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

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 07:48 authored by Saurabh AroraSaurabh Arora
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

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Regional Environmental Change

ISSN

1436-3798

Publisher

Springer

Volume

19

Page range

1571-1584

Department affiliated with

  • SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-08-27

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-08-27

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-08-26

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