Population growth is considered by many scientists and intellectuals as the main problem facing the world today. The stress that a growing population would place on civilisation was already predicted by Malthus in the nineteenth century. Yet, scientific and technological advances and the accumulation of human-made capital have since then proven sufficient to support a much larger population with even more goods and services.

In recent years, the debate has been revived, with neo-Malthusian writers warning that the world population would soon out-grow the resources (Ehrlich 1968), and that in any case resources were already over-used (Meadows, et al 1972)....

Rehri and Lad Basti are two fishermen villages that lie on the banks of the Korangi creek in the Indus delta system, are about forty-five minutes drive from the centre of Karachi. This proximity to the megalopolis raises the question whether to consider them representative of rural communities. However, as their economic organisation, centred around fishing, seems similar to the kind of organisations that can be found deeper in the Indus delta, and that the degree of their direct interaction with the city close-by is limited, it can be assumed that these villages still function as independent communities. This means...

The primary purpose of the study is to understand the interrelationship between demographic change, environmental degradation and livelihood systems. A major objective is to examine the collective response to the problem posed by rapid population growth in the northern mountains. The hypothesis that will be tested is that both population growth and environmental degradation are a reflection of the breakdown of systems of collective decision making. It is generally felt that traditional system of decision making have eroded during this century and that the erosion became more pronounced as the state and the market both began to intervene aggressively in...

The two case studies of the Punjab are an attempt to understand individual behaviour in a given community environment. By this we mean a production and consumption environment shared by a group of people. In agrarian Punjab, the village has emerged as a stable production and consumption unit over at least ten centuries of recorded history (Mahmood 1988). This production and consumption environment is defined by a set of conditions. The more important conditions are the distribution of owned and operated area, irrigation endowments, the state of factor markets, other infrastructure, and the level of human skilling. Both macro and...

The question of sustainability poses itself at different levels: local, regional, national and global. The preceding chapters have tried to analyse the dynamics of change and the impact of population growth in different villages, i.e. at the local level. This chapter reviews the main findings of the case studies and looks at the integration of these villages within a region or the country as a whole, that is at regional or national sustainability.

Let's first come back to some common trends that have been observed at the local level. First, and not surprisingly, it appears that the relationship between population...