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Sustainability
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 Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4 –5, August 2007
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Sustainability

Ian Scoones

As a consummately effective ‘boundary term’, able to link disparate groups on the basis of a
broad common agenda, ‘sustainability’ has moved a long way from its technical association
with forest management in Germany in the eighteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s it
defined – for a particular historical moment – a key debate of global importance, bringing
with it a coalition of actors – across governments, civic groups, academia and business – in
perhaps an unparalleled fashion. That they did not agree with everything (or even often
know anything of the technical definitions of the term) was not the point. The boundary work
done in the name of sustainability created an important momentum for innovation in ideas, pol-
itical mobilisation, and policy change, particularly in connection with the UN Conference on
Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio in 1992. All this of course did not
result in everything that the advocates at the centre of such networks had envisaged, and
today the debate has moved on, with different priority issues, and new actors and networks.
But, the author argues, this shift does not undermine the power of sustainability as a buzzword:
as a continuingly powerful and influential meeting point of ideas and politics.

KEY WORDS : Environment; Governance and Public Policy

Introduction
Sustainability must be one of the most widely used buzzwords of the past two decades. There is
nothing, it seems, that cannot be described as ‘sustainable’: apparently everything can be either
hyphenated or paired with it. We have sustainable cities, economies, resource management,
business, livelihoods – and, of course, sustainable development. Sustainability has become,
par excellence, what Thomas Gieryn (1999) calls a ‘boundary term’: one where science
meets politics, and politics meets science. The ‘boundary work’ around sustainability – of
building epistemic communities of shared understanding of and common commitment to
linking environmental and economic development concerns – has become a major concern
across the world. In the past two decades, networks of diverse actors have been formed, alli-
ances have been built, institutions and organisations have been constructed, projects have
been formulated, and money – in increasingly large amounts – has been spent in the name
of sustainability. It is at this complex intersection between science and politics where boundary
work takes place, and where words, with often ambivalent and contested meanings, have an
important political role in processes of policy making and development.

ISSN 0961-4524 Print/ISSN 1364-9213 Online 4–50589-8 # 2007 Oxfam GB 589

Routledge Publishing DOI: 10.1080/09614520701469609
 Ian Scoones

A (very) short intellectual history

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But like all buzzwords, the term sustainability has a history. It has not always had such significant
connotations. The term was first coined several hundred years ago by a German forester, Hans
Carl von Carlowitz, in his 1712 text Sylvicultura Oeconomica, to prescribe how forests should
be managed on a long-term basis. It was, however, not until the 1980s that the term attained
much wider currency. With the birth of the contemporary environment movement in the late
1960s and 1970s, and debates about the limits to growth, environmentalists were keen to show
how environmental issues could be linked to mainstream questions of development. The commis-
sion chaired by Gro Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway, became the focal point for this
debate in the mid-1980s, culminating in the landmark report entitled Our Common Future in
1987. This report offered the now classic modern definition of sustainable development:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without com-
promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (WCED 1987a: 43)

The terms sustainability, and more particularly sustainable development, drew on longer intel-
lectual debates across disciplines. From the 1980s there was a global explosion of academic
debate and policy debate on these issues, particularly in the run-up to the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio in 1992.
Ecologists had long been concerned with the ways in which ecosystems responded to shocks
and stresses; and mathematical ecology had blossomed through the 1970 and 1980s, with
important work from the likes of Buzz Holling and Bob May on the stability and resilience
properties of both model and real biological systems (Holling 1973; May 1977). Sustainability
could thus be defined in these terms as the ability of a system to bounce back from such shocks
and stresses and adopt stable states.
Neo-classical economists drew on theories of substitutable capital to define (weak) sustain-
ability. And within economics, debates raged over whether such a ‘weak’ definition of sustain-
ability was adequate or whether a stronger definition, highlighting the lack of substitutability of
‘critical natural capital’ was needed (cf. Pearce and Atkinson 1993). Ecological economics
meanwhile traced more tangible links with ecological systems, generating such fields as life-
cycle analysis, ecological-footprint assessment, and alternative national accounting systems
(Common and Stagl 2005). Elements of these debates were picked up by the business commu-
nity, where notions of the ‘triple bottom line’ emerged, in which sustainability was seen as one
among other more conventional business objectives, resulting in a whole plethora of
new accounting and auditing measures which brought sustainability concerns into business
planning and accounting practice (Elkington 1997). And at Rio, the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development was launched with much fanfare (Schmidheiny and Timberlake
1992), bringing on board some big corporate players. Drawing on wider popular political con-
cerns about the relationships between environment, well-being, and struggles for social justice,
political scientists such as Andrew Dobson (1999) delineated political theories that incorpor-
ated a ‘green’ politics perspective, placing sustainability concerns at the centre of a normative
understanding of social and political change. Others offered integrative syntheses, linking the
economic, environmental, and socio-political dimensions of sustainability into what Bob
Kates and colleagues have dubbed a ‘sustainability science’ (Kates et al. 2001).
By the 1990s, then, we had multiple versions of sustainability: broad and narrow, strong and
weak, big S and small s sustainability, and more. Different technical meanings were constructed
alongside different visions of how the wider project of sustainable development should be
conceived. Each competed with the others in a vibrant, if confusing, debate. But how would
all this intense debate translate into practical policy? 1992 was the key moment for this.

590 Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4– 5, August 2007

 Sustainability

Coming of age in Rio

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The 1992 Rio conference, convened by the United Nations and attended by representatives of
178 governments, numerous heads of state, and a veritable army of more than 1000 NGOs,
civil-society, and campaign groups, was perhaps the high point – the coming of age of sustain-
ability and sustainable development. Many people believed that this was the moment when sus-
tainability would find its way to the top of the global political agenda and would become a
permanent feature of the way in which development, both North and South, would be done
(Holmberg et al. 1991).
The Rio conference launched a number of high-level convention processes – on climate
change, biodiversity, and desertification – all with the aim of realising sustainable-development
ideals on key global environmental issues. Commissions were established, and national action-
planning processes set in train for a global reporting system against agreed objectives (Young
1999). At the same time, a more local-level, community-led process was conceived – Agenda
21 – which envisaged sustainability being built from the bottom up through local initiatives by
local governments, community groups, and citizens (Selman 1998).
These were heady days indeed. Environment and development had, it seemed, finally come
of age. Groups such as the London-based International Institute for Environment and Develop-
ment (IIED), the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, the Washington-based
World Resources Institute, and the Manitoba-based International Institute for Sustainable
Development had access to and influence over policy debates that a few years before they
could only dream of. The challenge for such organisations – and many others besides who
adopted the creed of sustainable development as central to their mission – was to move
from theory to practice, from ideals to real results on the ground. What did implementing sus-
tainable development mean? The result was an exponential growth in planning approaches,
analysis frameworks, measurement indicators, audit systems, and evaluation protocols designed
to help governments, businesses, communities, and individuals to make sustainability real.
This was great business for consultants, trainers, researchers, and others. But did it make a
difference?

Sustainable livelihoods as boundary work

In the late 1990s, particularly in the UK but also more broadly, the term ‘sustainable liveli-
hoods’ became the signifier of ‘good’ development. For a period this word-pairing became
enormously influential in UK international development policy, and a quintessential example
of how ‘sustainability’ – especially when connected to another term – can be a prime
mover in boundary work, linking science and policy in novel and potentially positive ways.
Originally coined by a committee working on agriculture and food for the Brundtland Com-
mission during the 1980s (reputedly emerging one evening over discussion in a Geneva hotel),
the term ‘sustainable livelihoods’ first appeared in the 1987 Food 2000 report (WCED 1987b).
This particular linking of terms was given definitional flesh by Robert Chambers and Gordon
Conway in a discussion paper published by the Institute of Development Studies in 1992
(Chambers and Conway 1992). For a time it languished out of the policy limelight, but with
the publication of the UK government’s White Paper on international development in 1997
(DFID 1997), it was suddenly centre-stage, and seen as a critical element of development think-
ing for the new department (the Department for International Development, DFID), now with
ministerial status and with a dynamic minister – Clare Short – in the lead role.
William Solesbury (2003) lucidly documents the policy history of ‘sustainable livelihoods’
over this period, tracing linkages between researchers, White Paper drafting teams, advisory

Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4 –5, August 2007 591

 Ian Scoones

committees established by the new department, and the bureaucratic manoeuvrings of key
individuals within government. Before long a large section of the department, with a substantial
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spending budget and a dedicated cadre of staff, had adopted the name ‘sustainable livelihoods’.
In a few short, if busy, months the old style ‘natural resource’ department had been transformed,
according to the promotional rhetoric, into something forward-looking, cross-cutting, and
dynamic that could meet the ‘New Labour’ political demands of doing something effective
about poverty and development.
Government enlisted external experts, including researchers, NGO workers, and others, to
think through the implications. A researchers’ checklist developed by a team at the Institute
of Development Studies (Scoones 1998) was adapted and embellished and became a ‘frame-
work’, and, later, a whole suite of ‘approaches’ (Carney 1998; 2002). And, with this, the
acronyms started to flow, a brand was created, and a whole industry of trainers, consultants,
web-based information specialists, and others were commissioned to make ‘sustainable liveli-
hoods’ a central thrust of UK development policy.
This flurry of activity and discussion was not confined to the new DFID: other aid agencies
looked with interest at what was happening in London. NGOs such as Oxfam GB were also
developing their own approaches (Neefjes 2000), and even large UN agencies such as the
FAO became interested in the approach as one that transcended narrow sectoral concerns
and took a more integrative approach to development and poverty reduction.1
This was classic boundary work. Scientific concerns, drawing from ecology, economics, and
politics, merged with specific political and bureaucratic agendas in a process of mutual con-
struction of both science and policy. Alliances were formed, spanning government, NGOs,
private consultants, and academia, linking often unlike organisations and individuals, both
North and South. It seemed that a word (or in this case two) had created a whole network,
loosely affiliated around a set of often rather vague and poorly defined understandings of a
complex and rather ambiguous concept. But at the time – and in certain places, notably
DFID – it had an important uses, both conceptual and political.

Things fall apart

But all good things must come to an end. While the DFID-centred network disintegrated for
parochial, bureaucratic –political reasons, a wider crisis of confidence overwhelmed the
confident, positive members of networks centred on ideas of sustainability by the late 1990s.
Why was this?
The 1992 Rio agenda was of course extravagantly ambitious, and high hopes depended on the
processes that arose from it. But not everyone was playing ball. Commercial interests lobbied
hard in the USA, for example, to dilute the conventions, and, in the end, the USA did not sign
up. Beyond the geopolitics of sustainability and the particularly recalcitrant role of the USA in
its new-found position as sole global superpower, there were other impediments to the realis-
ation of the ambitious aims of Rio. Once the heads of state had left, the often newly created
Environment Ministries had the task of seeking budgets and creating a political space back
home for environment and development agendas. Given other pressing issues, this was
usually an up-hill struggle. For those governments that had signed up to conventions, much
energy was spent on complying with the elaborate consultation, planning, and reporting require-
ments. For cash-strapped new ministries in developing countries, this was not easy. For sure, aid
flows helped as agencies re-geared their funding to accommodate the new enthusiasm for
environmental issues, but this was often not enough to bring sustainable development
beyond the rhetorical gloss and the often half-hearted routinisation of action planning, indicator
monitoring, and ‘sustainable development’ projects.

592 Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4– 5, August 2007

 Sustainability

Buzzwords – and the ambitions with which they are associated – that become mainstream
and incorporated into routine, bureaucratic procedures often (perhaps always) suffer this fate.
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For many commentators writing since 2000, the simplistic managerialism of many initiatives
labelled ‘sustainable development’ left much to be desired (Berkhout et al. 2003). Critiques
focused on the lack of progress on major targets set in 1992, the endless repackaging of old
initiatives as ‘sustainable’ this or that, and the lack of capacity and commitment within govern-
ments and international organisations to make the ideals of sustainability real in day-to-day
practice (Vogler and Jordan 2003). With the default bureaucratic mode of managerialism
dominating – and its focus on action plans, indicators, and the rest – the wider political
economy of sustainable development was being neglected, many felt. ‘It’s politics, stupid’,
commentators argued. And, with mainstreaming and bureaucratisation, the urgency and
political vibrancy is lost, and, with this, comes a dilution and loss of dynamism in a previously
energetic and committed debate.

Long live sustainability

But all was not lost. While the coalitions formed before and after the Rio conference may have
dispersed, fragmented, and turned in on themselves, since the late 1990s there has been a
revival – but in different guises – of sustainability debates. And this time politics is more to
the fore.
Rather than emerging from a rather ethereal and abstract idea of sustainability derived from
theory, debates in recent years have focused on some big issues that have hit the international
headlines. These have resulted in both public and, usually later, political reactions. For
example, the controversy about genetically modified (GM) crops, which peaked in Europe in
the late 1990s and early 2000s, had many political and policy reverberations internationally.
This was a debate about, among other things, the sustainability of farming systems, the
future of food, human health, and biodiversity, and corporate control of the agri-food system
(GEC Programme 1999). In the same way, the debate on climate change did not really begin
to be taken seriously until after the year 2000. No longer was this a discussion on the arcane
specifics of global climate models, but a real political and economic issue, to which people
and governments had to pay attention. Concerns about the environment-and-development
drivers of new global diseases and pandemics were also pitched into the public and political
realm, first with SARS and then avian ’flu.
All of these issues – and the list could go on – are centred around classic ‘sustainability’
questions: they each involve complex and changing environmental dynamics which have an
impact on human livelihoods and well-being; they all have intersecting ecological, economic,
and socio-political dimensions; and, as with an increasing array of environment – development
issues, they have both local and global dimensions.
But what is equally sure is that the existing ‘sustainable development’ institutional and policy
machinery is incapable of dealing with them effectively. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change
has all but collapsed, and the options for a post-Kyoto settlement that involves the USA, China,
and India have yet to be elaborated. Questions of biosafety surrounding GM crops have not been
resolved, and the UN Biosafety Protocol seems far from an effective answer. And recent disease
scares have shown that neither global institutions nor local health systems are able to deal with
the likelihood of a global pandemic.
So how have new coalitions, networks, and affiliations formed around the concept of ‘sustain-
ability’? In contrast to the Brundtland – Rio period of the 1980s and 1990s, today there is
nothing that can be constructed as a global consensus. While the post-Rio institutions – such
as the UN Commission for Sustainable Development and the secretariats of the different

Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4 –5, August 2007 593

 Ian Scoones

conventions – still exist, they are not necessarily seen as the rallying points for new initiatives.
For these we have to look beyond these institutions to new actors and groupings.
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The 2002 ‘Rio-plus-10’ conference in Johannesburg was not such a big deal as its predeces-
sor, but it did attract some interesting groups and some strong debate – and, importantly, much
dissent. Conflicts were sparked by the still very live GM debate, for example, where anti-GM
activists and social movements were pitched against corporations that had re-branded them-
selves as committed to ‘sustainable agriculture’ globally. More generally, there was a heated
debate about whether the ‘sustainable development’ mainstream had sold out to the needs of
business and global capital, or whether such accommodation and dialogue with big business
was the only route to getting corporate responsibility on sustainability issues (Wapner 2003).
Debate also flourished around the pros and cons, successes and failures of the divergent
routes of the Rio commitments – between local solutions (around Agenda 21) and international
legal processes (around the global conventions). Some groups argued that local solutions had
shown more promise, particularly where intransigent governments subject to extreme corporate
lobbying pressure (notably the USA, but perhaps increasingly in Asia) were unable to realise
any sustainable development goals, yet cities and neighbourhoods could make great strides
towards, for example, tackling the effects of climate change, conserving green spaces, or
meeting recycling targets. Others, by contrast, argued that the big sustainability agendas
remain global, and, in an increasingly globalised economy and inter-connected world,
seeking some form of international agreement on such issues – perhaps with new institutions
such as a World Environmental Organisation – remained, despite the pitfalls and obstacles, a
key objective for achieving sustainability (Newell 2001).
Thus by 2002, the ‘sustainable development’ movement, so confidently ambitious at Rio a
decade before, was more muted, more fractured, and perhaps a bit more realistic. The term ‘sus-
tainability’ has however persisted, and indeed been given more conceptual depth in explora-
tions of resilience (cf. Folke et al. 2002; Clark and Dickson 2003). As a boundary term,
linking diverse groups – even those who violently disagree with each other – it remains a
useful unifying link. To be effective in this boundary work, it is often essential to remain con-
tested, ambiguous, and vague. While academics continue to endeavour to refine its meaning,
locating it in ever more precise terms within particular disciplinary debates, it is the more
over-arching, symbolic role – of aspiration, vision, and normative commitment – that
remains so politically potent.

Where next? Reinventing a buzzword

So what of the future? Will sustainability become the unifying concept of the twenty-first
century, as many so boldly proclaimed just a few years ago? Certainly the managerialism
and routinised bureaucratisation of the 1990s have been shown to have their limits. While sus-
tainability-related commissions, committees, and processes persist in various guises, they have
perhaps less political hold than before. But with climate change in particular – and wider risks
associated with environmental change, whether epidemic disease or biodiversity change – now
being seen as central to economic strategy and planning, there are clear opportunities for the
insertion of sustainability agendas in new ways into policy discourse and practice.
But can an old buzzword be reinvigorated and reinvented for new challenges, or does it need
discarding, with something else put its place? Certainly terms associated with sustainability –
such as resilience, robustness, diversity, and precaution – are all seen more frequently in
policy debates these days (Stirling 2007). But they all have direct links to sustainability,
both intellectually, institutionally, and politically. So the lineage persists. Future buzzword

594 Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4– 5, August 2007

 Sustainability

archaeologies will no doubt trace transmutations, adaptations, and shifts, but, in my view at least,
sustainability – and the wider agenda that it inspires – is here to stay.
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Note
1. See information on the £5 m DFID-supported FAO Livelihoods Support Programme at the IDS-hosted
information portal, Livelihoods Connect, at www.livelihoods.org/lessons/project_summaries/
supp4_projsum.html

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The author
Ian Scoones is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, in Brighton, UK. Based in the
Knowledge, Technology and Society Team, he is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre (Social,
Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability). An agricultural ecologist by original
training, he works on institutional and policy issues that influence agricultural and environmental
change, with a focus on Africa. Contact details: Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, BN1 9RE,
UK ,[email protected].

596 Development in Practice, Volume 17, Numbers 4– 5, August 2007