Development and Sustainability: Core Concepts and Measurement

For a long time, a country’s progress was measured by one number: how fast its economy grew every year. That number told you almost nothing about whether people could see a doctor, send their children to school, or expect to live past sixty. Over the past five decades, economists and policymakers have built a much richer picture of what it actually means for a society to develop – and, alongside it, a separate but connected idea about how long that progress can actually last. Understanding both concepts, and how they’re measured, is the starting point for almost every debate on climate change, inequality, and global policy today.

Development means more than a growing economy 🔗

Development is a multidimensional process. It is not just about a rising GDP; it is about meeting basic needs, reducing poverty and inequality, raising living standards, widening access to education, extending life expectancy, and expanding the range of choices people have over their own lives. A country can post impressive growth figures while large sections of its population remain hungry, uneducated, or excluded from decision-making. That gap between growth and genuine progress is precisely why development economists moved toward broader definitions.

Development scholars often describe three core values that sit underneath every definition of development: sustenance (the ability to meet basic needs like food, shelter, and health), self-esteem (a sense of worth and dignity, free from being treated as a tool of other nations or systems), and freedom (the ability to choose from a wider range of life options rather than being trapped by circumstance). These aren’t abstract ideals – they show up in real policy questions, from minimum wage laws to school enrolment drives to land rights reform. Genuine development, in this sense, implies a radical transformation of society: a reorganisation of entire economic, social, political, and cultural systems, not just a tweak to fiscal policy.

From GNP to the Human Development Index 🔗

Why income alone fell short 🔗

Before the 1970s, development was measured almost entirely through growth in national income – Gross National Product (GNP). Critics pointed out an obvious flaw: a rising GNP says nothing about who benefits from that growth. A handful of large industries could drive up national income while wages, health outcomes, and literacy rates for the majority stayed flat. Income distribution, environmental costs, and social wellbeing were left completely out of the picture.

The Human Development Index 🔗

The response to this gap was the Human Development Index (HDI), introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990. Rather than relying on income alone, the HDI combines three dimensions: a long and healthy life (measured through life expectancy at birth), access to knowledge (measured through years of schooling), and a decent standard of living (measured through income per person, adjusted for what that income can actually buy in a given country). The index score runs from zero to one, and it lets researchers compare a country’s social progress against its neighbours in a way a raw income figure never could.

Beyond income: poverty, gender, and empowerment 🔗

The HDI opened the door to a whole family of related indices. The Human Poverty Index (HPI), introduced in 1997, flipped the logic of the HDI: instead of measuring how much people have, it measured what they lack – deprivation in survival, literacy, and access to safe water and health services. Alongside it, the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) were introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report to capture how far gender inequality drags down overall wellbeing, and how far women actually participate in economic and political decision-making, respectively.

These indices weren’t the final word, though. By 2010, the UNDP had replaced the GDI and GEM with the Gender Inequality Index, and the HPI’s role was largely taken over by the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), developed jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to track overlapping deprivations in health, education, and living standards at the household level. India has built its own version of this tool: NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index tracks poverty across states and districts using health, education, and living-standard indicators, and its most recent progress review found that around 135 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty in the country between 2015-16 and 2019-21. That kind of granular, deprivation-based tracking is exactly what a single income figure could never reveal.

Sustainability as long-term viability 🔗

Sustainability asks a different question than development does. Instead of asking how much progress a society has made, it asks whether the way that progress is achieved can actually continue over time. The idea grew out of the modern environmental movement, which pointed out that contemporary patterns of resource use and consumption were placing a strain on ecosystems that future generations would eventually have to pay for.

To make sustainability something you can actually measure rather than just discuss, researchers developed the concept of the ecological footprint. It calculates the physical area of land and water needed to produce everything a person, city, or country consumes, and to absorb the waste that consumption generates, expressed in global hectares. The logic is straightforward: if a population is consuming resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate them, that consumption is, by definition, unsustainable. According to the Global Footprint Network, which pioneered the metric, humanity’s current demand on nature already exceeds what the planet can regenerate in a year – a gap the organisation tracks annually through what it calls Earth Overshoot Day.

The three dimensions of sustainability 🔗

Sustainability isn’t a single, monolithic idea – it operates across three interconnected dimensions:

Environmental sustainability refers to the capacity of environmental resources – forests, soil, water, air – to keep supporting human activity without being degraded beyond recovery. Economic sustainability means economic activities need to generate benefits that outweigh their costs over the long run, not just in a single financial quarter. Social sustainability means the social structures that support communities – institutions, relationships, cultural systems – must be able to bear the weight of ongoing activity without being eroded or undermined.

Sustainable development sits at the intersection of these three dimensions. It is best understood as the practical pathway toward sustainability rather than sustainability itself – sustainability is the long-term destination, and sustainable development is how a society tries to get there. That requires properly integrating human systems with environmental ones, so that economic, social, and environmental concerns are addressed together rather than treated as separate silos competing for policy attention.

Developing countries face a different starting point 🔗

This is where the conversation gets politically charged. Over the past two centuries, the benefits of carbon-intensive industrial development have been concentrated overwhelmingly in developed nations. Countries that industrialised early built their wealth on cheap fossil fuels, locking in high living standards decades before climate change became a global concern. Developing countries, by contrast, are trying to raise living standards today, in a world where the atmospheric “space” for cheap carbon-based growth is far more constrained – a central reason why questions of differentiated responsibility dominate international climate negotiations.

Meanwhile, many developing countries are still working through more basic development challenges: low per capita income and persistent poverty driven by low agricultural productivity, limited capital formation, slow technological adoption, and rapid population growth. Global poverty data illustrates the scale of the gap – the World Bank estimates that hundreds of millions of people still survive on just a few dollars a day, and access to basic infrastructure remains deeply unequal. Recent World Bank data shows that roughly 618 million people still live without electricity worldwide, with the vast majority concentrated in rural areas of developing regions, and access to clean water remains similarly patchy across much of the Global South.

Larger, faster-growing populations only intensify these pressures. More people means more competition for land and water, higher energy demand, and greater strain on ecosystems that are often already under stress – a combination that makes both sustainability and development harder to achieve simultaneously. This is precisely why blanket climate policies that ignore historical responsibility and current development needs tend to draw pushback from developing nations: the argument isn’t that environmental protection doesn’t matter, but that the burden of achieving it shouldn’t fall equally on countries that didn’t create the bulk of the problem and are still working to meet their citizens’ basic needs.

What do you think? Given how differently the HDI and the ecological footprint measure “progress,” should a country be considered developed if it scores well on human development but poorly on sustainability? And how should the historical gap in carbon-intensive growth between developed and developing nations shape who bears the greater responsibility for climate action today?

References

1. https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index
2. https://www.undp.org/india/publications/gendering-human-development-indices-recasting-gender-development-index-and-gender-empowerment-measure-india
3. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1940125
4. https://footprintnetwork.org/what-ecological-footprints-measure/
5. https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/poverty
6. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/from-water-to-electricity–the-rural-urban-infrastructure-gap-in