Sustainable development, although a widely used phrase and idea, has many different meanings and therefore provokes many different responses. In broad terms, the concept of sustainable development is an attempt to combine growing concerns about a range of environmental issues with socio-economic issues. To aid understanding of these different policies this paper presents a classification and mapping of different trends of thought on sustainable development, their political and policy frameworks and their attitudes towards change and means of change. Sustainable development has the potential to address fundamental challenges for humanity, now and into the future.However, to do this, it needs more clarity of meaning, concentrating on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having, and long term environmental sustainability, which requires a strong basis in principles that link the social and environmental to human equity. 3 Sustainable Development: Mapping Different Approaches Sustainable Development: A Challenging and Contested ConceptThe widespread rise of interest in, and support for, the concept of sustainable development is potentially an important shift in understanding relationships of humanity with nature and between people. It is in contrast to the dominant outlook of the last couple of hundred years, especially in the "North", that has been based on the view of the separation of the environment from socio-economic issues.For most of the last couple of hundred years the environment has been largely seen as external to humanity, mostly to be used and exploited, with a few special areas preserved as wilderness or parks. Environmental problems were viewed mainly as local. On the whole the relationship between people and the environment was conceived as humanity"s triumph over nature. This Promethean view (Dryzeck, 1997) was that human knowledge and technology could overcome all obstacles including natural and environmental. This view was linked with the development of capitalism, the industrial revolution and modern science. As Bacon, one of the founders of modern science put it "The world is made for man, not man for the world". Environmental management and concern amongst most businesses and governments, apart from local problems and wilderness conservation, was at best based on natural resource management. A key example was the ideas of 4 Pinchot in the USA (Dryzeck, 1997) which recognised that humans do need natural resources and that these resources should be managed, rather than rapidly exploited, in order to ensure maximum long-term use.

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Financial exclusion is increasingly being recognised as an important aspect of socio-economic inequality where disadvantaged individuals and communities are isolated from mainstream financial services, particularly affordable and readily available credit. In the face of these problems, social policy initiatives have emerged that have travelled under various names: social investment, micro-finance, community finance and community development finance. These initiatives are seen as the basis of a ‘new economics’ that will create self-sustaining local economies. The government is also promoting community development finance as an aspect of community regeneration with the aim of providing credit to poor communities to stimulate local enterprise and thereby reduce dependency on state support. The same approach is being taken to grant-funded community and voluntary organisations to encourage them into a neo-market approach to the delivery of services. This article explores the phenomenon of community development finance and assesses its proposed role in community regeneration and in relation to the community and voluntary sector.

In the UK, many low-income communities have seen the withdrawal of 'mainstream', high-street-based fi nancial service infrastructure from their local areas since the mid to late 1980s, whilst more costly sub-prime lenders have fl ourished, often in their place. There has been a developing search for 'alternative', welfare-oriented rather than profi tdriven solutions to the problem of social and spatial segregation in fi nancial service provision. This paper explores an initiative to create such an alternative, affordable and locally embedded form of personal fi nancial service in a socially disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in the North East of England, Financial Inclusion Newcastle (FIN). This paper refl ects on FIN's successes and failures, the potential limitations of such alternative area-based solutions and the lessons that can be learnt from these, through a focus on three key issues surrounding FIN's demise-the FIN model, its internal functioning and, perhaps most important of all, its relationship with the local community.

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