Abstract
Sustainability has become a powerful discourse, guiding the efforts of various stakeholders to find strategies for dealing with current and future social-ecological crises. To overcome the latter, we argue that sustainability discourse needs to be based on a critical-emancipatory conceptualization. Therefore, we engage two such approaches—environmental justice approaches informed by a plural understanding of justice and feminist political economy ones focusing on care—and their analytical potential for productive critique of normative assumptions in the dominant sustainability discourse. Both of these approaches highlight aspects of sustainability that are particularly relevant today. First, although sustainable development was conceptualized from the outset based upon a twofold notion of justice (intra- and intergenerational), the integration of justice in the dominant sustainability discourse and praxis often manifests merely as a normative aspiration. Meanwhile, the environmental justice and care approaches offer conceptualizations of justice that can act as a powerful lever and as transformation-strategy. Second, the dominant sustainability discourse largely remains within a neoliberal economic framework that continues to promote economic growth as the means to reach prosperity while neglecting the bases of every economy: care work and nature. Its focus lies solely on paid work and the market economy. By integrating (a) social and ecological ‘reproductivity’ (unpaid care and subsistence work as well as nature) and (b) democratic processes for just distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, as well as participatory equity in relevant decision making, feminist political economy and environmental justice approaches offer substantial strategies towards building humane, just and caring societies.
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Notes
This is the title of the main policy document of the UN Rio+20 conference (General Assembly 2012).
We use the terms “Global South/North” to refer to historically produced areas in today still inequitable relations of power, resource flows, and (access to/recognition in) knowledge production.
The term care describes tasks that are essential not only for individuals but also for the functioning of society, such as providing childcare, support for the elderly and sick (both paid and unpaid), and social engagement, in institutions and in private relationships. At times, care is used synonymously with the term reproduction or reproductive labor. In a broad understanding of care (Tronto 1993: 103), as used here, the term also includes care (work) for future generations, as well as for nature, animals and plants.
This term recognizes the environmental-justice analysis that inequitable human–human relations are in fact greatly affecting human-nature relations.
The second paragraph of the Johannesburg Declaration, adopted at the World Summit for Sustainable Development 2002, states: “We commit ourselves to building a humane, equitable, and caring global society, cognizant of the need for human dignity for all” (United Nations 2002).
The term „praxis” refers to the inevitable interconnectedness between theory and practice, it therefore implies that academic work is always also political.
In the context of such struggles, indigeneity is a strategic, not ‘essentialized’, identity used to gain recognition and participation rights in decision-making processes (at the UN, nation state, or regional levels) that affect the cultural survival of many peoples.
In terms of climate justice, for example, industrialized nations have incurred an enormous CO2 debt during their “development” that is responsible for climate change today, while less industrialized nations have not, or have just recently begun adding to the problem. How can this debt be “repaid” to those nations less responsible, who need modes of sustainable development to grant a decent standard of living to their citizens?
Since the middle of the 1980 s, the DAWN network, which today covers Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific, has been one of the strongest voices in the discourse on gender and (sustainable) development. It has influenced the discourse by offering holistic analyses and advancing alternatives from a Global South feminist perspective that is both grounded in women's experience and inspired by women's collective strategies and visions (DAWN 2015).
The Vorsorgendes Wirtschaften network has grown in the context of the German-speaking sustainability discourse. The work on this approach started in 1992, when feminists posed the question of what “sustainable economy from a female perspective” would look like and, thus, initiated a process that continues to this day, namely to identify the prerequisites for a caring economy (Jochimsen and Knobloch 2000: 15).
The contested idea of degrowth is advocated by the degrowth movement, which has shown that economic growth could be considered rather a threat than a condition for intragenerational and intergenerational justice, eroding the natural and social bases for a high quality of life for all. Therefore degrowth advocates call for the downscaling of production and consumption, following the argument that overconsumption lies at the root of long-term environmental issues and social inequalities. For a representative of the degrowth view, see Muraca (2012).
We note that such a notion of the human family is also evident in almost all other UN documents concerning sustainability too, including the Rio +20 Declaration (General Assembly 2012).
Abbreviations
- DAWN:
-
Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era
- CSA:
-
Community supported agriculture
- UNCED:
-
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
- WCED:
-
World Commission on Environment and Development
- UN Rio+20:
-
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
- UCCCRJ:
-
United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice
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Gottschlich, D., Bellina, L. Environmental justice and care: critical emancipatory contributions to sustainability discourse. Agric Hum Values 34, 941–953 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9761-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9761-9