Community perceptions of sustainability: (Re)framing what matters for more just, ethical, and liveable municipalities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Municipal governments and community organisations are key stakeholders in the mobilisation of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through opportunities to make and implement sustainability policies at local levels. However, as perceptions of sustainability are normalised through globalising, colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist discourses, alternative stories of sustainability become marginalised. In response, this article positions diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting perceptions of sustainability within a relational assemblage to map the affects of difference between normalising and alternative perceptions of sustainability in local governance contexts of Saskatchewan, Canada. This article adopts cartographic and diffractive storytelling to map diverse perceptions of sustainability gathered through a series of focus groups and a Skills Forum event, as part of the Governing Sustainable Municipalities (GSM) project. By reading perceptions of sustainability through each other, economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability and diverse perceptions of sustainability from diverse stakeholders come into an entangled/differentiated relationship. As there is no central point of reference in a relational assemblage, heterogeneous perceptions of sustainability are held together through complex patternings of diverse, multiple, and often sticky, uneven knottings that dislodge hierarchical assumptions about what counts as sustainability. Providing an emplaced and situated account of perceptions of sustainability, we illustrate how municipal and organisational actors can transform through co-implicated relationships with social and material forces. To this end, assemblage thinking provides important anticolonial possibilities for sustainability policy making and implementation in the municipal sector.