Emerging Research Trends in Sustainable Development Studies

The paper is a deep dive into literature and scholarship on sustainable development. The purpose is to identify emerging research themes that are of growing interest to scholars on sustainability with particular emphasis on management and public policy literature, and the methodology is three-pronged, comprising the following: a content analysis of sustainability scholarship, tracking of patterns and trends over a two-decade period to delineate specific findings, and an exploration of the learnings from the literature review. We have trained our focus largely on the disciplines of management and public policy. The attempt is to distinguish the ideas, the orientation, and the direction of sustainability research longitudinally over time. The paper presents several interesting learnings growing cross-disciplinary trends in sustainability research, the evolutionary nature of sustainability studies, the induction of emerging economies into sustainable development and its reflection in research studies, theorising and the development of frameworks, creation of knowledge and information hubs in industry and the episodic movement from precepts and principles; to protocols and policy; and to practice process, and performance. By suggesting a novel approach to perceiving and classifying sustainability research over time, presenting frameworks for theory building in this field of study, and proposing fruitful areas for future research, we contribute to the body of relevant literature.