Environmental Law and the Unsustainability of Sustainable Development: A Tale of Disenchantment and of Hope

The sustainable development principle drives environmentally destructive neoliberal economic growth that exploits and degrades the local ecology. Despite well-meaning intentions behind sustainable development, it facilitates exploitative economic development activities that exacerbate systemic inequalities and injustices and the global “market-is-king” model of capitalism. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cannot be adopted as a global sustainability objective for all societies. Instead, they must be applied in a way that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive. Like , they must offer the potential to critically rethink how societies could re-orientate to radically different locally beneficial socio-ecological sustainability