Pathways to sustainability: perspectives and provocations

摘要

By sketching out the conceptual framework for research at the Economic and Social Research Council-funded STEPS (Social, Technological, and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre at Sussex University, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Andy Stirling, in Dynamic Sustainabilities, seek to reframe the contested concept of sustainability. This is not a project for the faint-hearted, given the fierce debates surrounding the concept and the many divergent programmes of action for which it has been invoked. In calling for "a more concrete clarification of what is meant by 'sustainability'" (page 41), the authors are not seeking some new, more authoritative definition with which to adjudicate what is and is not sustainable. Instead they make the very process of clarifying the diversity of sustainability frarnings and the pathways for achieving them central to what sustainability is all about. Sustainability, they explain, is not some fixed state to be achieved but "necessarily a political process ... [that] requires an opening up of debate through a diversification of knowledge bases and processes of inclusive deliberation at all steps" (page 64).