Introduction. Putting the Political in Its Place: Towards a Political Sociology of Sustainability

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the international framework on sustainability has developed into a rich and ambitious set of policy goals on such diverse topics as climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme poverty, public health, green growth, innovation, etc. Although it is often portrayed as a vague concept, sustainability has helped frame the multidimensional and highly interdependent issues that represent the crucial challenges of our time, framing them in a more or less coherent policy discourse. We are now used to grouping these issues according to the “three pillars” of sustainability, i.e., its environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Notably absent from this conception of sustainability is the discussion of its political components. This special issue aims to demonstrate the importance of sustainability as a research topic for contemporary political sociology and, vice versa, the meaningfulness of socio-political research in improving our understanding of sustainability issues.