Mapping Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept

Abstract

Despite the continuing salience of sustainable development as a norm for planning and policymaking, there is still no consensus over the societal goals that would count as sustainable development. This paper builds on a longstanding, though always minority, tradition that sees this conceptual ambiguity and ensuing contestation as inevitable and explicable. Where many representations and analyses of sustainable development obscure this complexity, the purpose here is to provide analysts and practitioners alike with a way of exposing and analysing it, in order to avoid the pitfalls of conflating opposing positions that are cloaked within the comforting rhetoric of sustainable development. The paper sets out a way to map contesting interpretations of sustainable development in relation to each other and wider political debates, and thus provides a visual representation of sustainable development as an essentially contested concept that may counter the rhetorically powerful organizing representations that support the dominant yet over-simplified analyses—the familiar three overlapping circles and weak–strong sustainability spectrum.