REGULATING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development is an intuitively rational and attractive idea which considerable interest and policy makers in recent years. Despit e this, the prospect of operationalizing the concept in any meaningful way now appears increasingly remote, In this paper we attempt to iden tify key deficiencies in extant approaches to sustainable development, We then argue that the formulation of a more substantial theory requi res the incorporation of key insights from social theory, We subsequen tly develop this agenda by linking current ideas on sustainable develo pment with regulation theory, This, we suggest, allows further progres s to be made in understanding what sustainability must be and how it m ight best be achieved.