Admitting uncertainty, transforming engagement: towards caring practices for sustainability beyond climate change

Saurabh Arora

doi:10.1007/s10113-019-01528-1

Abstract

Transformations to sustainability for addressing climate change are now more urgent than ever. This paper argues that such transformations are firstly required in modernist practices that militate against sustainability due to their constitution by the fallacy of human control. The latter points to the conceit of suppressing uncertainties in knowledge, commandeering agency from ‘above’, standardising governance, harming marginalised ecologies and disqualifying practices inferiorised as ‘primitive’, ‘irrational’ or ‘vernacular’. Undoing the fallacy of control, by admitting uncertainties, modernist practices may become caring through transformative engagement with others. I propose four aspects of such transformative engagement: (a) egalitarian commitment to distributing epistemological privilege; (b) ontological sensitivity, by taking seriously the relational bases of others’ knowing; (c) learning for divergence from others; and (d) affinity in alterity across widening divergence. These aspects are proposed not as fully formed principles, but rather as questions to be reworked in ongoing encounters and struggles for sustainability and climate justice. The aim is to nurture other-than-modern understandings of climate challenges and to help build multiple coexisting pathways of resilience, adaptation and mitigation.

Highlights

Transformations to sustainability for addressing the challenges of climate change are more urgent than ever
Cooperation may be afforded between diverse caring practices to address the challenges of climate change and wider unsustainability, through adaptation, mitigation and resilience-building activities
I have argued that resisting the fallacy of control underpinning modernist practices is critical in struggles for transformations to sustainability

Summary

Introduction

Transformations to sustainability for addressing the challenges of climate change are more urgent than ever. Transformative engagement, as outlined below, might enable practices to collectively become caring of vulnerable and neglected social and ecological worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) In this way, cooperation may be afforded between diverse caring practices to address the challenges of climate change and wider unsustainability, through adaptation, mitigation and resilience-building activities. Paying attention to this changing relational composition of diverse other hybrid collectives, requires that caring practices take each other’s ontological foundations seriously (Viveiros de Castro 2003; Candea 2011) This ‘taking seriously’ implies that caring practitioners slow down the explication of the processes and products of other practices, to not readily resolve others’ knowledges into particulars and universals, truths and falsehoods, facts and fantasies (Stengers 2003). Transforming this condition away from hierarchical ordering and the fallacy of control, through egalitarian commitment, ontological sensitivity and learning for divergence (rather than convergence), might be critical for realising multiple coexisting pathways to resilience and wider sustainability, with the aim of addressing and moving beyond the challenges of climate change

Summary of the argument

Concluding remarks