Introduction

Current debates on sustainable development are shifting their emphasis from the technocratic and regulatory fix of environmental problems to more fundamental and transformative changes in social-political processes and economic relations. The recurring calls for attention to be paid to human and social dimensions of sustainable development to realize transformative changes suggest that these dimensions have been relatively neglected dimensions of sustainable development if we compare them with other, widely accepted, economic and environmental dimensions (Jager 2003). For instance, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) held in 2012, the focus on the human and social dimensions had to be deliberately reiterated in an emerging “green economy” agenda, as the concept of the green economy seemed to have reinforced the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development (Le Blanc 2011; Cook and Smith 2012).