Sustainable development is an intuitively rational and attractive idea which has solicited considerable interest from both academics and policy makers in recent years. Despite this, the prospect of operationalizing the concept in any meaningful way now appears increasingly remote. In this paper the authors attempt to identify key dificiences in extant approaches to sustainable development. They argue that the formulation of a more substantial theory requires the incorporation of key insights from social theory. Subsequently they developed this agenda by linking current ideas on sustainable development with regulation theory. This, they suggest, allows further progress to be made in understanding what sustainability must be and how it might best be achieved.