Abstract
Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse, 1970-2000
Sustainability has become a key concept in the national and international policy discourse, and nonetheless it has not been clearly defined. This article argues that it is precisely the vagueness of the concept that has made it so attractive for politics. Focusing on the international politics arena and the West German case, the article shows that dominating political notions of development and progress were partly reconceptualised in order to incorporate long-term ecological and social issues around 1970. Against this backdrop, from the late 1980s onwards, «sustainable development» and «sustainability» became political concepts for the future which, explicitly vague, appeared to balance economic, ecological and social goals in both short-term and long-term perspectives. The notions of sustainable development and sustainability oscillated between crisis perceptions, steady-state thinking and a new semantics of modernisation from the 1970s to 2000. In this light, it is argued that there is no «end of confidence» but rather that understandings of progress have been reconfigured.
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