Designing Law for Sustainability

The present chapter addresses the issue of how to design law for sustainability. To this end, it firstly explores the historical and theoretical roots of sustainability, in order to show its original meaning. It highlights its ecological core and then looks at the evolution of the concept of sustainability to show how its ecological core has been gradually forgotten and almost lost over time. It observes how this may be related to the progressive conflation of sustainability with the concept of sustainable development and argues how to promote and reinstate a correct understanding of the two concepts.