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Looks at how to make sustainability less illusory and more tangible
Introduction
The world has changed immensely since the Earth Summit in Rio of 1992. China has taken on a tremendous role in the global economy; a realignment in global geopolitics came after September 11 2001; the Washington Consensus came to an end in Latin America with the wave of democratically progressive governments; the dismantling of really existing socialism became irreversible in the 1990s. And now we have the popular insurrections in North Africa and the Middle East. These changes point in contradictory directions - some reinforcing, some challenging conventional sustainable development views and agendas. More than ever, it is imperative to go forward, but how? How to make sustainability less illusory and more tangible? Some current narratives of transition give us some clues; they involve radical proposals for moving towards a pluriverse. We can also apply novel ideas of design to think about a transition to a truly sustainable planet.
Sustainable development (SD) was riddled with tensions and contradictions from the outset. Many pointed out the impossibility of harmonizing the goals of development with the needs of nature within any known economic framework, as the Brundtland report and Agenda 21 - bravely perhaps but implausibly - purported to do. At present, it is clear that SD amounts to no more than 'reducing unsustainability' (Ehrenfeld, 2008). Flawed from the start, the SD movement can be said to have arrived to its natural end.
Discourses of transition: Emerging trends
Arguments about the need for an epochal transition are a sign of the times; they reflect the depth of the contemporary crises. Transition discourses (TDs) are emerging today with particular richness and intensity from a multiplicity of sites, principally social movements, some civil society NGOs, and from intellectuals with significant connections to environmental and cultural struggles. TDs are prominent in several fields, including those of culture, ecology, religion and spirituality, and alternative science (e.g., living systems and complexity).
A hallmark of contemporary TDs is the fact that they posit radical cultural and institutional transformations - indeed, a transition to an altogether different world . This is variously conceptualized in terms of a paradigm shift, a change of civilizational model, or even the coming of an entirely...