We are faced with two problems: the first is to determine why sustainable development is so difficult to understand at a practical level and the second is to discover what it is about sustainable development that makes it better than just plain development in the first place. Literature on these topics seems to suggest that at least some of the answers to both problems reside in whether or not the conflicts created by the development process are discovered sufficiently early and treated sufficiently well.

For example, political agreement, cost efficiency, local input, and sectoral integration are all important pieces of a development decision and decisions taken which ignore any of these pieces often lead to failure. Seldom, however, do development actions fall short because resources are inadequately assessed or because the needs are misread. Failure occurs because one or more of the many conflicting demands made by humans on the systems they share are not discovered early enough, are known but not included in the analysis and treatment, or, there is no consensus gathered around the process, the product, or both. The reactions of unsatisfied or disenfranchised affected parties (including a significant portion of the political establishment) are what make development proposals and actions fail. They do so because of unresolved conflict.

Environmental quality has to do with how well the specific environment where we happen to find ourselves