3.3. Making wise pathway choices
3.3 Making wise pathway choices
The legacy of the Enlightenment, unanimity, and colonialism
Our current understanding of ecological crises is largely based on modern scientific knowledge. Its tools and methods provide invaluable insights into changes in Earth systems and the various processes that enable life and well-being, as well as into changes in biodiversity. Scientific methods allow systematic monitoring of changes over long time spans, identifying explanatory factors and modelling the future. The importance of science in identifying, describing and understanding the causes of problems may lead to the idea that science is also responsible for solving problems, or that people who have sufficiently absorbed scientific knowledge will rationally come to the same conclusions about how to solve crises. This model of thinking traces back to the Age of Enlightenment, which we will now explore by looking at Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century, who challenged the paradigms of his time.
During Berlin’s lifetime, social and philosophical research was inspired by the mathematical and natural sciences. The contributions of many renowned social thinkers and scientists reflected the legacy of the Enlightenment. The period of Enlightenment in 17th and 18th centuries and its influential intellectual heritage is characterized by a paradigmatic way of thinking. According to it, (1) there is one right answer to every important question, (2) there is a clear method for arriving at the right answer, and (3) together those right answers provide us with a coherent, unbroken and complete, right view of the world (Berlin spoke of assembling a cosmic jigsaw puzzle). The scientific and rational methods of reasoning, which provide precise information, were also believed to be able to find correct, universal (independent of place and time) answers to social and moral questions. The scientific and moral enlightenment of citizens would be achieved through rational methods.
The Enlightenment paradigm represents a strong monism. Monism refers to ways of thinking that seek a single, fundamental answer. For example, according to moral monism, what is right and wrong in human action is reducible to a single ultimate moral rule or value, such as the maximization of freedom or the greatest total happiness experienced (the state of happiness experienced by all individuals added together). An example of a monism leaning on the legacy of the Enlightenment might be the view that the best methods for protecting endangered species and habitat types can be determined solely on the basis of conservation biology and that these solutions are universal.
The “hard science method” of moral and political philosophy offered by natural monism inspired a large number of influential thinkers and scientists both during the Enlightenment and for centuries afterwards. Isaiah Berlin criticized the monistic view for leading to the formation of an intellectual-moral monolith. According to Berlin, intellectual-moral monoliths are often associated with the emergence of various totalitarian and oppressive societies. This can happen even if one of the golden rules of this monolith is the ideal of freedom, as in the legacy of the Enlightenment in the West.
A similar critique was made by the Frankfurt School, which had a strong influence on critical social sciences, or critical theory, after the World War II. According to its well-known critique, monistic thinking that emphasizes rationality panders to the instrumental reasoning that asks how goals can be achieved most effectively, but not why those goals are worth pursuing in the first place. At worst, such thinking leads to rationally supported fascism. The Frankfurt School also criticized the great project of rationality as a attempt to control nature foredoomed to failure. The main motivation behind the emphasis on scientific knowledge and rationality was the increasing harnessing of non-human nature for human benefit and thus the decoupling of humans from nature. According to the Frankfurt School, the separation of humans and nature was itself faulty reasoning.
The criticism of the legacy of the Enlightenment in the post-World War II social and scientific introspection influenced social thought and research. Criticism grew against perspectives that could justify or reinforce totalitarianism. However, the legacy of the so-called Western, rational scientific worldview remained influential in itself, even if it was paired with a strong anti-fascist stance. In the Western scientific and rational worldview, technological progress was intertwined with individualism and the associated values of individual freedom and high rationality. Such a technological-scientific-individual worldview may appear as a universal, value-neutral view that highly values scientific knowledge, and thus as the best way to address the challenges of sustainability.
Critical social sciences in particular have discussed the problems associated with the dominant technological-scientific-individual paradigm. These include apparent neutrality, unanimity, and the upholding of the legacy of colonialism and of structures of social inequality. According to the critical social sciences, Western cultures still treat, for example, economics, technology and ecology as fields that measure, describe and deal with real and unambiguous states of affairs, producing value-neutral knowledge of reality. However, economy and economics, technology and even ecology are categories of structuring our thinking and perception, guiding us to perceive reality in a certain way, which also involves assumptions linked to our worldview and values.
Consider, for example, money. Money is the means by which people's (as yet immaterial) ideas about exchanging things are transformed into material processes that change human societies and the fabric of life. Exchange, in turn, affects not only the price of products, but also the way we think about things that can be measured in money. Money commensurates: money can be used to exchange anything for anything, if both things have a price. In economics, money can be seen as a neutral medium of exchange, whose laws of operation economics studies in a value-neutral way. Since money controls human activity, this can lead, for example, to the idea that a value-neutral solution to environmental problems is to put a monetary price on the environmental impacts (i.e. external costs) of human activity.
However, this solution involves value commitments. It makes environmental impacts – and thus non-human life and its existence – an exchangeable object of bargaining. All living is reduced to a resource: environmental damage in one place is justified, as long as the market benefit in some other place is sufficiently high. The logic of environmental protection through money instrumentalizes our relationship with nature and can blind us to the distinctive features of the biota and the uniqueness of different forms of life.
Despite its problems, putting a price on, say, specific species, ecosystems and the integrity of planetary and ecosystem-level processes may be the most effective first step in regulating certain harmful environmental impacts under the current system. However, it is important to recognize both the limits of environmental protection through money and the risks its mainstreaming can pose at the level of worldviews and values. We should also critically consider in which situations strict regulation, for example by limiting or banning harmful human activities, would be a better solution than simply putting a price on harmful impacts.
The history of Western science is also part of colonialist history. When the West conquered foreign countries and nations, the export of science and technology was seen as a boon to the civilization and progress of the conquered territories. From the perspective of the elite of the colonized nations, technology and science represented the modern age and helped the elite to ally themselves with the Western conquerors and secure their own position. In research based on comparisons of biological characteristics, science also built a scientifically presented justification for racism. In addition, many medical projects became intertwined with the ways the occupiers exercised their power.
Western science has thus ended up supporting oppressive forms of power and exploitation, and the application of science to practice is never a value-neutral issue. Research, projects and interactions related to the concept of sustainable development have also been criticized to embody the legacy of colonialism. According to these critics, the paradigm of sustainable development sees development as a progression over time and as various forms of Westernization of science, technology and human practices, and as cultural and scientific enlightenment.
Phrases such as “developing countries” and “underdevelopment” are still in use and are sometimes used to justify intervention in “underdeveloped” communities, as if from the perspective of the more knowledgeable community looking down from above, as a concern for less able peoples, and without taking into account peoples' own views and values. To equate the idea of development with technological-scientific improvement or with the generalization of Western values ignores, for example, the fact that the current socio-ecological-technological conditions and standard of living in the West have been built through a series of processes that intensify ecological crises, as well as are violent and exploitative as both distant people and non-human nature are seen as resources to utilize.
The oppression and colonization of the Sámi people has also been scientifically justified, for example by racial theory and eugenics. The picture shows a Sámi family around 1900. Photo by Tonynetone, CC BY 2.0.
Scientific developments and efforts to explain and control non-human nature have also been found to have a significant impact on the view that scientific knowledge has become the only form of knowledge, and that local knowledge, for example of nature, has come to be seen as a manifestation of a lack of civilization and erudition, and should therefore be replaced by scientific knowledge wherever possible. The forms of knowledge that are seen as worthy enough to be taken into account will, in turn, influence the way in which problems of the prevailing systems and processes are diagnosed, and such “diagnosis” will, in turn, influence the solutions that are seen as workable and possible. This unanimity in diagnosis can also lead to unanimity in identifying pathways to planetary well-being.
Science cannot be assumed to be a value-neutral, universal harbinger of development and sustainability. The critique of unanimity and the upholding of dominant structures is not limited to the technical and natural sciences. For example, futurology has been criticized for reinforcing Western thinking and cultural attitudes that maintain inequalities. Without sufficient openness to cultural diversity, there is a risk of colonizing the future, with research and stories of the future being constructed through the currently dominant discursive frameworks that reproduce current oppressive or exclusionary hierarchies and limit the options of future generations. As for environmental ethics that critiques human-centeredness, it has been heavily criticized as representing a “white middle class mindset” that ignores the many socially unjust structures and histories of oppression that environmental issues are entangled in.
Making wise pathway choices requires paying attention to background assumptions and interpretative frameworks that are classified as value-neutral and universal, because the values or ways of acting associated with them are easily taken for granted. For example, all those concerns whose bearers are unwilling or unable to express their concerns with a rationalizing manner of speaking, are at risk of being ignored in a hierarchy of values where the rational argument is always the most important or the only serious argument (for more examples of colonizing knowledge and ways of knowing, see also the Good life and planetary well-being course).
This phenomenon affects, for example, the fairness of climate negotiations, as the dominant “developed countries” in practice determine – albeit perhaps partly informally and unintentionally – the manners of speaking that are taken seriously. For example, manners of speaking that emphasize the concerns and relations and that are prominent in certain countries of the Global South (rather than rational-scientific arguments) are seen as “irrational”, even if they call for a more ambitious sustainability transition and faster climate action, while arguments that emphasize economic impacts are always seen as “sensible” (rational) to start with, and therefore as weighty considerations.
While we have focused on the problems of unanimity and “West-down” management of systems change, primarily from a global perspective, the exclusion or inclusion of different perspectives and approaches is equally a crucial problem in building sustainability policies and projects at national and local level, and in promoting cultural and practice change. The problems of managing change top-down are next demonstrated by the Natura project on nature conservation.
Natura: the problems of top-down nature conservation
The process that created the Natura 2000 network was a major joint effort of EU countries to protect biodiversity. Its implementation began in 1992 as part of the EU Habitats Directive and the LIFE program. When it was created, Natura 2000 was the largest internationally coordinated network of nature protection areas in the world. Today, the network of protected areas covers almost a fifth of the EU's land area and around 6% of its maritime area, making it a major project, although it has not been enough to halt the biodiversity loss.
However, for all its coverage – or partly because of it – Natura illustrates the problems of top-down environmental action. In many EU countries, Natura caused widespread land-use conflicts and local-level disturbances, generating widespread opposition across the EU, as well as criticism and concern about Natura’s impact on livelihoods, local landscapes and the different uses of local nature. Top-down implementation processes created distrust both of conservation efforts and of the officials implementing them.
Natura was better received in areas where local people were involved in the implementation planning. Indeed, researchers who have compiled research findings on Natura identified the failure to involve local people as one of the main problems of Natura implementation. Local approval can be important not only for the success of the project in question and for maintaining social trust, but also for safeguarding biodiversity in the future: bad experiences with nature conservation projects can be reflected in attitudes towards future biodiversity protection measures and projects.
For example, in the study of policy instruments for managing transitions, long-term policy planning using only benefit-cost analyses locks transitions into certain pathways and excludes, by default, good alternative solutions that do not yet appear cost-effective in the present, even if they could produce the most transformative changes in the long run. Overcoming the problems of entrenched thinking and unanimity will require changing ways of acting, and we will learn more about this in this course.
Cultural sustainability transition
In particular, the perspective of leverage point theory has emphasized that the deepest leverage points can only be reached if the transformation extends to cultural processes – community practices, worldviews and values, including the relationship with nature. Bringing culture and values into the debate is not in itself a panacea for reaching sustainability. Futurologist Katriina Siivonen has pointed out that there is an essential tension here: change should be brought about in people's worldviews, opinions and beliefs, but a free and independent formation of all of these is considered to be a human right.
Cultures are, however, in a constant state of flux. Viewing culture as a process highlights how, for example, eating habits and their associated meanings form a cultural flow that combines with various flows of resources and non-human life and intertwines people as food-eating beings with the material flows of the world, which people also influence through their choices. Such a process also changes over time, and cultural change can be addressed in culture through concepts such as heritage futures. Heritage futures are activities that take place in the present and consciously renew the cultural heritage of the future. The idea behind heritage futures thinking is precisely to reflect on the nature of the culture of the future: what kind of culture do we want to leave to future generations to “inherit” and shape? The ecological awareness associated with this approach emphasizes that human processes are intertwined with non-human processes, and that human beings must find their place and new ways and skills to operate within the limits of the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity.
Reflecting on cultural change through tools of heritage futures, such as workshops, can provide meaningful ways to rebuild one's own and the community's relationship with all life. Culture in the narrower sense of the word, that is, arts and various cultural products and experiences, can also create transition and more sustainable well-being (this was discussed in sections 3 and 4 of the Good life and planetary well-being course). However, building a more sustainable culture by harnessing the power of cultural products or the concept of heritage futures is not just about building something new through the positive. Unsustainable processes, practices, norms and assumptions must be criticized and dismantled.
Participation is essential for change to take place: culture is not created by coercion. Participation can be supported, for example, by strengthening the multivocality of culture and debates regarding the future. Futurologist Barbieri Masini has stressed the importance of "side voices", i.e. voices that are different from the mainstream, for processes of change. He speaks of seeds of change, which are often present in non-mainstream activities: in Western society, they are found, for example, in non-Western elements of thought and culture, in the thinking and actions of philosophers and artists, women and children. Identifying and updating the stories or narratives that are central to society is also a key part of cultural debate and reflection on the future.
Narratives shape our understanding of transition
Species-specifically, humans are storytellers who create order in the world and its events by constructing stories in their minds, both consciously and unconsciously. This basic idea has served as a starting point for narrative research, including research on sustainability problems and how to solve them. Researcher Sina Leipold has argued that narratives have the ability to affect the deepest points of the leverage point theory framework by changing the way we think about particular systems or problems. Translated into the perspective of the MLP framework, narratives can produce a change in the assumptions and values at the level of landscape (operational environment) that decisively guide the kind of transition that is sought or considered desirable.
Many ways of structuring and telling things can be thought of as narratives. What is essential is that at least somewhat of a cohesive story is formed, in which events have a flow (“a plot”) – often proceeding from a problem to a solution, i.e. the end of the story – and in which the story is influenced by different characters, some of whom can be identified as good and some as evil. Stories can describe either expected, desired or undesired courses of events, linked to the strategic choices made by different characters.
Narratives of change and solutions can suggest moderate or radical solutions alike, and the narrative approach does not in itself represent any particular minority worldview. In France, for example, researchers identified three narratives related to the food system, and in particular to waste, that were prominent in debates about circular economy. Two of them focused on waste as a market commodity, either as an economic resource that is wasted if food is wasted, or as a business opportunity (services that manage waste are turned into business). In the business opportunity narrative, the problem is solved by turning it into a source of business and the new companies that turn waste into business, rise as heroes. The danger for sustainability is that food waste is seen as a good thing, as it creates new business opportunities. The third narrative, the solidarity narrative, saw food first and foremost as a basic need and a source of well-being, and food waste as a manifestation of strong inequalities: in this narrative, the solution would be a more radical reform of production and consumption systems so that the focus is on meeting human needs rather than economic activity.
Creating and changing narratives and challenging dominant narratives – for example, by telling the story from a new perspective or by questioning the hero's motives and heroism – can promote or inhibit changes in culture, values and prevailing assumptions, and hence in policies and marketing, for example. Examples include changes in the symbolic meanings of various activities and commodities, such as the images associated with petrol cars.
Another example of narratives comes from Indonesian palm oil production, which has expanded rapidly as global demand for palm oil has grown strongly in recent decades. Between 1990 and 2000, the country had the second fastest deforestation rate in the world. The expansion of palm oil production has been justified in particular by producing and reinforcing narratives of general development and, more specifically, regional economic development and poverty reduction. In these narratives, palm oil production becomes the hero of the story, lifting poor rural villages out of poverty and contributing to the development and prosperity of the country. The ecological sustainability of production has received increasing attention, particularly in global discourse and when brought forward by environmental organizations, but on the other hand, in Indonesia, for example, sustainability demands are resisted at the level of government and businesses by portraying them as a manifestation of Western hegemony. Thus, the state that persists in resisting sustainability demands is seen in public discourse as an independent hero with the power to resist the hegemonic messages of the West. In this way, narratives – whether or not this is a conscious aim – can also reinforce confrontations between different actors or objectives.
A wise journey: reflexive governance
A wise journey towards planetary well-being requires the ability to apply a diversity of knowledge, solutions and values to practical management and the ability to deal with complex systems and uncertain situations. Pluralism and acceptance of uncertainties are important principles of reflexive governance, i.e. governance that “learns” from its own actions and renews itself. It is difficult to define the precise elements of reflexive governance, because defining them strictly would confine reflexive governance in a way that would be contrary to the principle of learning and renewal. However, it can be said that reflexive governance is characterized by at least the following features:
Self-reflection and learning from one’s own experiences. Reflexive governance regularly reviews its processes and their functionality. It seeks to learn from the consequences of its actions and to take new information into account. The consequences and side-effects of actions taken influence new actions and serve as feedback on sustainability transition plans and decision made. This could also be summarized as "learning by doing".
Photo by Marlon del Aguila Guerrero/CIFOR, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
A systems perspective. To understand the interactions between different systems, it is necessary to look at the transitions in ways that transcend traditional sectoral boundaries (energy, food, transport). Given the complexity of society, a systems perspective involves not only a holistic view, but also an acceptance that missteps are an inevitable part of treading a path.
Tolerating uncertainty. Decision-making is not about expecting certainty about the impact of decisions, but accepting that uncertainty is an inevitable part of the process. The key is to monitor the changes that have been accomplished, and be ready to respond to them in new ways – to learn from them.
The multi-source nature of knowledge production. The knowledge base to support decision-making does not consist simply of scientific knowledge. The knowledge that people working with the systems have gathered through their practical experience and the overall picture that emerges from being in touch with the information is important. Taking account of such forms of knowledge requires new ways of co-producing knowledge.
Looking far and wide and keeping the options open. Reflexive governance looks further into the future than a precise impact assessment (e.g. traditional social, gender or environmental impact assessments) can achieve. It therefore also uses futures work in ways that ensure multivocality.
Avoiding lock-ins. Systems thinking pays particular attention to identifying path dependencies and negative feedbacks (which tend to return the system to its previous state). The aim is to avoid lock-in solutions where society becomes dependent on a particular technology or mode of operation. The aim is therefore to keep the future courses of action open to different solutions.
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