ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a wide range of academic and policy writing on sustainable development, attempting in the process to offer a critical evaluation of the significance and implications of the many worldviews, values and perspectives that inform or have emerged from it. A worldview can be understood as a set of beliefs and assumptions about life and reality that influence the way we think and behave. Worldviews help us describe the reality before us and they encompass many assumptions about such things as human nature, the meaning and value of life, society, institutional practices and much more. The German term Weltanschauung, from which the anglicized term ‘worldview’ is derived, is often translated as a total outlook on life and the universe (Koltko-Rivera, 2004). Consequently, a number of philosophical and ideological contributions to our continuing belief of what sustainability and sustainable development may mean or become are constitutive elements of a global dialogue on the future we want. Consequently, each worldview, or perspective, has its own attendant literatures and an array of subtle, and not so subtle, implications for action. Many offer an array of action-orientated normative prescriptions and proscriptions.
