influence the report to one they could endorse and be happy with, pushing for cooperation with governments to foster sustained economic growth consistent with environmental quality.

Our common future pushed for an integrated global view of how humans are inevitably a part of their environment, stressing it “does not exist in isolation from human actions, ambitions and needs,” which clearly broke with earlier conceptions in which the environment was something out there, impacted by but ultimately separate from humans (Warde, 2018). At the same time, the view pushed by the report is that it is not just humans but their development practices that are tightly intertwined claiming that “the environment is where we all live; and development is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable.” This could be interpreted as saying that we need to protect the environment and be mindful in our development, but this shift from a threatened environment separate from humans at the same time glosses over the fundamental differences in ways of inhabiting the planet and portrays Western capitalist and industrial development as universal and inevitable, echoing Thatcher's slogan “there is no alternative.” The inevitability of capitalist development underwriting sustainable development rests on an economic temporality which is transposed over Earthly temporalities, translating into a sense that even if negative impacts result over time as they had been demonstrated to do by science, the future holds the promise of technological management to alleviate those impacts.

In the preface to the report, the Commision states that the report “is not a prediction of ever increasing environmental decay, poverty, and hardship in an ever more polluted world among ever decreasing resources. We see instead the possibility for a new era of economic growth, one that must be based on policies that sustain and expand the environmental resource base.” The unlimited expansion of the environmental resource base to support perpetual economic growth is precisely what neoliberal economists like Julian Simon had been arguing against the neo-Malthusian's anxiety over finite resources with concepts like resourceship. In his programmatic article (1980) “Resources, population, environment: An oversupply of false bad news” where he outlined this concept, he also argued that the unknowability of future markets meant that future improvements in extraction technologies might mean that resources can be extracted from the sea or other planets, and that the only true limits to economic growth was “the total weight of the universe.”

Regarding the question of limits to the development the Brundtland report prefers to speak of “not absolute limits, but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth.” This quote is one of many examples of how the report, in facing the clashing temporalities of the Earth time and human time, effectively reinterprets the temporal vectors so that technology and management in the future will make room for further expansion of economic development.

In the years when the report was crafted, UNEP's collaboration with the ICC introduced new management concepts connected to efficiency, by which it made its case for voluntary business approaches to environmental problems (Bergquist and David, 2024). The underlying logic behind this approach was that efficiency measures would be superior both in terms of cost–benefit and in terms of improving environmental quality, to direct regulation of corporation's externalities in the shape of pollution and rising CO₂. The emphasis on technologies in the future aligns with a dominant ethos of the 1990s, that corporations, if given the freedom to operate according to their own needs, will solve environmental problems through voluntary commitments and social and environmental responsibility (Fressoz, 2025). The Rio Earth Summit was led by Maurice Strong, who had been a central figure in international environmental governance since chairing the 1972 Stockholm conference and who had consistently sought to engage industry as a partner in environmental reform. At Rio, this approach was institutionalized through formal collaboration with the ICC and the newly established World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which gave corporate actors a structural role in shaping the implementation of sustainable development. Whatever Strong's intentions—and his environmental commitments were long-standing and genuine—the effect was to create institutional channels through which the market-oriented and future-oriented temporal framework favored by corporate interests became embedded in the governance architecture emerging from Rio.

The ICC also crafted a Business Charter for Sustainable Development which was released just before the summit in 1992 in which it pushed for corporate stewardship and corporate responsibility. The document was drafted by oil company Shell among others, and served as an interpretation of the Brundtland report, which, as it informed its members, was “essential for establishment of public credibility in order to reduce government tendency to overlegislate and to strengthen business influence on public policies” (WICEM 2, 1991). In this corporate version of sustainable development, the charter downplayed the Brundtland reports emphasis on meeting the needs of the world's poor and on intergenerational justice, and instead made management and stewardship the hallmarks of sustainable development (Bergquist & David, 2023).

Crafted between the Limits to growth report of 1972 and The Planetary boundaries of 2009, the Brundtland report is imbued with an optimism for how future technology and management will be able to expand the resource base and improve the capacity of the biosphere to absorb the waste of human activities, from pollution to CO₂ emissions. The years following its release saw a dominant corporate aligned and arguably neoliberal interpretation of sustainable development becoming hegemonic. Today, the absolute limits of the biosphere are widely accepted, but the economic growth and market-based solutions to these environmental problems continue apace, often legitimized precisely through the solution of future technological development, which it is implied, market forces and entrepreneurs will inevitably produce.

Backstop technology and the economic temporality of climate governance

The years between 1988 and 1992 were foundational for the world's response to climate change, which emerged as a major public issue and became institutionalized through Sustainable development and the Rio Declaration, the founding of the IPCC in 1988, and UNFCCC in 1992. The efforts in crafting a business friendly neoliberal framework to climate change very much rested on specific conceptions of time as its central vector. The epistemology of the market was claimed to hold the best responses and ways of dealing with climate change in the future, so that directly addressing the problem in the present could be presented as counterproductive, particularly with support from cost–benefit analysis.

Already in 1968, the economist John Dales proposed cap-and-trade as a framework in his Pollution, Prices & Property, in which the state sets a limit to the externality of pollution and then hands out permits to pollute which can be traded and priced by market forces. This idea forms the basis for the EUs response to climate change, which is the world's largest cap-and-trade program for CO₂. Essentially, a cap-and-trade program for emissions reduction entrusts the market with setting the price of pollution-rights and avoids direct environmental regulation. Both voluntary and controlled carbon markets privileges neoliberal and technocratic values which narrows out alternative approaches to curbing emissions (Bailey and Wilson, 2009). The depoliticizing effect of their rollout has a long intellectual lineage in neoliberal thought (Felli, 2015). In the case of the EU Emission Trading Systems, the market has been flooded with excess permits leading to very limited actual reduction of emissions ranging from 0 to 1.5%, but all the more profits for polluters (Green, 2021). The significance of cap-and-trade as the preferred instrument becomes clearer in light of the alternative that was actively defeated. In 1991–92, the European Commission proposed a combined carbon and energy tax designed to stabilize CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by 2000—a direct regulatory intervention that would have imposed immediate costs on polluters. The proposal was scuttled before the Rio summit through coordinated lobbying by major European oil companies, including BP, Shell, Total, and Elf, working through business associations and sympathetic member states, as recent archival research has demonstrated (Jouty and Bonneuil, 2025). The defeat of the carbon tax and the subsequent turn to cap-and-trade was a paradigmatic instance of the temporal fix: a present-tense regulatory instrument was replaced by a market mechanism whose pricing signal was deferred to future trading dynamics, displacing the cost of emissions into a temporal horizon that, as the subsequent history of the EU ETS would show, could be indefinitely extended through the overallocation of permits.

In 1992, as the UNFCC was just founded, William Nordhaus proposed the control of CO₂ through an integrated model of climate and economic growth, which formed the basis of what would become integrated assessment models used by organizations like the IPCC to measure and provide the baseline between a rising global mean temperature and human industrial activities which produce emissions. Nordhaus model was called Dynamic Integrate Climate and Economy (DICE) for which he was awarded the Bank of Sweden prize in the memory of Nobel in 2018 (the same one that was given to Hayek decades earlier. By integrating and linking economic growth measured as GDP with the control of CO₂ and global mean temperature, later sanctioned as different targets to limit global warming, the status quo and continuation of the economic development causing much environmental destruction seemed controllable and manageable through future technology. Nordhaus model showed, for instance, that three degrees of global warming from preindustrial levels would only mean a 2% loss of global GDP. The argument based on his model, which has informed much environmental and climate policy since, is that a too quick reduction of greenhouse gases will have a strong negative impact on economic growth, and that is therefore better to allow for some warming to protect economic growth and development, and that the increase in warming and emissions can be taken care of in the future by means of technological solutions and adaptation. This implies an adjustment of the discount rate in how the cost of future climate breakdown is estimated compared to the costs of slowing down the economy in the present. In Nordhaus’ argument, the economic cost to people today will be much higher than the benefit of protecting people in the future. Focusing on GDP growth will allow future generations to develop the technologies and ideas needed to manage a changing climate. The economic solution became to price carbon so that markets would respond by shifting away from the more expensive fossil fuels toward cheaper renewables. Still today, three decades later, the actual shift continues to not happen as the profit margins of renewables without heavy tax subsidies remain to small to compete with fossil energy sources (Christophers, 2024).

When the UNFCC was formed in 1992, many central frameworks and approaches had been developed at IIASA by people who would move on to have prominent positions there and in IPCC, as well as other influential organizations for climate change mitigation (Fressoz, 2025). A central concept brought in from Nordhaus and his atomic futurology background was “backstop technology” defined by IPCC WG III as “an energy source assumed to be available in unlimited quantities at a certain price after a certain date” (IPCC, 1995). The theoretical or speculative future development of such a technology then comes to form the basis for projections of mitigation scenarios and their cost–benefit analysis, and once translated into policy via IPCC, forms the basis for actual mitigation and its postponement in the present. As Clift and Kuzemko (2024) have shown, the integrated assessment models that underpin IPCC scenarios remain grounded in neoclassical economic assumptions that project forward from historical trends, privilege least-cost pathways, and rely heavily on unproven future technologies such as carbon capture and storage and negative emissions. The effect is what has been termed “mitigation deterrence”: the construction of modeled futures in which speculative technological solutions defer the need for immediate emissions reductions, reproducing in technocratic form the same temporal logic of deferral that this article traces to the political economy of sustainable development in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Frederick Bernthal, the first IPCC WG III chair who had insisted that sustainable development showed that there was no conflict between global warming and global development, was succeeded in 1991 via appointment of George H. W. Bush by Roberth A. Reinstein, who was also the chief US negotiator to the 1992 founding of the UNFCCC. Reinstein received advice from Nordhaus in his work on climate negotiation, and he would later outline the work in crafting a strategy for the UNFCCC negotiations. As he would later explain, their strategy was one of avoiding any specific or binding emissions targets (Kennedy, 2010). In preparing for the meeting, Reinstein was instructed to resist an expected push from Europe for binding agreements as well as developing countries call for economic compensation. Instead, he was to position American technology development in response to climate change: “The developing country markets are the growth markets of the future, and technology is the way we can position ourselves in those markets. In other words, this [UNFCCC] is a ticket to establish a U.S. presence in the growth markets of the future: the technology […] Play the technology card and protect the few things we do want” (Ibid., 13). In this oral interview from 2010, Reinstein recalls European's initially pushed stabilization of greenhouse gases by the year 2000, allowing 8 years to phase out fossil fuels, which for Reinstein was out of the question. Instead, he came to UNFCCC with the mission to establish no money, and no targets as the outcome. He was successful and no targets were established in the UNFCCC. When a target finally was established two decades later 2015 in Paris, it was done under the framework of voluntarily set nationally determined contributions to limit warming to 1.5°, a target which one decade later has effectively been breached with no end to fossil fuels in sight.

After chairing the IPCC WG III Reinstein became a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industries and published articles insisting that the observed rise in CO₂ was a natural variation and emissions from industry not significant. His legacy in introducing the “technology card” as the main response to climate change was one that suited many interests; both the many oil, coal and gas exporting countries in the world, carbon intensive national economies and corporate interests (Fressoz, 2025). In 1995, the IPCC wrote that slowing the transition from fossil fuels down provides valuable time to develop new technologies and capital to adapt, which will produce cost-efficient responses. This position was directly aligned with Nordhaus who was the primary advisor to Reinstein and others at the IPCC WG III meetings held at IIASA. Supported by his DICE model, Nordhaus insisted that time for technological development and adaptation was crucial, and placing the time horizon to the year 2100 allowed this more cost-efficient approach. The temporality of the climate system in recycling carbon through the natural cycle was effectively overwritten by an economic temporality of cost efficiency, without regard to the effects this would have on the conditions at Earth, often with reference to human's ability to adaptation. The time of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen which regulate nutrients across the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere was subjected to the economic time of the market. Nordhaus managed to translate the climate issue into neoclassical economics, which in turn laid an ideal foundation for neoliberal environmental policy to prevail. Given the freedom to develop and act according to their needs, corporations could solve environmental problems on their own terms, with voluntary commitments, certifications, and codes of responsibility.

Conclusion

Just as anthropogenic climate change and widespread pollution from economic activities started to be widely recognized in the early 1990s, sustainable development became a policy tool that promised to integrate economic and social sustainability with their environmental counterparts, so that market forces could both produce prosperity for humans and minimize the negative anthropogenic impact that in the long run would threaten the very conditions of possibility for any economic activity. While the report itself is crafted in a language that lends itself to contradictory interpretations, the more corporate-friendly version quickly became dominant, and arguably, precisely the effect of maintaining a sense of progress in environmental improvement while allowing destruction and emissions to continue to soar was the key to its success. Given the continued steady rise since 1990 in greenhouse gas emissions, mass extinction of species, ocean acidification and eutrophication, and other detrimental effects of the capitalist market economy to this day, as well as the general failure so far to meet the targets associated with first millennium and then Agenda 2030 sustainable development goals, it seems worthwhile to ask by what means economic growth and development were really made “sustainable” over the past decades.

The institutionalization of sustainable development in the 1980s and 1990s resulted from decades of struggles over environmental futures. By the time of the publication Our common future, as strong belief in the need to protect economic growth against excessive environmental regulation prevailed and was often framed as a way to combat poverty in the Global south. In the 1970s, Hayek, the Godfather of neoliberalism, saw socialists as less of threat than environmentalists, who at the time had considerable impact on discussions about economics and environmental futures. By 1990, the Cold war was over and the neoliberal version of environmentalism became hegemonic. Environmental policy and politics in the guise of sustainable development largely started to search for and adopt market mechanisms in response to current and future environmental problems through cap-and-trade and off-setting which would protect the natural world while leaving the neoliberal market economy and growth paradigm unchallenged. While the Brundtland report is sometimes interpreted as a radical challenge to the development paradigm, it ultimately succumbs to the deus-ex-machina of future technological development to make extraction more efficient and produce new waves of economic growth. The temporality of sustainable development mortgages the future to maintain economic growth. In this way, sustainability is more applied to economic growth than to the environment that was originally considered in need of protection, which it is instead meant to receive in the future. Nordhaus clearly translated the issue of climate change into neoclassical economic terms, which fit ideally with the post-Cold War neoliberal faith in markets and self-regulation as the ideal and most effective way to combat environmental problems and climate change. This environmental temporality based on the sense that what you see in the present in the form of empirical scientific evidence, resulting from historical actions up until that present with no indication of ending, will, in the future, be managed efficiently by technologies yet to come, and market effects built up over time. The clash of temporalities between human time and Earth time to which the concept of sustainable development was a response led to a suppression of Earth time and an elevation of human time.