Political Science's Engagement With the Sustainability Challenge: A Semi‐Systematic Review of the Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) Governance Literature

ABSTRACT

The implications of sustainable development are far reaching, and yet many areas of academic scholarship were slow to deeply engage with it. This is a problem because, in practical terms, it can generate a false sense of calm, of business as usual, and a failure to rise to the integrative challenge of balancing the trade‐offs across sustainability's economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Conceptually it is also problematic as, properly understood, sustainability is highly disruptive of many longstanding bodies of theory. In this article we demonstrate how a lack of attention to sustainability's deeper meanings operates within the discipline of Political Science, focusing on private governance through Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS). We use a semi‐systematic literature review to generate a corpus of highly cited literature to reveal how the discipline of political science drew on ill‐defined and relative conceptions of sustainability during VSS' formative period. In the Conclusion, we consider the implications of this for contemporary politics and policy and propose possible remedies.