The Neoliberalisation of Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability – embedded in intergovernmental global agreements and filtering, reassuringly, into ‘common sense’ – is now the globally dominant environmental discourse. However, this dominance does not equate with the mainstreaming of its original meaning that is tied up with a radical critique of capitalism that crystallised in movements of both the South and the North in the 1970s. Rather, radical sustainability discourse has been effectively neutralised by its ‘articulation’ with the neoliberal capitalist project. This article examines this articulatory shift, focusing particularly on a post-Marxist neo-Gramscian inspired discourse analysis of the key documents of intergovernmental global agreement. The article argues for the rearticulation of sustainability to a new counter-hegemonic ‘reimagining’ of nature.