Purpose: to consider conceptual approaches in the study of the economics of sustainable development. Discussion: the relevance of the topic of sustainable development and its scholarly novelty are confirmed by the goals and objectives facing the development of the state, society, and business today in the context of the global challenge to build a smart national economy based on the concept of sustainable development. Making part of history, this concept endows today's economic reforms aimed at creating a post-industrial society and building an economy relying on the principles of sustainable development with a different meaning and actualizes their content and purpose. The authors outline the approaches that help solve the issues of advancement of sustainable development economy. Additionally, they study and characterize the main problems and peculiarities of the concept of "sustainable, stable, or progressive socio-economic development" based on the principles of traditional economy, which ultimately leads to a conflict of interests of the state, society, and nature.
Results: based on the highlighted problems and application of the conceptual approach, the authors propose a model of sustainable development economy, i.e. ESG-economy, revealing a high innovation potential of flexible networks of small and medium-sized high-tech industries on a new technological basis, which gives a completely different retrospective of the economy. The principles of the approach from global to local and from general to particular make it possible to change the perspective from the national economy to the economy of the region and city, from sectoral economy to the economy of a particular enterprise and project. This research fits into the new agenda of transformation of working enterprises and creation of enterprises with qualitatively new content based on the principles of sustainable development.