Environmental limits and boundaries: Evolving meanings, how different schools of thought draw a roadmap and what we learn from that

This paper seeks to trace the evolution of the intellectual debate on environmental limits and boundaries to understand the varied interpretations and aspects of this debate and ask how and why these limits are politicized the way they are. It does this by examining how three schools of thought conceptualize environmental limits, and investigates the reason for differences in articulation of the problem as well as the solution. In the process we see how the scientific framework and the discourse of environmental limits is a co-production with interpretive flexibility, and usually unacknowledged, non-environmental aspects together making it a much-contested concept.