Many governments continue to create policies concerned with environmental, economic, and social matters as separate issues. As a result, strategies for economic development often ignore the need to maintain the ecosystem on which long-term development depends.This is true not only in the United States, where the government has been divided along partisan lines for the better part of the last two decades, but also in other countries where parliamentary majorities often
are small. The result is gridlock and a sustained lack of leadership in dealing with global environmental issues.