ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the argument of the book. Simply summarized, the core argument of the book is that most societies, including Western societies, are on the verge of foundering over sustainable development because they cannot resolve the many small and large conflicts inevitably involved in sustainable development. The impending failure to achieve sustainable development is the manifestation of a universal problem of social development. The problem is that societies will always change out of their existing structures and can only change out of these structures. But these are precisely the structures that have long since ceased to be sustainable and also stand in the way of sustainable development. Change is therefore always associated with more or less heavy conflict. In the case of Western societies, this means concretely that they must achieve sustainable development out of their existing capitalist structures and must manage the specific conflicts which this involves. In this book I describe an ambitious, yet realistic strategy how this can be achieved. The pillars of this strategy are new concepts of sustainable development and of governance.
