Sustainability: a Critical, Comparative and Relational Approach

Campbell, Ben

Abstract

Sustainability was born in “a messy mutualistic politics of care”, but has come to be dominated by economists’ and engineers’ solutions (Stirling 2019:19). Anthropologists’ disciplinary orientation to cultural difference has led in directions of better understanding such mutual politics of care. They have done so in contexts of biodiversity conservation where the western concept of sustainability would be a very strange idea, as it involves presuming to know and be able to manage the non-human world, with humans having the upper hand. The comparative scenarios of relations of power and protection are entirely at odds with each other. While many advocates for greater sustainability bring necessary attention to planetary boundaries that are shooting beyond safe limits, the broader environmental turn since the last three decades has brought anthropologists to realise how culturally strange it is comparatively speaking, for humans to contemplate an exterior natural environment separate from them, and to see human action as exceptional to the species, conducted within worlds of meaning and intersubjectivity, excluding all non-humans in such association.

Citation

Campbell, B. (in press). Sustainability: a Critical, Comparative and Relational Approach. In Is the Concept of Sustainability Misleading?. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg

• Acceptance Date: Jan 15, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jan 26, 2024
• Book Title: Is the Concept of Sustainability Misleading?
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2164856
• Publisher URL: https://pus.unistra.fr/presentation-des-pus/#