ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, sustainable development (SD) was described as a ‘contested concept’. One option is to leave it like that and happily point to the confusion that exists: ‘We do not need to bother about this obscure idea of sustainability’. Another option, and the one that is chosen here, is to try to identify competing interpretations of SD and then reject some interpretations in favour of others. Attempts will then be made to broadly define what I see as the more constructive interpretations of SD. A direction of desired social and institutional change will hopefully emerge. Such decisions about definitions and direction of desired change are, as I have argued, ethical, ideological and political.
