Sustainable development (SD) has become a popular catchphrase in contemporary development discourse. However, in spite of its pervasiveness and the massive popularity it has garnered over the years, the concept still seems unclear as many people continue to ask questions about its meaning and history, as well as what it entails and implies for development theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discourse on SD by further explaining the paradigm and its implications for human thinking and actions in the quest for sustainable development. This is done through extensive literature review, combining aspects of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and the Recursive Content Abstraction (RCA) analytical approach. The paper finds and argues that the entire issue of sustainable development centres around inter- and intragenerational equity anchored essentially on three-dimensional distinct but interconnected pillars, namely the environment, economy, and society. Decision-makers need to be constantly mindful of the relationships, complementarities, and trade-offs among these pillars and ensure responsible human behaviour and actions at the international, national, community and individual levels in order to uphold and promote the tenets of this paradigm in the interest of human development. More needs to be done by the key players—particularly the United Nations (UN), governments, private sector, and civil society organisations—in terms of policies, education and regulation on social, economic and environmental resource management to ensure that everyone is sustainable development aware, conscious, cultured and compliant.

1. Introduction

Sustainable Development (SD) has become a ubiquitous development paradigm—the catchphrase for international aid agencies, the jargon of development planners, the theme of conferences and academic papers, as well as the slogan of development and environmental activists (Ukaga, Maser, & Reichenbach, Citation2011). The concept seems to have attracted the broad-based attention that other development concept lack(ed), and appears poised to remain the pervasive development paradigm for a long time (Scopelliti et al., Citation2018; Shepherd et al., Citation2016). However, notwithstanding its pervasiveness and popularity, murmurs of disenchantment about the concept are rife as people continue to ask questions about its meaning or definition and what it entails as well as implies for development theory and practice, without clear answers forthcoming (Montaldo, Citation2013; Shahzalal & Hassan, Citation2019; Tolba, Citation1984). SD therefore stands the risk of becoming a cliché like appropriate technology—a fashionable and rhetoric phrase—to which everyone pays homage but nobody seems to define with precision and exactitude (Mensah & Enu-Kwesi, Citation2018; Tolba, Citation1984).

In the attempt to move beyond the sustainability rhetoric and pursue a more meaningful agenda for sustainable development, a clear definition of this concept and explanation of its key dimensions are needed (Gray, Citation2010; Mensah & Enu-Kwesi, Citation2018). This need, according to Gray (Citation2010), as cited in Giovannoni and Fabietti (Citation2014), has been advocated by both academics and practitioners in order to promote sustainable development. While it cannot be disputed that literature on SD abounds, issues regarding the concept’s definition, history, pillars, principles and the implications of these for human development, remain unclear to many people. Thus, the profusion of literature notwithstanding, further clarification of the unclear issues about SD is imperative since decision-makers need not only better data and information on the linkages among the principles and pillars of SD, but also enhanced understanding of such linkages and their implication for action in the interest of human development (Abubakar, Citation2017; Hylton, Citation2019). Succinctly put, a concise and coherent discourse on SD is needed to further illuminate the pathway and trajectory to sustainable development in order to encourage citizenship rather than spectatorship. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to contribute to the intelligibility and articulacy of the discourse on SD by providing more concise information on its meaning, evolution, associated key concepts, dimension, the relationships among the dimensions, the principles, and their implications for global, national and individual actions in the quest for SD. This is significant as it would provide researchers, policymakers and academics, as well as development practitioners and students more information about the paradigm for policy-making, decision-making and further research.