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- Convenors:
-
Nina Moeller
(University of Southern Denmark)
Laura Rival (University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) SR1
- Start time:
- 18 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the heterogeneous socio-ecological effects of the diverse understandings of 'sustainability' underpinning different transition initiatives, and critically asks: Whose green? Who benefits and who suffers from particular framings and associated actions?
Long Abstract:
The growth of the technosphere, climate crises, shifting species distribution and other phenomena contribute to increasingly dramatic socio-ecological changes across the planet, impacting livelihoods and indeed survival opportunities.
These changes are experienced and imagined by a variety of actors, in a variety of ways, leading to a variety of different responses. Whether top-down or bottom-up, initiatives for transitions to 'sustainability' are multiplying. From 'green economy' strategies and high-tech fixes to grassroots initiatives and social movements, envisioned sustainability transitions and the actions taken to bring these about take on a variety of forms, at different scales, and all over the world: offshore wind farms, biorefineries, carbon markets, geoengineering, tax advantages for electric cars, photovoltaic roof tiles, guerrilla gardening, ecosystem restoration camps, permaculture conventions, off-grid communities, indigenous uprisings, to name but a few. These different initiatives embody conflicting visions of a 'green' future and the pathways to get there.
This panel explores the heterogeneous socio-ecological effects of the diverse understandings of 'sustainability' underpinning different transition initiatives, and critically asks: Whose green? Who benefits and who suffers from particular framings and associated actions? How are relations of power (gender, race, class and entangled inequalities) reconfigured by green transitions? What kinds of more-than-human relations are fostered or undermined? Which particular values orient any given transition initiative and its version of sustainability?
We especially invite papers which address the contribution anthropology can make to a better understanding of the dynamics and politics of contemporary systemic transition.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses findings from Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature, a three-year project in Sheffield, UK. It shows how policies to promote wellbeing of humans and 'nature' are muted through decision-making rhetorics that box environmental imaginaries within neoliberal governance models.
Paper long abstract:
The interrelationship of human and 'natural' environments underpins the quest for sustainable development. Yet the understanding of human interdependence with a healthy planetary environment that is the foundation for sustainability discourses is not matched by investment in the provision, care and animation of natural spaces in the cities where human impacts are concentrated.
Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN) is a multi-disciplinary investigation of these interrelationships in the city of Sheffield, UK. One strand of the project focuses on translations between academic research and situated practice, working with stakeholders to understand how urban nature is seen to create the conditions for wellbeing, and how these understandings intersect with the logics of funding and investment.
Analysing emerging findings from this project and drawing on scholarship on everyday 'institutional work' (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) this paper exposes the mismatch between holistic logics of wellbeing and an austerity agenda that demands short-term cash savings to the public purse as the price for investment in the natural environment. It shows how arguments in favour of wellbeing and quality of life are muffled through rhetorics of legitimacy (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) that box environmental imaginaries within neoliberal models of governance and participation.
Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S. R. Clegg et al (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organisation studies (pp. 215-254). London: SAGE.
Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2005). Rhetorical strategies of legitimacy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(1), 35-67.
Paper short abstract:
Wales' One Planet Development policy enables green lifestyle migration. The extant population's ways of life and land use are criticised by a dominant environmental ideology that makes resistance difficult. This interplay of policy, morality and settlement invites parallels with settler colonialism.
Paper long abstract:
Transition is often presented as a grass-roots movement that empowers "local communities" to organise and participate. Transition discourse operates at the nexus of global-local interaction to bring local knowledge into conversation with global environmental systems, and vice versa. Accepting the sometimes contentious and exclusionary nature of the term community, this paper takes a further step towards critiquing the transition movement, with a particular focus on green lifestyle migration.
This paper focuses on the example of "One Planet Development" (OPD)—a rural development model which encourages Green lifestyle migration by relaxing planning restrictions for demonstrably zero-carbon smallholdings—to examine the problematic meeting of "migration" and "transition". The OPD rural development model is a "Good Thing", but one which contains a number of problematic contradictions.
Foremost of these is the coupling of migration to the desire for change. Members of the extant rural population resist the transition discourse and the notion that their ways of life are wrong and must change to fit migrant aspirations. The substance of this resistance needs urgent attention. The dominance of the environmentalist ideology, and its inherent perceived morality, creates problems for those who would resist it. Coupled to this migration trend is the creation of specific policy frameworks to support transition. When viewed as the desire for a low-carbon future, such a policy seems outwardly benign. Using ethnographic comparison, this paper argues however that this practice has more in common with settler colonialism than many of its advocates would care to admit.
Paper short abstract:
The Regional Amazonian University IKIAM has been conceived as a catalyst for Ecuador's economic transition towards sustainability. I explore this site of friction with attention to the way in which pathways to alternative sustainabilities are opened up and foreclosed in the Amazon and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
Initiatives for transitions to 'green' production and consumption patterns are emerging and multiplying, at different scales and all over the world. The visions of 'sustainability' underpinning these initiatives are diverse, and their heterogeneous socio-ecological effects raise urgent questions of justice. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, I investigate a green transition initiative in the Ecuadorian Amazon: the Regional Amazonian University IKIAM, which has been explicitly conceived as a catalyst for Ecuador's transition from extraction and export of oil and other sub-soil resources towards a 'green and sustainable economy'.
IKIAM means 'forest' or 'nature' in Shuar, one of nine Amazonian languages spoken in Ecuador. With its 93,000 hectare 'living laboratory', the university is a site of 'friction': between the forest and the urban, between indigenous and industrial science, between conservation and extractivism, between commons and the market, and between different versions of 'green'. Such friction is not only conflictual, it is also 'interconnection across difference', productive of new relations and interactions (Tsing 2005).
I explore this friction with particular attention to the way in which pathways to alternative sustainabilities are opened up and foreclosed, in the Amazon and beyond. Working with indigenous midwives, healers and the university's hygienic services association, amongst others, I inquire into how stakes get defined, pathways made visible and socio-ecological risks and benefits distributed. I highlight the variety of perspectives on 'what the region needs' that is obscured by IKIAM's slogan 'a university in the Amazon, for the Amazon'.
Paper short abstract:
We explore the assemblage of narratives of environmental responsibility and sustainability in synthetic biology. Drawing on Strathern's notion of 'fragile futures' we interrogate the partiality of existing anthropocentric and market-driven narratives of 'green' production.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on an ethnography of 'Responsible Innovation in Practice', we explore the assemblage of narratives of environmental responsibility and sustainability in a synthetic biology collaboration. Drawing on Strathern's (2008) notion of 'fragile futures' we consider how ethnographic knowledge can be used to interrogate formal narratives of environmental accountability, and the partiality of the anthropocentric and market-driven aspirations to 'green' production.
One of the promissory roles of synthetic biology is the potentially to transition away from reliance on petrochemical processing toward 'greener' bio-based modes of production. As the science matures, industry leaders and small to medium scale enterprises (SMEs), supported by government initiatives, are increasingly investing in the development of synthetic biology collaborations. Ensuring the sustainability of biotechnological advancements is central to current Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) frameworks, embraced by UK Research Councils. As such, the aspiration, promise and rhetoric of 'green' production is highly visible in narratives of synthetic biology.
Using ethnographic data from a UK industry-academic synthetic biology collaboration we interrogate concepts of environmental responsibility, exploring the unstable assemblage of conflicting values involved. This assemblage takes place against the drive to maximize capacity, stability and sustainability in the wider material, political and knowledge economies. We use this analysis to explore how researchers engage with the conflict of securing 'greener' access to products which may themselves have questionable environmental legacies and futures. We conclude by exploring what a meaningfully 'win' for 'green' strategies might constitute in this current terrain of synthetic biology.
Paper short abstract:
Small-scale fisheries in the Finnish archipelago are struggling with growing tension between authorities, environmentalist, climate change, growing seal population and alien species. Through anthropology, can we find 'green' that would benefit all the stakeholders, and promote sustainability?
Paper long abstract:
The small-scale coastal fisheries worldwide are struggling with various environmental conflicts. Such is the case also in the Finnish archipelago. Finnish small-scale fisheries have gone through great changes over time, especially from 1960s onwards, due to i.e. urbanization, but also due climate change. For example, since the 1990s, the Archipelago Sea rarely freezes over anymore, thus preventing practicing the old traditional winter-seining. The amount of small-scale fisheries have decreased drastically within the last decades and the conditions of practicing small-scale coastal fishing have become more demanding.
The most crucial issues, according to the fishers themselves, are the dramatic increase in the populations of the grey seal and the great cormorant - both protected species. The struggle over right to use natural resources against these newcomers is both rhetorical but also physical. Also, in effort to maintain sustainable fish stocks, the regulation of fishing has become increasingly strict, focusing on the quotas, but also on the minimum lengths of caught fish. The relationships between fishers, environmentalist, researchers, recreational fishers and authorities has become tense.
This paper addresses the issue of multilayered disagreement over the notion of sustainability, what is "green" and who should have the right to access natural resources, in the perspective of socio-ecological systems of small-scale fisheries. From fishers' point of view, they are the ones who are in the biggest risk of becoming extinct. Through anthropological research, one can hope to find solutions that would benefit all stakeholders, including the animals.
Paper short abstract:
An ethnographic perspective on climate change adaptation strategies in an 'ecovillage' in Sub-Saharan Africa will be presented, engaging with global discourses on development, power relations and the different moralities underpinning socio-ecological transitions.
Paper long abstract:
Chololo 'ecovillage' is a place where 'ecological innovations' - such as 'improved stoves', 'improved seeds', 'improved livestock', and a water solar pump have been introduced in order to foster adaptation strategies to climate change. I conducted nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the 'ecovillage' of Chololo aimed to understand how and to what extent these technologies were embedded into people's everyday life, with a practice theory approach to sustainability and socio-ecological transitions.
In the emerging context of the Anthropocene - in which adaptation to local environmental challenges, national and global discourses on climate change, poverty reduction and development are deeply entangled - I focused my research on the following questions: how are current local institutions and histories related to everyday understandings of the environment, technology, and justice? What has been the impact of the introduction of technological innovations at the village level? Why are some technologies adopted whereas others are not and how are technologies reshaped in the process? Who, within the 'community', benefits from these innovations? When is it possible to claim that adaptation and mitigation strategies are appropriate and just?' In answering to these questions (drawing on participant observation, 60 interviews and 20 focus groups), particular attention is given to power relations and the different moralities underpinning socio-ecological transitions.