ABSTRACT
Revising an article first written soon after the publication of the Brundtland Report, Tim O’Riordan accepts that sustainable development has achieved a currency and status he would not have predicted for a concept he had contended “was deliberately vague and inherently self-contradictory so that endless streams of academics and diplomats could spend many comfortable hours trying to define it without success”. Five years on, he concedes, “the term has stuck. … Like it or not, ‘sustainable development’ is with us for all time” (O’Riordan, 1993, p37).
