I would like to quote Gilber Rist, an author I really hold in esteem with regard to development epistemology, who addresses the ambiguity of 'sustainability' in his book The History of Development (p. 192-193):
Now, it is to its ambiguity that the term ‘sustainable development’
owes its success. For ecologists, the interpretation is clear enough:
sustainable development implies a production level that can be borne
by the ecosystem, and can therefore be kept up over the long term;
reproduction capacity determines production volume, and
‘sustainability‘ means that the process can be maintained only under
certain externally given conditions. To use a (cautious) analogy with
the realm of the living, we might say that whereas cell growth is
necessary to a child’s development, an excessive proliferation of
cells makes the continuation of life impossible. Or again – to draw on
French popular wisdom – ‘if you wish to travel far, spare your steed’:
the important thing is the journey rather than the speed, life on the
planet rather than the pace of ‘development‘.
The dominant interpretation is quite different. It sees ‘sustainable
development’ as an invitation to keep up ‘development’ – that is,
economic growth. With ‘development’ already universal and inescap-
able, it has to be made eternal. In other words, since ‘development’
is regarded as naturally positive, it must be stopped from becoming
asthenic. Sustainable development, then, means that ‘development’ must
advance at a more ‘sustained’ pace until it becomes irreversible – for
what the countries of the South are suffering from is ‘non-
sustainable development’, ‘stop–go development’ constantly unsettled
by ephemeral political measures. For conventional thinking, then,
‘sustainability’ is understood in the trivial sense of ‘durability’:
it is not the survival of the ecosystem which sets the limits of
"development", but "development" which determines the survival of
societies. As "development" is at once necessity and opportunity, the
conclusion is perfectly obvious – so long as it lasts!
These two interpretations are at once legitimate and contradictory,
since two antinomic signifieds correspond to the same signifier. The
Brundtland Commission and the Rio Conference both avoided choosing:
both oscillated between reminders of the environmental limits on
‘development’ and exhortations to advance boldly into a ‘new era of
economic growth’. Hence their recourse to oxymoron, to the rhetorical
figure that joins together two opposites such as ‘structural
adjustment with a human face’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’.
