The host country of Pakistan will provide a rich environment to explore this theme, which is one of the country s major development challenges. The International Session will address the societal, cultural, environmental, political and economic impacts at the national and local level of current community development trends. Sustainable community development requires systems approaches to overcome specific and universal development challenges. Pakistan is an extremely diverse country, with communities dependent on all manners of resource bases and eco-systems for their survival. The development patterns in the country have engendered a highly skewed distribution of income and wealth.
Most people live in rural areas and depend on natural resources for their livelihood.
The landed and industrial assets are, however, unequally distributed. The levels of absolute poverty, which fell significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, has rapidly increased in the 1990s. The incidence of prolonged recession along with high inflation near 11 percent per annum in 1990s explains the rising trend in poverty. Due to the dismal economic performance of the economy in recent years, the lack of good governance has also emerged as one of the key issues facing the country. In this scenario, development initiatives in industry, natural resource management, conservation, infrastructure development, capacity building and governance offer innovative solutions to the challenge of sustainable development.