Abstract Achieving ambitious policy goals such as those enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals requires that several conditions be met. For example, it is widely believed that sustainable development policies should be legitimate, as the concept of legitimacy is frequently associated with sustainable development. Nevertheless, the notion of legitimacy is notoriously multifaceted and contested. In light of this complexity, this paper addresses the question ‘what does legitimacy mean within sustainable development?’. Through a scoping review of the academic literature, this study maps how the concept of legitimacy has been used in the scholarly fields dealing with sustainable development. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis reveal that a) the relationship between legitimacy and sustainable development tends to follow distinct disciplinary trajectories; b) legitimacy tends to be framed mostly in organizational, economic and corporate terms; c) the connection between legitimacy and sustainable development has led to innovative conceptualizations of legitimacy.
Matteo De Donà (Fri,) studied this question.