Integrating sustainable development and economic restructuring: A role for regulation theory?

Despite the growing importance of environmental issues within international and national economic policies, little attention has been paid to these issues in work on economic restructuring. However, the increasing adoption of the concept of sustainable development as a means to resolve conflict between the economy and the environment has major implications for the form and direction of economic restructuring. In this paper it is therefore argued that the growing adoption of sustainable development as a central guiding principle for economic development necessitates the incorporation of environmental issues into work on economic restructuring. The limited amount of existing work linking the environment with economic restructuring is criticized and it is suggested that there is considerable potential to use regulation theory to combine debates on economic restructuring and sustainable development. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd