At present, the sustainable development is a concept which is the talk of the town; you hear it everywhere, during political debates, economic conferences and ecology’s lessons. But, it isn’t clear what is its definition and what is exactly its meaning. The recent publications about the sustainable development are numerous, but when we read them, we realize the vastness of this subject without really understanding its practical implications.

The European Constitution, which has recently been signed by the Heads of State and the Premiers of the member States, assigns to the sustainable development the role of the goal that the European Union proposes itself to achieve and promote. Article 3 of the Constitution places the sustainable development at the centre of the Union action’s range and pays a specific attention to its economic and occupational aspects, besides the social and environmental ones. But the Union also overshoots, claiming the duty in its relationships with the rest of the world, in order to promote the sustainable development of the Earth.

This particular attention, which is paid around the sustainable development, makes inevitable a question  such as: what is “promoting the sustainable development” and what does it really mean. In Italy, there is also being faced this theme as a result of the reform of the constitution’s article 9, inserting in an official way the environmental protective and sustainable development’s values.

In the first place, it is important to pay a lot of attention to a common error, that’s the equalization of the sustainable development with the environmental measures sic et simpliciter. In fact, a lot of people think that the sustainable development is only a different way of speaking about the environment and taking care of questions that are of interest to the Greens.

The sustainable development’s concept has been brought to the international notoriety by “The Report Brundtland”, as a result of the works of the World Commission on environment and development, instituted within the United Nations and presided by the Norwegian Premier Gro Harlem Brundtland. In this report, entitled “Our common future”, the sustainable development is defined as the only possible way for

“Humanity to make sustainable the development, this means to satisfy the needs of the present generation without complicating the capacity of the future ones”.

The fundamental idea of all this speech was born as a result of the recognition that the natural resources can finish and the economic difficulties that this aspect would have determined on the world economy in the middle and long period. So, the sustainable development’s theory comes into being and develops like a concept of economic nature, whose evidence of the necessity to weight also its availability and the consumption of the natural resources within some determined productive activities.

So, the sustainable development tries to join economic growth’s aspects with the ones of environmental measures and attention to the individual living quality. But, this can be done without having settled and predetermined rules. The great advantage of the sustainable development is just this:
the freedom, which is given to the single local bodies in their activity of operating the best sustainability’s policy for their needs and the ones of their territory.

Of course, this implies the disposition to the programme, which is often made difficult by the emergency’s situations that the municipalities, above all, if they are small ones, find themselves having problems every day. And it is just for this reason that the so-called sustainability’s instruments such as: environmental certificate, environmental book-keeping, Green Public Procurement, environmental information, ecc. -   can intervene to support this planning activity.