Sustainability

Abstract

Over the last decades, the notion of sustainability has come to be of indisputable social relevance, even though some commentators have criticized it as being too broad and too vague. It has become a key concept of social change on the level of the world society and can be seen as a development model directed at the future but meant to become effective in the present. Very different processes, values, and visions of the future may be connected to invocations of sustainability: from attempts to initiate a major socioecological transformation to sustainability as merely a facade behind which rather unsustainable actions are practiced. Modernization, transformation, and control represent three different trajectories, three potentialities of social change. These trajectories do not so much refer to our actual future, though, but rather signal which imaginaries about the future are currently competing against each other.