This study’s starting point is the question of whether it is still possible to refer to sustainable development in a critical and emancipatory vein or whether it would be better to dispense with the hollow concept of sustainability. The author analyses different strands of justice, politics and economics in the context of the debate on sustainability (political and institutional, feminist, anti-authoritarian and integrative) and demonstrates that they have emancipatory potential. She appraises this potential in detail, using a form of discourse analysis strongly influenced by feminism. In this way, she contributes to a new and different approach to appraising sustainability, while also incorporating the findings of the critical debate on new, different and future ideas on sustainability, which has been conducted in the past twenty years, extremely knowledgeably. This study was awarded the Christiane Busch-Lüty prize for young scholars by the “Vereinigung für Ökologische Ökonomie” (German Association of Ecological Economics).