Milestones of this endeavour can be seen in the ‘World Conservation Strategy’ of 1980 (IUCN/UNEP/WWF 1980; Pinto 1995). and especially in the widespread definition within the so-called Brundtland-Report named ‘Our Common Future’ of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987, p. 8) which states: ‘Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable—to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future to meet their own needs’. Thereon based sustainable development became a main topic of the World Summit of Rio 1992 and got intensively included into the central outcome documents adopted there.

The working steps proposed in Table 2 make the spatial aspects of the term ‘scale’ more explicit such as pointed out by Jordan and Fortin (2002; see also Dovers 1995) when compared with Daly’s (1992) original more throughput oriented definition. The correct classification of this scale level is a precondition for the decision about the right action to be taken in order not to exceed the carrying capacity. This applies to the environmental, but also to the social carrying capacity (Mauerhofer 2008a, 2013a).

Many scholars regard this type of circulation as a form of imposition—for example, an expert scholarship in environmental policy diffusion denominates this type of circulation “coercive policy transfer” or “domination” (Tews 2011, p. 229)—for implementing SD at the national level in developing and transitional countries. In fact, the eco-conditionality behind this circulation and under the auspices of international organizations consisted in the pressure toward developing countries to prepare and implement SD strategies.