Advances and limits of social sustainability as an evolving concept

The concept of "environment" usually refers to the external nature of the human world. Nevertheless, the academic discourse on the modern environmental crisis considers and tends to treat human society as part of the environment. In this context, the concept of sustainable development (SD) includes the social, economic, and ecological. This article analyses the social dimension of sustainable development in its evolution as a concept. The paper concludes that the main approaches in this field subordinate the social to the ecological. The implications of this are analysed and assessed.