The growing Environment and Sustainability list is at the heart of our remit to publish quality scholarship that addresses global social challenges.
This list covers a broad spectrum of issues and focuses on the social justice dimensions of environmental sustainability, including in: climate change, environmental politics, developing sustainable economies, transport and sustainability and environmentalist thought and ideology.
The new open access Global Social Challenges Journal incorporates these themes to facilitate critical thinking across disciplines and fields.
Environment and Sustainability
The distinctiveness of urban processes and dynamics in Africa are of global significance. Achieving sustainable transitions in African cities must necessarily engage with theory and practice, which are derived out of context, and applied in systems and structures that are not globally understood. As sites of knowledge production, universities on the continent have a key role to play in addressing Sustainable Development Goal 11, which seeks to make cities sustainable. The ‘third mission’ of universities, which involves shaping societal benefits, extends their traditional mandates of research and higher education teaching beyond and across academic disciplines, to engage in local and global partnerships. Evidence from a range of knowledge co-production programmes anchored at African universities show that transdisciplinary approaches have made positive contributions to society. With the goal of realising the full potential of sustainability transitions, a network of scholars convened around a series of workshops to understand and enhance the effectiveness of the New African Urban University. Through processes of knowledge exchange, the network showed that realising the full potential is hampered by challenges of working across and beyond disciplines, highlighting the structural and systemic shifts required within African universities. Furthermore, partnering across the Global North and South in international transdisciplinary programmes is beset by power dynamics that shape assumptions and practices based on universalised assumptions about both theory and practice. This article outlines dimensions of an agenda to inform a more global and inclusive positioning of African universities as agents of social change.
Since the late 1980s, academics and activists have been drawing attention to a slow-moving global crisis: the ongoing destruction of global linguistic diversity. Despite this attention, language loss has proceeded unabated, and conservative estimates now suggest that around half the world’s languages will no longer be in use by the end of this century. In this provocation, I argue that only a global mass movement has the capacity to change the course of this crisis. I furthermore argue that a rights-based approach, centred on language rights, is our best bet for organising such a movement. Drawing on social movement studies, and my own experience as a language rights researcher and advocate, I explore three key areas where language rights provide the foundations for a mass movement in defence of linguistic diversity. First, I look at how language rights provide a discursive frame that resonates with other movements and clarifies the problem that needs to be addressed. Second, I look at how the concept of language rights can help recruit individuals and organisations into a mass movement and sustain their involvement in the cause. Third, I discuss how language rights provide a basis for effective collective action. In the conclusion I briefly discuss some of the challenges that will need to be overcome in forming a global mass movement for language rights.
Central to the more-than-human form of biocultural diversity conservation linked to Maya Ixil practising and living tiichajil and its txaa norms is a more-than-human identity that animates agency beyond the human. Drawing these terms and concepts together, the biodiversity conservation models that they create in their application to the land is an everyday performance and interaction of caretaking with and of diversities of life. This article explores the biocultural, spiritual and cosmological relationships of caretaking in the milpa according to one Indigenous knowledge system that manages the land from embodied, multispecies, networks of reciprocity, that are practised in a peopled, bottom-up model, built in equality, for biocultural diversity’s transmission to next generations.
Emphasised in the analysis of data collected from multispecies ethnography with the Maya Ixil, I argue that expression of these embodied and more-than-human Maya Ixil knowledge systems not only ‘decolonises’ the Ixil from historical and globalised systems of oppression, thereby addressing historical inequalities, but that the other-than-human agencies implicit within them demonstrate a model of relationality articulated through local languages and transgenerational and multispecies biocultural expression in the very real local expressions of the global buen vivir, decolonial and rematriation movement. The Maya Ixil demonstrate not only the theoretical plausibility of forms of community beyond globalised anthropocentric society rooted in colonial structures of inequality, but that the living networks that tiichajil speaks to and txaa guides the human right relation within, provide an alternative model for human behaviour to preserve biodiversity from food systems generating food sovereignties.
Drawing on a methodological approach that involved visual ethnography and combined content and narrative analysis, my research aims to analyse the role that emotions play in the territorial–ontological conflict between British Columbia provincial government, Coastal GasLink and the Wet’suwet’en. Using high-quality online audiovisual material produced by the Wet’suwet’en – allowing a critical perspective throughout the article on the politics of self-representation – I was able to get into the conflict with a phenomenological approach, employing my senses to analyse body movements, tone of voice and language. Theoretically, I articulate a framework made up of Ingold’s phenomenology, Blaser’s ontological conflicts and Escobar’s studies of culture. Then, I build on the spiderweb, a metaphor developed by Ingold, to expand the scope of González-Hidalgo’s emotional political ecologies. The results show that Coastal GasLink, taking culture ‘as a symbolic structure’, proposes as a central mitigation strategy, through their environmental impact assessment, what I call ‘an ontological interruption’ of the Yintakh. Besides, I demonstrate that the processes of political inter-subjectivation sought at the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre help understand the worry, frustration and stress of the Wet’suwet’en facing the world-creating practices of Coastal GasLink. On the other hand, the Healing Centre also reveals how the affections for the other-than-human and their spiderweb (Yintakh or relational world) inform Wet’suwet’en resistance. Lastly, I unveil how Coastal GasLink and the Ministry of Aboriginal Rights, through practices of inclusion and gender equality, seek to blur radical cultural differences, delegitimise the Wet’suwet’en precolonial governance system, and create affections for the Western-modern world.
This article shares the author’s reflections on what decolonial cracks for recreating UK universities as sustainable pluriversities emerge from encounters and engagement in three arts–research co-productions relating to sustainability and justice: a training process led by a professional storyteller on converting political-ecology research into short, spoken ten-minute stories, the co-production of visual summaries and a role-playing game on sustainable value chains, and the collaboration producing an immersive audiovisual exhibition on ‘Can we fly-less?’.
This article makes an empirically based case that engaging in co-production on arts–research knowledge translation can help identify decolonial cracks to sow the seeds of pluriversity, that is, epistemically diverse institutions for public good that recognise present patterns of colonially rooted injustices and unsustainability, in UK academia. Drawing on relational, deep-listening conversations with six collaborators on the projects, three artists and three researchers, the article highlights benefits arising from the creative collaborations, such as social, transformative learning and critical introspection, and research acquiring a life beyond the page and becoming accessible to a broader audience. However, they also emphasised institutional barriers such as perverse incentives in current academic conventions, such as little or no recognition for knowledge translation, unequal starting points among permanent/precarious or salaried/non-salaried staff, and uncooperative monitoring and application systems, which render identifying these decolonial cracks and seeds necessary. With a methodology rooted in its conceptual, relational approach, the article highlights decolonial cracks in current academia, and transformative seeds to reimagine it in a more decolonial and sustainable image befitting of a pluriversity.
‘New economics’ discourses – comprising diverse approaches advocated as more just and sustainable replacements of dominant neoclassical and neoliberal economic perspectives – have been criticised as insufficiently coherent to form the ‘discourse coalitions’ necessary to enter the mainstream. To date there has been little systematic exploration of the agreement or divergence in new economics discourses. Here, we conduct a qualitative systematised review of new economics literature in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to analyse stances towards the economic status quo and the depth of change advocated in it, such as fundamental and systemic transformation or more superficial reformist or accepting types of change that mostly maintain current economic systems. We interpreted authors’ stances towards six key status quo themes: capitalism; neoliberalism; GDP-based economic growth; debt-based money; globalisation; and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the 525 documents analysed, there was relative consensus that neoliberalism needed transforming, stances towards GDP-based growth substantially diverged (from transformative to reformist/accepting), and stances towards the SDGs were mostly accepting, although the status quo themes tended to be infrequently mentioned overall. Different new economics approaches were associated with diverging stances. We suggest that alignment against neoliberalism and towards the SDGs may provide strategic coalescing points for new economics. Because stances towards core problematised aspects of mainstream economics were often not articulated, we encourage new economics scholars and practitioners to remain explicit, aware and reflexive with regard to the economic status quo, as well as strategic in their approach to seeking economic transformation.
This chapter explores the biopolitical ‘effects’ of ESD interventions in terms of the subjectivities and conceptions of sustainable lifestyles that they produce in different socio-economic and geographical contexts. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the empirical material alongside some reflections on methodological challenges involved in studying biopolitical ‘effects’. The chapter then proceeds with a comparative biopolitical analysis of such effects in discrete socio-economic and geographical ESD settings. This analysis brings attention to the different conceptions of sustainable lifestyles that are produced among students and how they understand their everyday lives, and constitute themselves as agents, in relation to sustainable development. Attention is further drawn to the notions of responsibility that are produced and where responsibility for sustainable development is located. Thereafter, the analysis closes in on the students’ engagement with democratic decision-making within ESD activities, and how they think about themselves as shapers of sustainable development through these initiatives. Finally, attention is drawn to how students situate themselves geographically in relation to sustainable development and how they engage with the key rationale of ESD suggesting that the local community is the most promising arena for transformative action.
This final chapter concludes the book. The first part of the chapter summarizes and discusses the main findings and themes of the book. Contributions to previous research and missing pieces are also brought to the fore. The second part of the chapter seeks to intervene in the world of ESD policy and practice by raising issues around what affirmative alternatives there might be to current modes of biopolitical differentiation in global ESD implementation – that is, alternatives that take seriously UNESCO’s vision of a more just and sustainable world.
This chapter and the next explore the world’s largest ESD programme – Eco-Schools – through comparative biopolitical analysis across sites and scales. Combined, the two chapters probe how the programme is governed globally, and how it is unpacked in different local contexts in a world marked by deep inequality. The present chapter focuses on the rationalities and techniques through which the programme is rendered governable globally. The chapter begins with a short introduction to Eco-Schools and to the programme’s national operators in Sweden, South Africa, Rwanda and Uganda. Thereafter, the chapter proceeds with an analysis of how Eco-Schools is governed across scales. Through this analysis, the (neo)liberal biopolitical elements that pervade the programme are laid bare. These include: the programme’s efforts to target and transform everyday life through education; techniques of self-management and performativity; decentred power structures; and the overall logic of global inclusion. A biopolitical understanding of these modalities of government will prove important as it will pave the way for the subsequent chapter’s findings from different local Eco-School settings.
