The Earth’s current environmental crisis marks the limits of science and technological progress and challenges our knowledge and certainty. This ecological crisis is accompanied by an increase in global inequalities between southern and northern countries, a clear sign of a certain failure in development. While the physical and biological environment was at the heart of the discussions at the Planet Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Johannesburg Summit in August 2002 aims to reconcile social, economic and environmental imperatives with a new approach: sustainable development. The contributions gathered in this book question the various aspects of sustainable development: the doctrines underlying it, the evolution of local practices in the face of its narrative, and its inclusion in the major challenges of globalisation. Can sustainable development be a non-moral narrative? This requires returning to the origins of the concepts — sustainable development, social development, biodiversity, local knowledge — and defeating them to better rebuild them. Looking at local contexts — urban environment, forests, arid populations, arrangements for receiving refugees — shows the mismatch between concrete practices and the alleged desire for sustainable development. Finally, globalised trade reveals major global challenges and risks: nutritional insecurity, emerging viral diseases, the uneven spread of knowledge, the ideological misconception of sustainable development. Thus, as this book explicitly shows, questioning sustainable development also means calling it into question.