Lorenzini opened by observing that sustainable development today occupies a central place in global governance, most visibly through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015. Yet while the concept has become ubiquitous, its intellectual history remains surprisingly underexplored. Existing scholarship tends to focus on institutions, reports and international conferences while paying relatively little attention to the individuals who developed and promoted the underlying ideas. Her project seeks to address this gap through a collective intellectual biography of four women: the British economist and journalist Barbara Ward, the Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Together, Lorenzini argued, these figures transformed sustainable development into a framework for reimagining both international cooperation and Europe's role within it.
The lecture concentrated primarily on the first two of these pioneers. Lorenzini argued that although Ward and Brundtland are often associated with the same concept, they represented two distinct visions of sustainable development that reflected different political moments and different understandings of the international order.
