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This paper questions the rhetorical workings of 'sustainable development' as an ideological construct in contemporary global society. It suggests that this term actually is increasingly used as a label to place over modes of existence that are neither sustainable nor developmental. Yet, the rhetoric is also now a material culture of being that is created, carried and continued in the everyday practices of design, exchange and production. Copyright ©; 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

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Examines the impact of the sustainable development discourse on the academic curriculum and the ways in which the ecological emphasis on technical rationality affects the training of professional ecologists. As with Keulartz in the preceding chapter, it recognizes that nature is an interpreted construct whose meaning is essentially contestable. This leads to the argument that ecological training, notably in the USA and in Britain, has incorporated a particular set of cultural assumptions about the purpose of ecology, by which managerial concepts of objectivity, rationality, and utility have been skewed towards endorsement of the performative norms embedded deep within capitalist theory and practice. This gives ecological management, or ‘eco‐managerialism’, the qualities of government, whereby nature loses its transcendental qualities and its locales, resources, and systems become objects of capitalist manipulation.