Discourse Yes, Implementation Maybe: An Immobility and Paralysis of Sustainable Development Policy

Abstract

Sustainable development policies are on the move. Cities the world over are repositioning, repackaging and remarketing themselves as green and sustainable, and sustainable development is the moniker imported to spark the process. At the same time, sustainable development, as a normative point of departure, is itself going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-composition. The research in this article aims to understand this process by mapping the trajectories of sustainable development policies, and understanding sustainable development as a contextually grounded policy in motion. In Luxembourg, as planners are confronted with finding ways to manage growth, sustainable development has come to permeate all levels of the planning system. To understand how this came into being, research methods were employed that included document screening and a series of conversational interviews that were later transcribed and coded. In so doing, the discourse around sustainable development policy could be reconstructed and analysed. The results showed that the multi-scalar, cross-national, and simultaneously micro-level governance structures pose many obstructions to the implementation of sustainable development policies that are imported from abroad. Thus, policy is ultimately immobile, and a policy paralysis can be considered.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express deep gratitude to the reviewers who provided very helpful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. The author is also grateful for the support of the “Fond National de la Recherche”, Luxembourg. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, in a session entitled “Situating Urban Sustainability”, as well as at the Third Workshop the Regional Studies Association's Network of Ecological Regional Development.