Distinguishing Sustainability from Durability: Hidden Convergences and the Logic of Redirection

Sustainability and durability are often treated as overlapping terms in environmental debates. This article argues that distinguishing them reveals hidden convergences between positions usually presented as divergent. Sustainability evaluates trajectories under ecological limits, material dependence, limited substitutability, and systemic risk. Durability refers to the organized capacity of material and institutional arrangements to maintain a function through time, through maintenance, repair, support chains, and the governance of obsolescence.The argument is conceptually driven and empirically informed by an eight-month advisory study conducted by the author for a public development finance institution, involving twenty interviews, a 100-page internal report, and a 25-page synthesis. Drawing on Halloy’s contrast between living and zombie technologies, the article develops a sustainability–durability matrix distinguishing sustainable continuity, durable lock-in, sustainable fragility, and negative inheritances. It then uses redirection, organized withdrawal, and Deron’s framework of ruins, ghosts, seeds, and visions to rethink how inheritances may be maintained, supported, redirected, or allowed to decline.