Reconstruing Cultures of Sustainable Consumption and Climate Justice: Towards a Deconstruction of the Global Polity
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on August 10, 2009 |
This newly published paper intends to correct the downstream outlook of the IPCC scientific body by focusing upon the putative lessons from the field of sustainable consumption, and in so doing, achieve climate justice. In particular, the socio-psychological approach set against a social constructivist backdrop adopted by Tim Jackson is heeded. Jackson’s discourse towards the construction of cultures of sustainable consumption emerges as an emancipatory grid of power/knowledge. In taking this grid to its logical conclusion, the challenge of sustainable consumption grows progressively relocated into the realms of political philosophy and international political ecology alike. That is, the power effects of the knowledges surrounding sustainable consumption invite a serious debate upon ‘whither global polity?’ In deconstruing the ecocidal character of Western polities, we reach a position of undecidability as regards the superiority of either anthropocentric despotism or misanthropic ecologism. Out of this commensurate hesitation, ‘culture’, and for that matter, ‘Gaia’, emerges as the distinctive stylus ready to incise novel figures and elements in the process of reconstruing the polity. Five radical ecological thinkers –Arnold J. Toynbee, Tim Jackson, Herman E. Daly, Edward Goldsmith & Victor M. Toledo- contribute to the design of these elements and figures. In having explored the interrelations established between their positions, the chapter concludes that the Gaian polity of the future should build upon a constellation of emancipatory grids of
power/knowledge. These ought to combine cultural diversity at the bioregional level with stern regimentation against socio-ecological imbalances at the global. Tim Jackson closes the chapter with a ‘Postscript’ in which he argues that a kind of schizophrenia is endemic in neo-liberal Western polities, in having to advocate ecological practices, on the one hand, and relying upon relentless economic growth and thus consumption, on the other. Fully aware of this fracture, Jackson suggests nonetheless that the search for a ‘sustainable polity’ requires us to hold onto the concept of governance as a ‘commitment technology’ even as we expose its fault-lines in terms of climate justice.
Tags: Climate Justice > global polity > power/knowledge > social constructivism > social psychology > sustainable consumption
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