Regulating sustainable development

Sustainable development is an intui tively rational and attractive idea which has solicited considerable interest from both academics and policy makers in recent years. Despite this the prospect of operationalizing the concept in any meaningful way now appears increasingly remote. In this paper we attempt to identify key deflciencies in extant approaches to sustainable development. We then argue that the formulation of a more substantial theory requires the incor poration of key insights from social theory. We subsequently develop this agenda by linking current ideas on sustainable development with regulation theory, This, we suggest, allows further progress to be made in understanding what sustainability must be and how it might best be achieved.