Drawing on a study on environmental and sustainable development policies in Manchester (United Kingdom), this paper attempts to provide a periodization at the urban scale of the evolution of the management of environmental issues. The periodization traces the shift in discourse from a focus on “local environment“ to “sustainable urban development”. Three main sequences are identified corresponding to three different ways of tackling environmental issues, covering a period from the late seventies up to the present. The aim of this paper will be twofold. First, we will show that this evolution has lead to an entrepreneurial approach to tackling environmental issues. Secondly, we will try to demonstrate that this evolution is also characterised by major changes in the network of actors involved in urban policy-making and in the ways in which these actors try to understand and define environmental issues in order to tackle them.