Sustainability Is Dead: Adaptive Transformation Governance and the Quadruple Bottom Line as a Post‐ SDG Framework
The sustainable development paradigm, as institutionalized through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has reached a state of structural exhaustion. Only 17% of SDG targets were on track at the 2024 midpoint, with over one‐third stalled or regressing. This conceptual paper argues that sustainable development is dead as a governance paradigm, killed by four convergent forces: political delegitimation processes by populist‐authoritarian movements, capture of UN sustainability mechanisms by financialized market instruments, conceptual stretching beyond analytical coherence, and coordination failure across global, national, and local governance scales. Drawing on the Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL) framework, the post‐factual polity thesis, and adjacent literatures on resilience‐based governance, paradox theory, and sustainability transitions, the paper proposes adaptive transformation governance (ATG) as a successor framework that embeds governance accountability as a structural design principle.