The ideology of sustainability and the globalization of a future (original) (raw)
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Sustainability Science, 2019
Historically, concepts of sustainability have been articulated in response to a perceived crisis within central modernist narratives about progress. As such, they are not just environmental concepts, but ethical and political ones. At the same time, they have often been accused of being too wedded to many of the same assumptions as these central narratives of modernity, and indeed inviting the hubristic mistakes of modernity to be resurrected in the form of pretentions to global stewardship or ‘managing the planet’. I respond to some recent critiques of key conceptual elements encountered within sustainability narratives by articulating an approach to imagining sustainability that draws on D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘holding environment’, and which acknowledges the otherness of the future and of nature, while also affirming responsibilities towards both.
The Unsustainable Sustainability
Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, 2021
Over the last four decades, and particularly after Rio-92, discussions on environmental sustainability have expanded and been incorporated in many legal texts, in public policies and in the practices of daily life for a portion of the world's population. Despite this progress, achieving a more sustainable development is a goal that has yet to be realized, mainly due to economies that favor a predatory development, masquerading as sustainable, which turn a blind eye to the social, environmental and cultural limits of the planet's many different regions, and ultimately threatening the continued existence of human life on Earth. The guiding question of this paper is the incapacity of the sustainability model adopted in discourse, in business and in contemporary society. This paper is a test study and questions political ownership and the transmutation of the concept of sustainable development in discourse and daily life over the last few decades. Ultimately, we hope to draw att...
The Sustainability of our Common Future: An Inquiry into the Foundations of an Ideology
Pergamon Technology In Society. Vol. 17, No. 3. pp. 327-336, 1995 , 1995
This paper examines the modern philosophical background of the idea of sustainable development, especially as it has been articulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development in the document entitled Our Common Future (1987). We argue that this document is not near& as radical as is sometimes supposed, but in fact only extends the principles of the economics of scarci[y into the realm of environmental ecology.
CULTURE IN SUSTAINABILITY; TOWARDS A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
When we have the ability to destroy Earth's carrying capacity and equilibrium, do we not equally have the ability to repair them and put them — and ourselves — back in balance again? The article argues that we can and should, but that this requires fundamental changes, beginning with no less than the rewriting of the basic narrative of mankind. We currently live the narrative of modernity, with a very appealing plot and storylines, telling us that we can emancipate from nature and master nature through science and technology, creating a never-ending process of societal growth and development, in a straight line towards ever more progress. The narrative of modernity indeed is appealing but has proven to be largely false. The article argues that we need a new narrative of planetary consciousness that, like the one of modernity, should appeal to us offering a promising plot that drives and motivates us, but in a socially and ecologically safe direction. This is the cultural challenge sustainability presents us with. The chapter explores a shift away from modernity to planetary consciousness in terms of a number of key changes, more in particular the change towards embodiment, as being in the world searching for connectedness instead of emancipation, complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity, embracing multiple criteria of progress and wellbeing, polyphony and dialogue, accepting multiple truths, and finally arts-based and artful ways of working, being reflective constantly evaluating the consequences of our actions.
Sustainable Cultures – Cultures of Sustainability
We are witnessing a politicaleconomic passage: from global stagnation to amplified uneven development to worsening primitive accumulation ('looting') to socioeconomic conflict. This trajectory highlights Africa's problems in particular, and in turn also suggests ways forward for durable peace building and development for sustainable futures. After three decades of neoliberalism, a policy approach meant in theory to establish market relations above all else, authorities on global political economy have returned to themes of imperialism grounded in extramarket power relations. For Africa's popular struggles, the objective of transforming power relations as the basis for ending conflict and underdevelopment requires engaging this theoretical approach to the critique of capitalism and reinvigorating a new approach to the dynamic of emergent capital intensification related maladies like climate change and the net negative effects of a fossil based economic model, which though finite, continues to wreck havoc on the environment. Ecological degradation, as a central failure of the contemporary development paradigm, necessitates the need for new thinking and approaches that make the linkage between the ecology, earth and economy as a fundamental site of alternative thinking. This should inform the critic of the contemporary failures of global capitalism and infuse the fabric on which movements for a sustainable future cut their foundation, theory and action from.
Understanding Nature and Un-Understanding Environment: A Non-Western Conception of Sustainability
2012
Arturo Escobar in his book Encountering Development (1995), draws attention of the world on the special formation of development discourse and how this formation changes the world view of third world countries towards development, sustainability and growth. Based on works of Foucault, analyzed discourse of development that how “dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible” (Escobar 1995: 15). In this context, this paper discusses how by emphasizing on the discourse of environment, the west had made the other discourse, the discourse of Nature impossible thus changing the whole worldview towards sustainability of life. This paper first discusses how the very concept of development, growth itself is unsustainable, second, how the western discourse of develo...
Sustainability and the politics of transformations: from control to care in moving beyond modernity
What Next for Sustainable Development?, 2019
Sustainability: from controlling progress to caring transformation Of the many dimensions of Sustainability, perhaps none are at the same time so ambivalently intimate and antagonistic, as its relations with Modernity. Despite a diversity of views on what constitutes either Modernity or Sustainability, it is striking that themes coming most repeatedly to the fore in characterising Modernity, tend also to be prominent in defining Sustainability. For instance take the theme of control. This is an essential strand in defining the distinctive patterns of practice in Modernity, with contrastingly-diagnosed modalities of control variously including: rationalization, industrialization, bureaucratization, individualization, democratization, as well as nation-forming, capitalization and disenchantment from tradition (Stirling, forthcoming). All are analysed to involve some kind of effort at control. Correspondingly, control is also central to modernist understandings of the world, in efforts to: reduce complexity; standardise diversity; aggregate variabilities; integrate plurality; externalise uncertainty-and so discipline change. Equally in its materialities and its imaginaries, then, Modernity is centrally about aspirations to control. Whatever view is taken, one of the most obvious corollaries of all such modernist efforts at control, is that-for all their spectacular successes (and even in their own terms)-they often go awry. In the course of their development both before and after the Brundtland Commission, then, Sustainability movements can be understood in this light (Redclift 1987)(Doherty & Geus 1996). For Sustainability is arguably the single most important general international critical response to the manifest failures to which modernist romanticisations of control can lead. In terms of definitions that will be discussed in a moment, Sustainability presents a stark contrast with the controlling ambitions of Modernity, in being concerned with many ways of caring for the neglected unintended consequences, for: people, societies, ecologies and the future of the world (Bellacasa 2017)(Robinson 2011). Indeed, it is as this political reaction to failures of modernist control, that Sustainability is critiqued by detractors, as being about 'holding back' modernistic ideas of progress (Lovelock 2006). Yet there is also a sense in which these caring sensibilities of Sustainability may actually be seen as a kind of intensification in imaginations related to control. In its modernist forms, control involves