Countries generally strive for economic growth and the increased material standard of living this can bring, in order to do this traditionally governments have based policy decisions on maximum growth. However it is not possible to successfully achieve sustainable global development by focussing on any of the individual areas of society, environment and economy in isolation.

Thus it appears that fundamental changes to the way these areas were studied and developed was required. This "seed" change in how governments view society, environment and economy and their interactions strongly influences the mechanisms and policies that government's employ to achieve sustainability. Improved understanding and development of methodologies may then lead toward more positive actions on international agreements, which have seen relatively little progress.

Developing green economic theories centre on the issue of "costing the environment". Many economists argue that environmental problems are the result of governments failing to fully enforce property rights, which results in parts of the environment being treated as a free good. This failure makes pricing impossible and in turn generates misallocated investments. In chapter 38 of Agenda 21, governments called upon UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) to focus on "developing and promoting of techniques such as natural resource accounting and environmental economics". This has resulted in a vast amount of literature being produced and developments of traditional guidelines for national economic accounting. A variety of programmes have been inaugurated and institutes such as the World Resources Institute and World Bank are involved.

In essence although countries signed up to the Rio declaration on sustainable development details on how this strategy could be incorporated into national policy were not clear. Work carried out within the economic field has therefore taken place in order to ensure that individual countries do not endanger their world economic position by implementing untried methodologies aimed at achieving sustainable development. Although at first glance this issue might seem more pertinent to the wealthy nations, in fact sustainable methodologies become even more important in the developing countries where growth and environmental degradation will inevitable go hand in hand if technology and knowledge transfer does not occur.