ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex debates over growth and explains how its perceived role within sustainable development has changed over time. It focuses on how did economic growth go from being largely acceptable, albeit controversial, in the milieu of 1980s-era sustainable development, to being largely unacceptable and even an object of scorn by the 2010s? There is a growing sense amongst both historians and sustainability advocates that the ambivalence toward economic growth that characterized the early formation of sustainable development ended up benefitting the status quo and essentially failed to change the course of unsustainable global development. Ambiguity about economic growth appears in numerous documents, committee proceedings, and conferences from the 1980s and 1990s, all of which helped give sustainable development its original, core identity. And sustainable development will likely remain ineffective and unable to uproot the ultimate causes of environmental decline as long as it avoids the inherent problems of our sprawling industrial economy.
