Dynamic Sustainabilities: Linking technology, environment and social justice
- When?
- Thursday 27 May 2010, 13:00
- Where?
- 45B AZ 04
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Prof Melissa Leach, Director ESRC STEPS, Centre Leader IDS Knowledge, Technology and Society (KNOTS) team
Climate change and global pandemics both highlight the complex, multi-scale, uncertain dynamics that pervade societal problems today - and also the circulation of highly contrasting narratives about these dynamics, why they matter and to
whom, and what to do about them.
This seminar will share how researchers at the STEPS Centre are thinking about sustainability challenges in this light, in ways that incorporate explicit concern for equity, social justice and the wellbeing of poor and marginalised groups. It will lay out and illustrate a pathways approach, showing how amidst complexity, different actors produce particular narratives which frame systems and their dynamics in different ways, promote particular goals and values, and justify particular pathways of response. These range from a variety of crisis narratives to alternative but often marginalised narratives variously emphasising long-term structural, land use and environmental change, local knowledge and
livelihood goals. Governance pressures often lead powerful actors and institutions to 'close down' around narratives that emphasise stability, underplaying longerterm, less controllable dynamics. Yet building pathways to sustainability requires, it
will be argued, diverse strategies to 'open up' to embrace flexibility, diversity, and reflexivity, and to enable a progressive politics of sustainability.
A PDF of the presentation is available:
Melissa Leach Presentation (445.16KB - Requires Adobe Reader)
