Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 144, February 2018, Pages 304-313
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Discursive Synergies for a ‘Great Transformation’ Towards Sustainability: Pragmatic Contributions to a Necessary Dialogue Between Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.08.025Get rights and content

Abstract

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal “Great Transformation” of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development – Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir – and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transformative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socio-economic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots (‘Achilles heels’) of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new “Great Transformation”. As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.

Section snippets

Introduction: Ecological Economics and Development

Ecological Economics (hereinafter EE) has been broadly called the “science of sustainability” (Costanza, 1991). Since the mid-1980s when a society and a journal were founded, EE scholars have been advocating a necessary dialogue between natural sciences and social sciences, more precisely, between economics and ecology. Following this multidisciplinary perspective, the EE community hesitantly engaged the debate on sustainable development (hereinafter SD)1

Setting the Scene: a Critical Analysis of Development

The notion of development did long enjoy a virtually unquestioned legitimacy since its debut in the political jargon (attributed to US President Truman's inaugural speech in 1949): from Rostow's ‘stages of economic growth’, through Dependency Theory and Endogenous Development, up to ‘sustainable development’, all have hailed the idea of development as the promised land of all historical trajectories.

Decades after the notion of ‘development’ spread around the globe, the vast majority of the

Human Development

The ideas of HD and more precisely of the Capability Approach (hereafter CA) have been gradually introduced to EE in the mid 2000's (Ballet et al., 2013; i.e. Lehtonen, 2004; Pelenc and Ballet, 2015; Sneddon et al., 2006). The fundamental question is whether the CA can offer suitable theoretical and ethical foundations (in particular, its idea of justice) for a great transformation towards global sustainability.

Ideas of Human Development (HD)6

Transformation Discourses

From the perspective of their content, what Escobar calls ‘discourses of transformation’ are not a novelty of the 21st Century; they are rather part of the long search for and practice of alternative ways of living, forged in the furnace of humanity's struggle for emancipation and enlightenment. What is remarkable about these alternative proposals, however, is that despite the fact that they typically arise from traditionally marginalized groups (often majorities rather than minorities within

Discursive Cross-pollination and Synergic Engagement Among Discourses

Having reviewed the three discourses HD, BV, and DG, this section seeks to assess the knowledge-gain and socio-political leverage that each discourse offers, on the one hand, and their blind spots and weaknesses (or ‘Achilles heels’), on the other. This will help pave the way towards understanding what can (and what cannot) be expected from each of the discourses as a contribution towards a “Great Transformation”, and how they could potentially fertilize and be articulated with each other.

Further Pragmatic Considerations Towards a Fruitful Dialogue Between BV, DG, and HD

The three discourses under consideration carry diverse symbolic and material markers which stem from their respective socio-cultural contexts of emergence: they are to be seen as situated discursive productions. The obstacles that transformative discourses face are not to be located mainly in a lack of conceptual or analytical clarity, but rather in the particularities of diverse geo-historical contexts and contingent moments, with their varying political and socio-cultural connectivity points (

Conclusion

This article is meant to contribute to an emerging research agenda on the question: How can complementarities among different transformation discourses be made fertile towards a global socio-ecological transition? (Acosta, 2014; Brand, 2015; Escobar, 2015, 2011; Kothari et al., 2015). This involves envisioning pathways towards a pluriverse, “a world in which many worlds fit” (Demaria and Kothari, 2017).

In the introduction to this article we provocatively argued that while the EE community has

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Joan Martinez-Alier for his uncompromising yet constructive critique of our text. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive and useful feedback.

Adrian E. Beling acknowledges the financial support of Paul + Maria Kremer Foundation and Julien Vanhulst acknowledges financial support from FONDECYT Project No. 1160186 (CONICYT - Chile).

Federico Demaria acknowledges the support of the European Research Council for the EnvJustice project (GA 695446) and

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