In advance of the World Social Science Forum I have been in Durban with an inspiring group of researchers and activists to discuss transformations to sustainability. It has been incredibly useful to share insights and perspectives over the past three days.
The workshop was organised by the International Social Science Council. With seven other groups, the STEPS Centre was selected from nearly one hundred applicants to join a workshop under the Council’s ‘Transformations for Sustainability’ programme, which forms part of the international ‘Future Earth’ platform. The programme will fund a set of ‘transformative knowledge networks’, which will work together to build a shared, and open body of knowledge for use by researchers and practitioners.
The workshop was facilitated by Margaret Krebs (Stanford University) and Valerie Brown (Australian National University), who brought her unparalleled thirty years of experience, guiding more than 300 social learning workshops across four continents.
We discussed approaches to workshop facilitation across diverse stakeholder groups holding different forms of knowledge and often divergent interests. We also learned and reflected on desired qualities of networks, and what would be most likely to lead to successful collaboration across the different groups represented.
Yesterday, some of the workshop participants took part in a panel that had been organised as part of the World Social Science Forum. The session, entitled ‘Social Transformation for a Just and Sustainable World’, heard a keynote from Valerie Brown, and then interventions from different TKN colleagues.
Bringing together different knowledge cultures
Valerie explained that she was talking about nothing less than a new step in human evolution, to a point when our collective understanding could be mobilised to address sustainability challenges. This required bringing together different knowledge cultures, and a move away from divisive ‘BUT/OR’ thinking towards a third space of ‘AND’ thinking where divergent viewpoints found a way to coexist.
In response, Uliana Pysmenna of the Ukraine National Academy of Sciences explained how they applying some of these ideas to political economy of energy transformations, Elvin Nyukuri (University of Nairobi) talked about their network’s focus on sustainability in coastal zones.
Marco Armiero (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) queried the possibility (and necessary desirability) of “AND” thinking and third spaces, pointing towards invevitable struggles, tensions and conflicts that characterise transformations to sustainability. And Anabel Marin (CENIT, Argentina) spoke of tensions and conflicts around the future of seeds and agriculture in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay).
Mutizwa Mukute (Garden Africa) talked about ‘T-learning’ (transgressive learning, as well as transformative learning). Rania Masri (Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship) continued the discussion, raising important points about the difficulty of working across all sides in the context of struggles in the Middle East.
David Iwaniec (Arizona State University) talked about his work on visioning sustainable cities, and Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu-Natal) gave examples of the current challenges to social justice in South Africa.
Dilemmas in making alliances
The discussion touched on some of the differences in approaches that had been evident from the earlier days of the workshop (alongside enduring questions of who could/ should be included in purposive transformation processes). Do we try to work with actors whose behaviours are deeply contradictory to our understanding of sustainability (such as imperialist states or some multinationals), or do we focus our efforts on organising and mobilising across shared communities to challenge these (often powerfully dominant) groups?
Bringing a pathways approach perspective to the discussion, I suggested that often these dominant actors are wedded to pathways that – by their nature – remove the possibility of ‘AND’ thinking. They close down alternatives and are often incapable of co-existing with a diversity of other pathways, both as a result of their structures and the forms of knowledge that they engender.
There is a need, therefore, not only to seek a ‘third space’ that supports more sustainable alternatives to emerge, but also for struggles that focus on weakening those dominant actors (and pathways) that stand in the way of transformations to sustainability.
The risk with this approach is of course labelling everyone whose thinking is too hard for you to understand as ‘standing in the way of transformation’. This trend was very clear in the workshop where some participants started with staple anti-imperialism rhetoric only to switch their fire to academic disciplines (‘anti-disciplinary’). ‘neoliberal universities married to global capitalism’ and finally to the truth itself (suggesting to replace ‘truth to power’ by ‘power to power’). Such discourses provided foundations for most of the 20th century dictatorship and I see them equally as no more dangerous to sustainability than those ‘imperialists’. Thus, indeed, choose your alliances!
I enjoyed this post. To achieve the innovative solutions that policy makers of all stripes regularly seek, there is a need to bring different ‘knowledge cultures’ to inform solutions. I have referred elsewhere to the role of different kinds of knowledge in community problem-solving, and how bringing different knowledges together across entrenched social divides is a way to spark social innovation (see e.g. Eversole 2015). Yet this kind of ‘spark’ only seldom happens organically – for all the reasons Adrian highlights. Still, I would go further. Not only are ‘dominant actors’ ‘wedded to pathways that..remove the possibility of AND thinking’; look further: ALL actors (dominant or not) have logics and frameworks that influence how they see problems and solutions (and other actors!). Aleh’s observation of the ‘staple..rhetorics’ of those in the workshop resonates with my experiences. I’ve always found loud subaltern voices as disturbing and prone to stereotype others as loud dominant-group voices. And in the process, key knowledges are overlooked, voices of all kinds silenced, and important problems remain unsolved.
Alliances or partnerships are interesting things – you can’t force anyone to work with you, or even agree with your way of seeing the world, but that doesn’t mean there is no grounds for a relationship. The SDGs being launched this week have the potential to create political space around big-picture shared aspirations on the international stage. If very different actors agree that something is important, this creates a starting point for ‘AND thinking’. Will it be possible to bring different kinds of knowledge together to spark real change? There are examples of where it has been done before. But it does require a willingness to listen and learn from each other – even (especially!) those who see things quite differently.