1. Fundaments in natural science, economics and epistemology.- 1.1 Sustainability: A definition and the non-sustainability of Western lifestyle: Resource and sink problems.- 1.2 Energy transition: An alleged success story.- 1.3 Sustainability purely technical through consistency, efficiency and wonder technologies - or also through sufficiency?- 1.4 Sustainability, profitability, and the involuntary transition to a post-growth society.- 1.5 Levels of sustainability discourse and transdisciplinary approaches.-1.6 Basic terms, levels of rationality and misunderstandings.- 1.7 Methods beyond empiricism and the duality of quantitive vs. qualitive.- 2. Conditions of a transformation to sustainability - sociological, psychological, biological.- 2.2 Complex interconnectedness of stakeholders.- 2.2 Knowledge and environmental awareness as key factors?- 2.3 Individual and collective factors of motivation: self-interest, values, structures, perceptions of normality, emotions, pathways.- 2.4 Biology and culture behind factors of motivation: brain research, evolution, education, Protestantism, capitalism.- 2.5 Happiness, empirical happiness research, cooperation research, criticism of capitalism and its tendencies overdo it.- 2.6 Politics, corporations, citizens, interest groups and other stakeholders: How change is possible in a ping-pong.- 3. Ethical and legal theory of sustainability - especially of human rights.- 3.1 Why normative questions can be rationally decided - toward a new universalism.- 3.2 Why philosophical classics, postmodernism and cost-benefit analysis are no alternative.- 3.3 A sustainable conception of freedom: Preconditions of freedom, multi-polarity and responsibility for consequences.- 3.4 Misunderstandings: Regulations of a good life, detailed distributional justice, environmental ethics.- 3.5 Concrete decision-making and balancing beyond risk theory and cost-benefit analysis.- 3.6 Institutions and democratic systems beyond an eco-dictatorship.- 3.7 Handling uncertain states of facts.- 3.8 Example: Strong climate protection obligation despite non-egalitarianism and leeway.- 4. Politics and governance of sustainability - the example of newly focussed climate, energy, agriculture and nature protection policies.- 4.1 Sustainability through education and role models?- 4.2 How much containment does capitalism need - sustainability through CSR and sustainable consumption?- 4.3 Political targets and sustainability strategies up until the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals.- 4.4 Classic approach to instruments: regulatory law, planning law, subsidies, information.- 4.5 Basic regulation problems: Enforcement, weak targets, rebound effects, shifting effects, ability of mapping.- 4.6 Basic structures of economic policy instruments and their defective implementation so far.- 4.7 New resource and climate governance through newly focussed economic instruments.- 4.8 Sustainability and questions of distribution.- 4.9 Competitiveness, shifting of emissions, global economics: Could the EU become a real pioneer?- 4.10 Integrated solutions for environmental problems such as land use, energy, climate, biodiversity, phosphorus and nitrogen.- 4.11 Either underestimated or overestimated complementary role of regulatory law - the example of biodiversity.- 4.12 Other relevant, however often overrated, instruments, especially information and nudging.- 4.13 Centralised versus decentralised structures.- 4.14 Free trade, global constitutionalisation and the WTO.