ABSTRACT
Sustainable development, due to its huge ambition and its diverse interpretations, always risks becoming something between a marketing slogan and an evangelical, utopian doctrine. everyone is in favour of it, but the devil is in the detail. Yet, rooted firmly in the Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED] 1987), sustainable development defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987) has mobilized collective actors in different sectors and at different levels of society and has shifted the ground of environmental debate considerably over just two decades. Contemporary debate, as Lightfoot and Burchell (2005, pp. 77–8) observe:
has focused less on the existence of an environmental crisis, and more on the nature of environmental responsibility, the predominant focus for that responsibility and the best methods of undertaking it.
Taking responsibility, in the sense employed here by Lightfoot and Burchell, implies not just the functional governance of sustainable development, but also refers normatively to ‘governance for sustainable development’ (Lafferty 2004; Meadowcroft, Farrell and Spangenberg 2005). Meadowcroft et al. define ‘governance for sustainable development’ as the deliberate adjustment of practices of governance and of the structures that regulate societal interactions in order to ensure that social development proceeds along a sustainable trajectory through a process of adaptation (2005, p. 5).