Chapter 14: Sustainability and its Paradigms

The concept of sustainability has been popular, having its first dictionary appearance in the late 1980s (Lutz Newton, & Freyfogle, 2005). The Online Oxford dictionary definition of the word relates it to some actor that is: able to be maintained at a certain rate or level, the word maintaining implying that it is process related. The term crosses a number of disciplines and “Given the large number of perspectives and contexts in which the term sustainability is used, its meaning varies widely across the literature” (Stepanyan, Littlejohn, & Margaryan, 2013, p. 94). The rise of the sustainability concept has drawn significant criticism (e.g., Beckerman, 2002; Harrison, 2000; Lutz Newton & Freyfogle, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2007) with comments that imply that it is an unsustainable concept due to its unconvincing, controversial or unclear nature and development. So what is the value of this confusion called sustainability? In this chapter we shall explore the development of the concept, and show that it actually arises from two distinct and competing paradigms as highlighted by Gladwin, Kennelly, and Krause (1995).