Upfront

Sustainability: Design for the pluriverse

ARTURO ESCOBAR

Arturo Escobar is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Departmentof Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hilland associate editor of Development. His research interests arerelated to political ecology; the anthropology of development, socialmovements; Latin American development and politics. Escobar0sresearch uses critical techniques in his provocative analysis ofdevelopment discourse and practice in general. He also explorespossibilities for alternative visions for a post-development era. He is amajor figure in the post-development academic discourse, and aserious critic of development practices championed by westernindustrialized societies.

KEYWORDS transition; development; unsustainability; buen vivir

Introduction

The world has changed immensely since the Earth Summit in Rio of1992. China has taken on a tremen-dous role in the global economy; a realignment in global geopolitics came after September 112001; theWashington Consensus came to an end in Latin America with the wave of democratically progressivegovernments; the dismantling of really existing socialism became irreversible in the1990s. And now wehave the popular insurrections in North Africa and theMiddle East.These changes point in contradictorydirections ^ some reinforcing, some challenging conventional sustainable development views and agen-das. More than ever, it is imperative to go forward, but how? How to make sustainability less illusory andmore tangible? Some current narratives of transition give us some clues; they involve radical proposalsfor moving towards a pluriverse.We can also apply novel ideas of design to think about a transition to atruly sustainable planet.

Sustainable development (SD) was riddled with tensions and contradictions from the outset.Many pointed out the impossibility of harmonizing the goals of development with the needs of naturewithin any known economic framework, as the Brundtland report and Agenda 21 ^ bravely perhapsbut implausibly ^ purported to do. At present, it is clear that SD amounts to no more than ‘reducingunsustainability’ (Ehrenfeld, 2008). Flawed from the start, the SD movement can be said to have arrivedto its natural end.

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Discourses of transition: Emergingtrends

Arguments about the need for an epochal transi-tion are a sign of the times; they reflect the depth ofthe contemporary crises. Transition discourses (TDs)are emerging today with particular richness andintensity from a multiplicity of sites, principallysocial movements, some civil society NGOs, andfrom intellectuals with significant connections toenvironmental and cultural struggles. TDs are pro-minent in several fields, including those of culture,ecology, religion and spirituality, and alternativescience (e.g., living systems and complexity).

A hallmark of contemporary TDs is the fact thatthey posit radical cultural and institutional trans-formations ^ indeed, a transition to an altogetherdifferent world. This is variously conceptualized interms of a paradigm shift, a change of civiliza-tional model, or even the coming of an entirelynew era beyond the modern dualist, reductionist,and economic age. This change is often seen asalready happening, although most TDs warn thatthe results are by no means guaranteed. ThomasBerry’s, notion of The Great Work ^ a transition‘from the period when humans were a disruptiveforce on the planet Earth to the period whenhumans become present to the planet in a mannerthat is mutually enhancing’ (1999: 11) ^ captureswell this spirit. Berry calls the new era Ecozoic.The radical discontinuity between the human andthe non-human domains is at the basis of many ofthe critiques. Along with the ideas of a separateself and of an economic domain disembedded fromsocial life, this discontinuity is seen as the mostcentral feature of modern ontology, or worldview.The bridging of these divides is posited as crucialto healing society and the planet by secular andreligious visions alike ^ whether it is through thenotions of inter-connectedness and interdepen-dencies of ecology, the idea of interbeing anddependent co-arising of Buddhism, or frameworksbased on self-organizationand complexity focusedon co-emergent systems of relations.

Many TDs are keyed in to the need to move topost-fossil fuel economies. For Vandana Shiva(2008), the key to the transition ‘from oil to soil’ ^from a mechanical-industrial paradigm centred

on globalized markets to a people- and planet-centred one ^ lies in strategies of re-localization,that is, the construction of decentralized, biodiver-sity-based organic food and energy systems thatoperate on the basis of grassroots democracy,place-based knowledge, local economies, and thepreservation of soils and ecological integrity. Inemphasizing re-localization and the rebuildingof local communities, this ‘ecology of transforma-tion’ (Hathaway and Boff, 2009) goes directlyagainst most globalization discourses and forces;it bets on the fact that the re/constitution ofplace-based (though not place-bound) societiesare not only possible but perhaps inevitable(Hopkins, 2008). They advocate for a diverse econ-omy that has a strong base on communities(Gibson-Graham, 2006). The focus of many TDson spirituality is a reminder of the exclusion ofthis important area from our secular academies.

Toward a pluriverse

Some of the changes envisioned in TDs are underway in some fashion. The 2008 Ecuadorian andBolivian constitutions have garnered well-deserved international attention because of theirpioneering treatments of development and nature.The Constitutions introduced a novel notion ofdevelopment centred on the concept of sumakkawsay (in Quechua), suma qaman! a (in Aymara)or buen vivir (in Spanish), or ‘living well’. Thesenotions entail a rupture with the conceptions ofdevelopment of the previous six decades. Theygrew out of decades of indigenous struggles asthey articulated with manifold social changeagendas by peasants, Afro-descendants, environ-mentalists, students, women, and youth.The buenvivir upholds a different philosophy of life intothe vision of society, one that subordinates eco-nomic objectives to ecological criteria, human dig-nity, and social justice. These arguments apply toanother prominent idea of the Ecuadorian Consti-tution, that of the rights of Nature, or the Pacha-mama; it represents an unprecedented ‘biocentricturn’, away from the anthropocentrism of moder-nity. This biocentric turn represents a concreteexample of the civilizational transformation ima-gined by theTDs.

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The modern ontology presumes the existence ofOneWorld ^ a universe. This assumption is under-mined by discussions in TDs, the buen vivir, andthe rights of Nature. In emphasizing the profoundrelationality of all life, these newer tendenciesshow that there are indeed relational worldviewsor ontologies for which the world is always multi-ple ^ a pluriverse. Relational ontologies are thosethat eschew the divisions between nature andculture, individual and community, and betweenus and them that are central to the modern ontol-ogy. Some of the today’s struggles could be seenas reflecting the defense and activation of rela-tional communities and worldview (includingsome of those in the Arab World?), and as suchthey could be read as ontological struggles; theyrefer to a different way of imagining life, to an othermode of existence. They point towards the pluri-verse; in the successful formula of the Zapatista,the pluriverse can be described as ‘a world wheremany worlds fit’. At their best, it can be said thatthe rising concepts and struggles from and indefense of the pluriverse constitute a post-dualisttheory and a practice of interbeing.

The end of globalization (as we knew it)

Globalization discourses of all kinds assume thatthe world is some sort of ‘global space’ that willprogressively and inevitably be fully occupied bycapitalist modernity. There is something terriblywrong with this imaginary if we are to take thepluriverse seriously, let alone if we are to confrontthe everworsening ecological and social crises.Thisviewof globalizationas universal, fully economized,and de-localized is made possible by the immensepower of corporations andmaintainedwithinman-ageable levels of dis/order by military might. Fromits very global conditions are emerging, however,responses and forms of creativity and resistancethat make increasingly visible the poverty, perni-ciousness, and destructiveness of this imaginary.

Rather than in terms of globalization, the evol-ving pluriverse might be described as a process ofplanetarization articulated around a vision of theEarth as a living whole that is always emergingout of the manifold biophysical, human, and spiri-tual elements and relations that make it up. Manyof the features envisioned in theTDs ^ from strate-gies of re-localization to the rise of an ecologicalcivilization ^ will find a more auspicious home inthis notion.We need to stop burdening the Earthwith the dualisms of the past centuries, andacknowledge the radical interrelatedness, open-ness, and plurality that inhabit it. To accomplishthis goal, we need to start thinking about humanpractice in terms of ontological design, or thedesign of other worlds and knowledges. Designwould no longer involve the instrumental tamingof the world for human purposes, but buildingworlds inwhich humans and the Earth can coexistand flourish (see essay by Kathryn Cox-Shraderin this issue for some ecological design principlesand references).

Pluriversal studies cannot be defined in opposi-tion to globalization studies, nor as its comple-ment, but needs to be outlined as an altogetherdifferent intellectual and political project. Nosingle notion of theworld, the human, civilization,the future, or even the natural can fully occupythe space of pluriversal studies. Even if partlybuilding on the critical traditions of the modernnatural, human and social sciences, pluriversalstudies will travel its own paths as it discoversworlds and knowledges that the sciences haveeffaced or only gleaned obliquely. This, it seemsto me, might constitute the basis for conceptionsof sustainability that go beyond the business asusual understanding of sustainable development.This notion of sustainability would be one capableof inspiring the popular and scientific imagina-tions alike to take steps that are at once pragmaticand transformative in the path towards more ethi-cal and ecological words.

References

Berry, Thomas (1999) The GreatWork: OurWay into the Future, NewYork: Bell Tower.Ehrenfeld, John (2008) Sustainability by Design, New Haven:Yale University Press.

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Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Hathaway, Mark and Boff Leonardo (2009) TheTao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation, Maryknoll,NY: Orbis Books.

Hopkins, Rob (2008) The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, White River Junction, VT:Chelsea Green Publishing.

Shiva,Vandana (2008) Soil, Not Oil. Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis, Cambridge: South End Press.

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