Sustainable futures: an agenda for action

Abstract

Studying climate change and our insufficient and counterproductive responses can easily lead to despair. In his new book, Raphael Kaplinsky sets out to offer an explicitly optimistic guide to addressing climate change, based on an analysis of economic growth cycles and the ‘techno-economic paradigms’ that drive them. Kaplinsky, therefore, aims his book at both an academic and a popular audience, especially policy-makers. In doing so, some of the more complex and hotly debated issues and suggested prescriptions in environmental politics and transition studies are set aside. The text can be separated into three sections. The first, consisting of chapters one to five, deals with the origins of our contemporary crises. Here, the primary contribution of Sustainable futures is found in its novel deployment of the techno-economic paradigm concept to historicize and diagnose the climate emergency. Techno-economic paradigms are constellations of social, political, economic and technological relations that form a ‘synergistic fit’ and define economic and social activity for a period typically lasting five to six decades. Each paradigm is characterized by a heartland technology, ‘which has ubiquitous use … offers major reductions in cost and the possibility of new products … and has no physical limits to its supply’ (p. 3). Arguably, the most recent dominant paradigm, that of ‘mass production’, is giving way to an emergent ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT) paradigm.