EcoSImies of care: a proposal for decolonizing ‘sustainable development’ (original) (raw)
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Resurgence of relationality: reflections on decolonizing and indigenizing ‘sustainable development’
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2020
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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
Capital & Class, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis began after this forum was written. Yet, it has highlighted, in an extreme way, how humans, nature and global capitalism are each deeply interconnected. This speaks to an ongoing debate within radical environmental politics, which focuses on the question of nature, and the degree to which humans are separate from, and/or part of the natural world. Much of this debate is reflected in the disagreement between John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore, over the way and the extent to which we can conceptualise capitalism as a process that systematically produces ecological destruction (see especially Foster 2016; Moore 2017). This debate raises important questions regarding the way in which Marxism (including Green, or eco-Marxism) is susceptible to charges of Euro-centrism. The aim of this forum is to contribute to this debate, providing opportunities through which to develop and clarify what a decolonised eco-Marxism might look like. A key aspect in the debate between Foster and Moore is over the question of how to conceptualise the effect of capitalism upon, or in, nature. For Foster, who has perhaps done most to develop a Marxist approach to climate change, especially through a
Santamarina, B.; Vaccaro, I.; Beltran, O. The sterilisation of eco-criticism: from sustainable development to sustainability to green capitalism. Anduli. Revista Andaluza de Ciencias Sociales, 14: 13-28, 2015
Development has been a dominant and highly visible trope of the global political and economic life of the world since the 1950s. As such it has been inevitably linked to some of the most important social processes of this era: colonialism, globalization, postcolonialism, global ecological crisis, the rise of environmentalism, and more. The consolidation of the contemporary consumer global society came, hand by hand, with the certainty that it sustained a way of life that as a collateral damage, included a global ecological crisis. From many quarters of the world new voices raised concerns about the costs of globalization and proposed alternatives and solutions: modern eco-criticism was born. This article analyzes the historical process of emergence of eco-critical concepts as well as on its appropriation, redefinition, and use by mainstream political and economic agents. Specifically we reflect on how "development" and "growth" under heavy criticism during the 70s were gradually transformed on "sustainable development" first, and, as the conversion was still raising significant disapproval, to "sustainability" later. The adoption of these new ideological frameworks to legitimize development allowed Western societies to dismiss more critical approaches such us "zero growth" or "de-growth".
Care, Ecology, and the Crisis of Eco-social Reproduction: Politicizing More-than-Human Care
Hypatia , 2024
While the ethics of care has considered the possibility that caring occurs for the environment, it often remains silent about the caregiving that humans receive from the environment. This essay suggests that ecological justice requires humans to consider themselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earth dwellers. The argument is built by first accounting for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other-than-humans. The focus then turns to eco-feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other-than-humans to work and appropriate their efforts to maintain the world. The fact that they cannot demand a salary and that the commodification of life increases its depletion leads to an examination of how the conceptual recognition of more-than-human care can be translated politically. The article sketches how the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thought could allow to engage more critically with environmental issues, notably by blending environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments towards other-than-humans, with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor.
The sterilization of eco-criticism: from sustainable development to green capitalism
Anduli, 2015
Development has been a dominant trope of global political and economic life since the 1950s. As such it has been inevitably linked to some of the most important social processes of this era: colonialism, globalization, postcolonialism, global ecological crisis, the rise of environmentalism, and more. Consolidation of the contemporary consumer society came, hand in hand, with the certainty that it sustained a way of life that, like collateral damage, included a global ecological crisis. From many parts of the world new voices raised concerns about the costs of globalization and proposed alternatives and solutions; thus, modern eco-criticism was born. This article analyzes the historical process of emergence of eco-critical concepts as well as appropriation, redefinition, and use of these concepts by politicians and economists. Specifically, we reflect on how "development" and "growth" under heavy criticism during the 70s were gradually transformed into "sustainable development" first, and, as this conversion was still raising significant disapproval, to "sustainability" later. Adoption of these new ideological frameworks aimed at legitimizing development allowed Western societies to ignore more critical approaches such us "zero growth" or "degrowth".
Struggles for Dignity in the Web of Life: Capital, Waste & the Violence of Cheap Nature
Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, & the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain, 2022
When I grow up, I hope to write a book half as good as Power Struggles. Its narrative is elegant, engaging, accessible. Its insights will keep you thinking long after you read the last page. Power Struggles is that rare book: scholarly without being scholastic; intimately ethnographic without losing sight of the Big Picture; politically committed without succumbing to dogma. In my original book endorsement, I wrote that Power Struggles is “indispensable reading for energy justice in the age of climate crisis.” This is true. But Jaume Franquesa has given us something far more significant than an ethnographic masterpiece of renewable energy and its brutal inequalities. His vision refused the dominant fetish energy, piercing its ideological veil, laying bare the contradictions of capitalist power in the web of life. Power Struggles reads as a searing indictment of capitalist power as a Promethean drive to dominate humans by dominating the rest of life (and vice versa). For Franquesa, that Prometheanism does float in the philosophical ether; it is a class project of ideological domination and cultural devaluation, one that seeks to mystify capitalism’s real movements of accumulation, inequality, and laying waste to life, labor and landscapes. Preface to the Spanish translation of Jaume Franquesa, Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, & the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain (Madrid: Errata Naturae, forthcoming late 2022; 2018 original, Indiana University Press).
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
This article examines sustainable development discourses while addressing the unsustainable structures within which these discourses take place. The main research question concerns how sustainability is understood in relation to class and capitalism and what ideologies are expressed as neutral in the anodyne context of public information. Critical discourse analysis is applied as a method to examine how sustainable development is shaped through the construction of problems, responsibilities and solutions in a Swedish municipal magazine. The analysis reveals two parallel constructions: hyper-politicised discourses about free enterprise and a trivialisation of discourses about socio-economic challenges. Texts about social care and social responsibility are represented in the form of banal politics, transforming conflict into consensus, while stories about the business sector rely heavily on market rationales stressing the importance of political intervention to increase the attractive...
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The concept of the "green economy" was revived after the global financial crisis of 2007-2011, without any consensus on its definition. i Various interpretations of the financial crisis have surfaced to frame the different narratives on the green economy, with different remedies proposed. This paper provides a cosmological and discourse analysis of these diverse narratives of the green economy, namely green revolution, green transformation, green growth, green resilience, new developmentalism, and just transitions (decoupling). While the rational scientific method has been the dominant mode of research for the modern and postmodern eras, this paper seeks to contribute to the broadening of our current worldview to include more intuitive, imaginative, speculative, and visionary aspects. Insights from an emerging archetypal cosmology provide a critique of the underlying assumptions found in the current discourses on the green economy, and empower us to re-imagine sustainability. This emerging cosmology seeks to bring a corrective to the more dominant, rational-discursive, one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all free-market economic view of life and its misenchantment visible in (green) techno-science and the increased financialization of labor and nature. ii Anchored in the bioregion, the emerging cosmology re-imagines existing patterns of economics, polity, and socio-cultural life. It is through morphic resonance that these emerging life-sustaining habits germinate and grow, mitigating the capture of the state by the economically and politically elitist networks that often exacerbate injustice, poverty, exploitation, and degradation.