Why is ecological sustainability so difficult to achieve? An in‐context discussion of conceptual barriers

Despite all kinds of environmental goals and programmes, there has been a severe overshooting of the planet's ecological boundaries. The paper investigates various conceptual barriers contributing to the lack of ecological sustainability. The concepts discussed are weak sustainability, eco‐efficiency, ecological modernization, and neoliberalism. This paper's empirical field comprises the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and what preceded them. It is about the report Our Common Future, the green economy, ecological modernization and the Millennium Development Goals. Even with partially positive effects, these programmes have not fulfilled their promises. The various conceptual barriers are recognizable in these programmes; they are exponents of an unshaken belief in efficient markets and conventional economic growth. This appears to be the overriding issue as economic growth in terms of GDP does not respect ecological boundaries, so that ecological sustainability comes closer to being realized. Neoliberalism—coupled with the power of the World Bank and the IMF and their long maintained “market fundamentalism”—has produced unsatisfactory outcomes in the social and ecological domains. The various crises during the last decades have caused governments to expand their roles, but every time this happened under the promise of a speedy return to normal, that is, small government and austerity. Ecological sustainability requires strong governmental roles. This paper does not provide a complete path towards ecological sustainability but discusses three possible conceptual foundations for it: steady‐state economics, eco‐development, and post‐growth economics.