Rethinking Progress. On the Origin of the Modern Sustainability Discourse, 1970-2000 Sustainability has become a key concept in the national and international policy discourse, and nonetheless it has not been clearly defined. This article argues that it is precisely the vagueness of the concept that has made it so attractive for politics. Focusing on the international politics arena and the West German case, the article shows that dominating political notions of development and progress were partly reconceptualised in order to incorporate long-term ecological and social issues around 1970. Against this backdrop, from the late 1980s onwards, «sustainable development» and «sustainability» became political concepts for the future which, explicitly vague, appeared to balance economic, ecological and social goals in both short-term and long-term perspectives. The notions of sustainable development and sustainability oscillated between crisis perceptions, steady-state thinking and a new semantics of modernisation from the 1970s to 2000. In this light, it is argued that there is no «end of confidence» but rather that understandings of progress have been reconfigured.

This article deals with the emergence of Futures Research after 1945 and its production of future expertise.

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Abstract. In the 1970s, the futures field became globalized. This paper shows how perceptions of globality shaped interdisciplinary approaches towards forecasting, planning and thinking about the future. Futures studies were reconceptualized, shifting its perspective from a West-East, technology-driven slant towards a global and human-centred one around 1970. The perceptions and conceptions of globality came out of notions of global interdependence, which emerged from three root sources. The first was the epistemic context of cybernetics and systems analysis, which had shaped the 1950s and 1960s futures studies and had led researchers to aspirations of being able to model the world system. The second, affecting significant sections of the field, was the web of new ecological ideas and their focus on interrelations within the global ecosystem. Third, futures studies took up dependency theories, responding to the rising voice of the global South and new ideas of a New International Economic Order. The futures field was not only influenced by 1970s events, it itself contributed to cultural and social change by enhancing the crisis perceptions and environmentalism of the early years of the decade and by stimulating notions of 'One World' solidarity. Through their insistence on the interdependence of environment and development, 'futurists' then laid the basis for conceptions of sustainable development. Keywords. Club of Rome, development, future(s) studies, global interdependence, humankind, World Future Studies FederationIn 1973, the World Future Research Conference postulated, in a memorandum, that 'we must strive towards a new general understanding of our global interdependence and limitations if we are to have a society that does not destroy itself and us' (IRADES and WFRC, 1973, 1, p. 10). The Rome Conference committee, which represented the newly established World Future Studies Federation and the affiliated Italian Istituto Ricerche Applicate Documentazione e Studi, proclaimed global interdependence and the need to give thought to coming global problems. It highlighted the danger of humankind destroying itself and was alert to the implications of present and future globality.There was a shift in the futures field around 1970. Futures studies' mental maps changed from having a simple West-East axis towards acquiring a global perspective, and many 'futurists' got engaged in propagating a global future. Related to this, technology-driven approaches lost influence whereas a human-centred perspective gained new ground. In forming the perceptions and scenarios of globality, notions of global interdependence played a decisive role. They came from three root sources. The first was the epistemic