Despite the challenges, broad-based sustainable development is achievable. This popular textbook presents a holistic approach, going beyond the narrow goal of economic growth to include the full range of social, cultural, environmental and political factors necessary to achieve sustainable development.

How can politics, economy and society become more sustainable and socially just? To this end, what kind of political course has to be set at national and international level? The volume "In Search of a Sustainable Future" has experts from five continents and different disciplines giving answers to these questions and presents solutions for a more sustainable future. Following a comprehensive approach to sustainability, the authors do not only consider the ecological aspects but also the economical and social ones while taking into account their interdependence. They describe the challenges for a global policy of sustainability and discuss the barriers such a development has to overcome.

This book deals with the issue of sustainable development in a novel and innovative way. It examines the governance implications of reflexive modernisation - the condition that societal development is endangered by its own side-effects. With conceptualising reflexive governance the book leads a way out of endless quarrels about the definition of sustainability and into a new mode of collective action.

‘Transgovernance: Advancing Sustainability Governance’ analyses the question what recent and ongoing changes in the relations between politics, science and media – together characterized as the emergence of a knowledge democracy – may imply for governance for sustainable development, on global and other levels of societal decision making, and the other way around: How can the discussion on sustainable development contribute to a knowledge democracy? How can concepts such as second modernity, reflexivity, configuration theory, (meta)governance theory and cultural theory contribute to a ‘transgovernance’ approach which goes beyond mainstream sustainability governance? This volume presents contributions from various angles: international relations, governance and metagovernance theory, (environmental) economics and innovation science. It offers challenging insights regarding institutions and transformation processes, and on the paradigms behind contemporary sustainability governance.This book gives the sustainability governance debate a new context. It transforms classical questions into new options for societal decision making and identifies starting points and strategies towards effective governance of transitions to sustainability.