ABSTRACT
Nowadays modern environmental policy is often considered essentially to be sustainability policy. In 2002, the German Advisory Council on the Environment stated: ‘Since the adoption of Agenda 21 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the concept of sustainability has become a key component of international and national environmental policy making’ (SRU 2002: 57). The prominence (indeed, almost dominance) of the concept, however, appears to be a rather two-edged sword in the quest for successful environmental policy. On the one hand it clearly attributes major importance to environmental concerns and yet, on the other hand, ‘the debate [on sustainability] is characterised by a lack of clarity in terms of both conceptual orientation and content and is also increasingly being trivialised’ (SRU 2002: 57) 1 .
