'Sustainability' in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review

This article reviews the work of several sets of researchers prominent in current debates over how sustainability might be interpreted and achieved. The notion of 'sustainable development' has reached a conceptual dead-end. Geographers may offer more effective investigations and critiques of socioecological transformations by instead focusing on 'sustainability' and its application to multiple dimensions of human and nonhuman processes. Such a move within geography demands critical engagement with ongoing debates in ecological economics, the ecological sciences and social applications of sustainability. Geographers are well positioned to address crucial gaps in these fields of inquiry and to propel debates over sustainability in several fruitful directions.