Computationally the context-sensitive lanugages are equivalent with linear bounded Turing machines where a linear bounded Turing machine is a Turing with a tape of only kn cells where n is the size of the input and k a constant associated with the machine. This means that every formal language that can be decided by such a machine is a context-sensitive language, and every context-sensitive language can be decided by such a machine.
See also: Chomsky hierarchy