Understanding and encouraging transformations to ... · •Structuration, practice and praxis...
Transcript of Understanding and encouraging transformations to ... · •Structuration, practice and praxis...
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www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Understanding and encouraging transformations to
sustainability
Melissa Leach
Keynote address to session on The Belmont Forum-NORFACE
Transformations to Sustainability Programme
World Social Science Forum, Fukuoka, 25-28 September 2018
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Intensifying sustainability challenges in a complex, interconnected world
• Risks and uncertainties
• Short-term shocks, long-term stresses
• Cross-scale interactions
• Technical, social and political dimensions
Rapid urbanisation
Epidemics, AMR
Climate change
Insecurity, extremism, migration
Digital economies and the future of work
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We need to find new transformative pathways ways……..
Leach, M., B. Reyers et al in press ‘Equity and Sustainability in the Anthropocene’, Global Sustanability
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Social sciences and humanities – potential contributions
• Bring insights and knowledge from multiple disciplines and fields - from political science to history, anthropology to art
• Challenge assumptions about (technical) solutions
• Keep attention to power relations centre stage
• Ensure concern with social justice, equity, fairness
• Appreciate diverse meanings and framings – of goals, means to reach them
• Bring nuance and adaptation to questions of acceleration and scalability
• Engage with complexity and uncertainty
• Work actively with knowledge-action relationships
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Many approaches – drawing on deeper theoretical debates
• Structural-historical analyses (Marx, Gramsci, Polanyi….)
• Systems approaches - social-ecological, socio-technical
• Agency and action
• Structuration, practice and praxis
• Epistemologies – ways of knowing, social constructivism, imaginaries, politics of knowledge
• Ontologies – ways of being, interactions with non-human natures and multiple species
• Diverse theories of power
• Questions of scale, impetus (local and global, bottom up and top down, multiple actors and alliances)
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‘Transformations to Sustainability’, new STEPS Centre Working Paper co-authored by Ian Scoones, Andy Stirling, Dinesh Abrol, Joanes Atela, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph, Hallie Eakin, Adrian Ely, Per Olsson, Laura Pereira, Ritu Priya, Patrick van Zwanenberg and Lichao Yang.
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Engaging with society
Co-design, co-construction, co-communication
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New ways of working - practical and political challenges
• Lack of institutional support for interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity
• Co-construction approaches are difficult – skills, patience• Internationally diverse and dispersed teams bring cultural
and management challenges• Risks – to careers, personal safety• Challenging incumbent power is challenging and can be
dangerous• Engaging in messy politics is inevitable, but
uncomfortable• Acknowledging our own positionalities is vital, and
requires reflexivity and humility
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Turning challenges into opportunitiesLooking forward to seeing the T2S projects chart new transformative pathways – towards sustainability, and in ways of working