What is development? Particularly what does sustainable development connote? Sustainable development for who? Who defines what is sustainable in a given context? Sustainable over which spatial-temporal scale? How can sustainable development be monitored? How useful are indicators like the GDP in sustainable development? Are current methodologies adequate for sustainable development research? What aspects of sustainable development do buzz-phrases like win-win solutions, optimisation or evidence-based policy fail to capture? How can these be recast to inform policy targeting sustainable development? Answers to these questions have all implications of the interpretation of what should inform sustainable development research. This paper expounds some answers to the above-listed issues and highlights their implications on sustainable development research. Focusing on sustainable energy development, the paper asks: energy supply, access and use for what? Energy over which spatial-temporal scale? Are short-term development goals agonistic to long-term developmental goals? Questioning the performance of current development indicators, the paper argues for those that are scalable across all compartments composing a hierarchal societal entity. The complexity of sustainable energy development spanning multiple scales and the intricate nexus of multiple dimensions is thereby addressed. The paper challenges sustainable development research with respect to the complexity issues particularly multiple scales and multiple dimensions. The derived impact for the governance of sustainable energy development research, and therefore its overriding challenge, is two-pronged: The need to embrace complexity as the inherent nature underlying all sustainable energy development processes and to consequently allow for an eclectic mix of tools permissible in within the post-normal science realm to resolve the complexity. The implication on the governance of sustainable energy development research is to arrange for a transition from reductionist, normal science based approaches characterising the current practice to holistic interdisciplinary, integrated, post-normal science based methodological frameworks.

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