ABSTRACT
There is growing support for the concept of sustainability but there is a large divergence between rhetoric (policy) and reality (practice) (Barr 2012). This is understandable because deep analysis to find a true balance between economic, social and environmental factors is difficult. The aviation sector was selected for a case study to examine the process of developing sustainable policy because it stands out as the most difficult sector to implement sustainability (Nijkamp 1999; Gössling & Upham 2009; Daley 2010; Watson 2014). The UK was chosen for practical reasons and because there is a history of attempts to apply sustainability to aviation. The UK Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) which operated between 2000-2011 carried out an investigation into aviation (SDC 2008a). Meetings were convened and focus groups consulted, but the results did not go much beyond clarifying that stakeholder views were highly polarized and that further investigation was needed (SDC 2008b). The difficulty of the challenge in aviation, which made it so hard for the SDC to have an impact, makes it ideal for an examination of barriers to sustainability and exploration of how they might be overcome. If progress could be made in this most intractable area of policy then lessons might be learnt applicable to other sectors to mainstream sustainability in policy formulation.
