Historicising and Theorising Sustainable Development

The sustainable development concept has widely attracted policy and scholarly interest in recent years as a potential pathway through which human welfare can best be attained. However, what it comprises remains vague with both policy-makers and scholars often offering contradictory explanations with regard to the concept’s meaning and history, and its implications for development theory and practice. Thus, this chapter contributes to discussions on the concept by further clarifying its history and meaning and also by highlighting its implications for development practice and theory. This is achieved through a critical analysis of secondary texts obtained in both academic and grey literature using sustainable development as a key term. This chapter shows that sustainable development is based on inter- and intra-generational equity predicated principally on some tripartite interconnected and overlapping pillars, namely, the environment, economy, and society. It concludes that for successful utilisation, there is need to be acquainted with the interactions, complementarities, and interchanges that exist among the pillars of the concept so as to mobilise for appropriate sets and systems of human behaviour and practices that can eventually translate into human welfare. Additional research is needed to explore how sustainable could be made to be cultural- and context-specific so as not to disrupt and distort existing survival activities, thus, triggering adverse implications.