Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Ed Hackett: All right, great, thank you. Good afternoon, welcome. Thanks for coming. Maybe intimidated a little bit by the lovely accents our speakers have. I’ve actually prepared a formal introduction rather than just a kind of, “Here’s Melissa and Andy and they’re gonna speak to you.”

Let me go through it formally to be sure that we get it right for posterity. The Rob and Melanie Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiative is proud to welcome Melissa Leach and Andy Stirling from the STEPS Centre in Sussex England to speak with you today.

Their talk is co-funded by two parts of the Walton Initiative; the Next Generations Project Fund that Anne Kinzig leads and the Fellow’s Program that I direct. STEPS stands for social technological and Environmental pathways to sustainability. Write that down cuz there’ll be a quiz. Let me just say a couple more things about their work because this is important.

Theirs is an imaginative, integrated interdisciplinary approach that brings together scientists both social and natural along with international development experts, science and technologies studied scholars, practitioners, policy makers and members of local publics to work on a host of problems at the intersection of social justice and environmental integrity. Their aim is to enhance equity and sustainability. I think there is no more urgent problem before us today.

They properly place such problems in the context of a complex and dynamic world—we just talked about how great it is that things are complex—and understand that the problems have technical, moral, political and social dimensions and each of these dimensions needs to be given attention. They’ve developed a distinctive approach to these problems that they call the Pathways Approach that begins with the recognition that different people in different places have different framings of the sustainability problem, different narratives, different destinations in mind. That the challenge for those of us who are serious about sustainability is to work with these framings, these pathways that people have in their mind and to reconcile, adapt, adjust and synthesize them into something workable for the future.

I think they’re doing the most serious work in the world on this topic right now. Melissa is director of the STEPS Centre. She is trained as a social anthropologist. Her publicans and accomplishments are too numerous to mention but broadly she works at the intersection of science, technology, development and environment. She’s done extensive ethnographic field work in Africa, speaks four languages, if you wanna communicate otherwise.

Melissa Leach: Rustily, I’d say.

Ed Hackett: Rustlily, so she’d appreciate a chance to polish. She’s lead many large interdisciplinary problems; I learned about one this morning. She’s engaged in a project concerned with the origins and spread of zoonotic diseases; a large international interdisciplinary effort.

Andy is a co-director of STEPS. This is gonna be a tag team talk. It’ll be Melissa and then a hand-off to Andy. He’s a professor of science and technology studies at Sussex. He’s fitted elements of several successful careers all into one lifetime and he’s still going strong. He has been trained in astronomy, archeology, social anthropology, science and technology, policy. He’s done fieldwork in ecology and archeology. He was active in Green Peace at the grassroots level and at an executive level, advisory level. He’s consulted with business, government, civic organizations, published a lot of stuff and is an all-around good guy.

I can’t imagine two people who better exemplify the values of the Walton Initiative than these two. They are bridging scholarship to practical solutions in real and challenged places in the world today and doing so with the highest values of social justice, sustainability and moral conduct in mind. I commend them to your attention. Melissa.

Melissa Leach: Well, my goodness. How does one follow an introduction like that? It’s a very good summary of what Andy and I are going to be talking about over the next little while. I must say we’re both absolutely delighted to be here having worked with and watched from afar and admired a lot of the work going on on sustainability at ASU over many years. It’s wonderful to be here.

Well, what we’re going to be talking about over the next 45 minutes or so is how we go about tackling some of the most pressing challenges of today. We’re talking about a context for sustainability where one’s not only dealing with, as we’re aware, rapid environmental change and complex settings, what some are referring to as planetary boundaries that the world is on the edge of with impending threats and thresholds. Also a context in which those very issues are the subject of intensive and growing scientific and policy concern, concern that’s often highly politicized in many contexts.

In a context, too, where we’re dealing with rapid social and economic change, instabilities of many kinds, shifting geographies that were the crumbling of what we might once have thought about as north/south divisions, separations between an industrialized and a developing world. Many of these things no longer hold up. We’ve got a much more complex geography of power and privilege at play in the world today. At the same time many challenges around poverty and inequity and injustice haven’t gone away. They’re just taking on different forms.

This is—well, it’s supposed to be on but if it’s not picking up—I’ve unmuted it, is it not working? Hello? Oh, it’s not high enough. Shall I relocate it? All right. See if I can do that. This is not going to fall off. Is that any better? Yeah, okay.

This is the context in which in the STEPS Centre we’re asking a rather large and ambitious question. How might pathways to sustainabilities, as we put them, that link environmental integrity with social justice be thought about, conceptualized and ultimately built in this world of complexity and dynamism? This is where we’ve been developing what we’re calling a Pathways Approach which is very much a work in progress. The STEPS Centre is, as Ed says, an interdisciplinary center. We’re based in Sussex but we’re working with partners around the world, principally in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, for a mixture of conceptual research of political engagement and policy engagement and a variety of very much located projects around pressing issues to do with urbanizations, yunoses, technologies, innovation, agriculture and food in a variety of different settings.

It’s through that kind of iteration of projects and high-level thinking that we’re developing and continuing to enrich and elaborate what we’re calling a Pathways Approach. Which is really a kind of guide to thinking and action about meeting theses sustainability challenges. The book here, Dynamic Sustainabilities which was published now a couple of years ago lays out where we’ve got to so far but it’s very much an ongoing debate which we’re taking forward with others. What I want to do in the next 20 minutes or so is outline some of the core elements of this Pathways Approach and illustrate it a bit. Then I’m going to hand over to Andy who’s going to talk about what some of that means for thinking about the politics of innovation.

Our Pathways Approach starts with a set of contradictions and it’s really between the growing recognition, as I pointed out, of this complexity and dynamism in the world today. The fact that around any sustainability challenge we’re dealing with social, ecological, technological process—systems, if you like—and dynamics that are often working across global and local scales. They’re often not linear; they often involve many, many uncertainties.

At the same time there’s a growing recognition in many quarters that there are many diverse ways of knowing and thinking about these very systems and challenges. Yet, we see over and over again a search in policy agencies, in governments and in international agencies for far more technical, managerial solutions. Seemingly promised on a view of a world that’s not like this at all, but a world where solutions are there to be found, where problems can be solved, where stability can be achieved, where risks and uncertainties can be diminished, pinned down, managed.

The results of that mismatch is often cycles of failure because we end up with situations where a solution is proposed and it gets unraveled, it gets undone by the dynamics. Whether those are backlashes from nature, unpredictable microbes or climate changes or unraveled by politics, local resistance, disagreement, people not buying into the consensual solution that’s offered. What we often see in a scene in many of our field settings the results of those processes is that it’s the people who are ready, honorable and marginalized who often lose out.

It was addressing some of this that our Pathways Approach has attempted to battle. What are some of the building blocks and emphases that we’ve taken in trying to find a different way forward; a way forward that’s not just like this? Well, the first building block is a particular way of thinking about sustainability. Now, this is a term that’s out there in the world and is widely used, but it’s also a contested term and one with a history.

Not to hack through this, many of it may be familiar with people, but it was a term first used in around 1712 in the context of forestry. We saw a massive growth through decades up until the 1980s. Then, of course, it was the Broken Commission in 1987 which coined this still, I think, substantial view of sustainable development around meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future. Of course we saw at the first Rio Conference in 1992 a very vibrant and committed debate around this and all sorts of versions of sustainability put forward.

A lot of that, as one went forward through the 1990s translated into precisely this kind of managerialism that has so often driven planning. We saw a whole set of planned frameworks, evaluation protocols, a kind of bureaucratization of sustainability and the use of it, sometimes in rhetorical terms, which often didn’t actually do much and was critiqued many as being often kind of empty rhetoric.

I think, for many, sustainability is a term that’s been discredited to some extent. Yet, it’s still there and it was still very much the buzz world of the Rio+20 conference earlier this year. It is, of course, the term that many of us are using. We’re using in our center, you’re using here in Arizona.

How should we be thinking about it? our arguments in the STEPS Centre is that we need to move both beyond a kind of generalized colloquial notation that sustainability is about maintaining something, sustaining something. Also beyond these kind of rather bored and static notions that we saw in Brundtland. Okay, sustainability was something about needs and environmental limits. All of the equivalents that we saw from Rio+20 earlier this summer in Rio and that we’re moving towards at the moment were sustainability is about a generic set of sustainable development goals that somehow everybody can agree upon.

We think sustainability has to be specified much more precisely in relation to particular issues, places, people, settings so that we’re talking about specified, qualities of those things that matter; human wellbeing, social equity, environmental integrity as they related to particular dynamic environments. We also have to bear in mind something that drives us very strongly in steps. Enormity, the moral concern with those particular qualities and properties that are valued by people who are currently poor and marginalized and that go along with reducing that poverty.

This leads to a view that in any setting there are going to be multiple and often contested sustainabilities that need to be recognized, defined and deliberated on. Very quick example that I’ll pick up on if we’re thinking about African seed systems amidst draught and climate change. Are we talking about the sustainability of natural food systems and security? Are we talking about the sustainability of dry land farmers and their livelihoods? Or are we talking about the sustainability of crop varieties that women control within households as opposed to those that men control?

In a setting like that and around I would argue any deals with sustainability has to be seen as contested and actually recast as a discursive resource to facilitate argument deliberation and action about possibly diverse pathways to the futures that different people value.

This brings sustainability really firmly into the realm of the political where other concepts we’re familiar with. Things like justice or citizenship have been for centuries. Why hasn’t sustainability? It’s been kind of parceled off over here as something technical. We’re arguing that it’s an inherently political term.

Well, how is this politicized perspective sort of operationalized in our Pathways Approach? Here we recognized that while the world is kind of endlessly complex and dynamic represented by all these blurbs over here on the right it’s useful for analytical and often practical purposes to think about systems in particular environments. Where systems involve these multiple elements which interact in often very dynamic ways.

We don’t stop there. Central to the Pathways Approach is integrating a kind of reflexive dimension, drawing on perhaps a rather different sort of social science traditions. Coming from kind of constructivism and reflection on knowledge and values. That is to recognize that there are always multiple ways of understanding and representing or framing a system and that framing involves not just choices about which elements to highlight, what scale one’s talking about, what dynamics and elements in relationship one thinks are important, but also more subjective things. What are the goals? What are the values? What purposes is this system serving for whom?

Framings, we would argue, in every situation are produced by particular actors, particular people. Whether they’re local farmers in particular setting, whether they’re science, policy or business actors. That’s kind of co-produced with people’s life worlds and settings; where they come from.

What we also find and take onboard as a kind of analytic is to recognize how these framings often become part of narratives. Often quite simple storylines about a problem, a sustainability problem following the work of people at Emory Row, these storylines have starting points, they have middles which are a set of envisioned actions and ends. Particular futures one might desire or particular problems and potential catastrophes that one wants to revert.

Narratives often start with a system and talk about how one might want to transform it to bring about a particular end. They often have a moral content to them; not least because embedded in those narratives are an idea of who needs to change their ways? Who’s responsible for a problem and who needs to change their ways and mend what they’re doing in order to solve it? There are lots of practices as I’ll illustrate in a minute involved in the creating of narratives. Everything from stating goals and setting agendas through to value judgments about what is prioritized and who is to blame and who is to change what they’re doing.

Let’s look at a couple of quite stylized examples. Take something like the kind of sustainability goal of achieving food security in dry land Africa; something I was referring to. Many contrasting narratives out there, just to pick out two, one that we see promoted very often at the moment by technology firms, by certain governments and by some big international agencies. Would see the problems in terms of production, in terms of deficits and an argument that what we need is massive boosts to production. Particularly through modern plant bleeding, including genetic engineering which can deliver technical solutions to be rolled out to scale; transform unsustainable to sustainable agriculture.

A contrasting narrative put forward perhaps at the moment by a number of NGOs, by social researchers and, indeed, by farmers themselves would recognize those food securities differently. As shaped by local, economical and social processes requiring instead solutions which are amidst the social and the technical, particularly centered on farmer knowledge and their own innovations.

Take another issue; one we’ve been working on in STEPS Centre’s work which actually brings health challenges into the sustainability frame. Which thinks about epidemics and pandemic threats. One dominant narrative at the moment, which one finds in the WHO and international agencies and in the concerns with bioterror and pandemics, that one often finds in northern governments would be the view, an outbreak narrative that we have. Outbreaks coming from places in Africa and Asia are very often threatening global publics that need to be controlled by picking them up through surveillance and then rolling out packages of top-down public health interventions.

This is very much the narrative in the film. I don’t know if any of you saw; Hollywood movie Contagion which has been doing the rounds of recent years—recent months. Again, a contrasting narrative emerging from people who are thinking in more integrated one-health terms as well as many field practitioners. It’s actually we need to be thinking about and tackling the underlying causes through which disease transmit from animals to people very often and people become vulnerable to them. That’s going to need more diverse social, cultural and technological responses. As pictured here on the right is just one which has emerged from that. it’s a bamboo skirt created by local entrepreneurs to shield date palm sap, key to local livelihoods, from bats who were urinating in them, transmit hanaper viruses to people in Bangladesh; a bottom-up, local technological solution.

One of the issues we’ve been concerned with is how different narratives think about those questions of system dynamics that I highlighted at the beginning. Different narratives treat them in different ways. Narratives about actions aiming to address sustainability involve assumptions about the nature of the changes at stake. Are we talking about short-term shocks or are we talking about longer-term stresses, but also about the styles of action we want to bring in to bear to deal with those.

Are we talking about controlling the underlying drivers or do we recognize that they can’t really be controlled and we’re talking about response? That creates four sets of different kinds of strategies depending on how you group those dynamics. We might ask within any given narrative our strategies, interventions aimed at exercising control to resist shocks, or we might be talking about stability. Are we talking about an acknowledgement that there are limits to control and we’ve got to respond to shocks requiring resilience and adaptation.

Or are we talking about trying to address underlying drivers and stresses, durability? Or about a mixture of the two; responding in a more responsive way to ongoing changes where we’re thinking about robustness. These, we find, are important political distinction that are often or ignored in analysis for sustainability, policy and solutions. Yet, they’re very important because they suggest rather different kinds of strategies.

For instance, looking quickly again at this kind of epidemics, zoonotic disease example. An emphasis on stability is absolutely the case for those standard outbreak contagion type narrative. We’re thinking here about rapid response at source to restore a previous status quo. Kind of the outbreak team sweeps in and deals with it.

In thinking about a sustainable disease response system over wider scales and time one needs to recognize that these outbreaks are often unpredictable, they’re merging in ways shaped by climate, by animal movements that we can’t necessarily predict. We might need to actually a more resilient response; perhaps a flexible response network that you can mobilize as needed. This is actually very much what the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network is about and what some governments are thinking about.

That doesn’t really deal with some of these ongoing changes which might indeed be related to perhaps longer term shifts in viruses or, indeed, climate or, indeed, ones that one can’t necessarily control. Things like non-equilibrial shifts in ecologies which might alter the conditions in which disease is spreading. These things are going to require perhaps forms of surveillance and infrastructures that are more flexible and can actually adapt over time to those changes. As well as being able to understand them by bringing together different disciplines and sectors liking up people who are working in environment agencies that are dealing with environmental and climate change as well as those in health.

Our suggestion would be that if we want to think about sustainability these four properties of stability, resilience, durability, robustness might be seen as individually necessary and collectively efficient elements of sustainability. Sustainable solutions then would be ones that offer those qualities in relation to—and this is going back to my earlier definitions—specified qualities of human wellbeing, social equity and environmental quality.

It’s not just a matter of thinking about, in a technical way, meeting those challenges because we also need to ask, going back to those ideas of framing, actually what is the system and who says so? What are the goals for change that are being prioritized? Who’s to define each of those things and how and each of those aspects we must recognize as contested.

This is where we come to thinking about pathways. For any issue, just to backtrack a moment, we might identify an array of narratives for each of those we might want to ask who are the actors, how are they framing the system and the goals for change for which dynamic properties and strategies for addressing them are being prioritized. We also need to recognize that narratives aren’t just stories about the world. Why they’re important is that some of them at least come to justify particular pathways of action.

Trajectories of system change shaped by interventions and actions in the world but not all of them do. We may have multiple narratives out there about system goals and change but only some of them are going to become pathways. Only some of them will be realized. Others may well remain in people’s imaginations, they’re marginalized, they remain not the major motorways but the bush paths; the alternatives. One of them may be hidden; some of them may be excluded. Our suggestion is that constructing pathways to sustainability requires that we recognize all of these, that we unearth some of the hidden alternative marginalized narratives and bring them into a field where they can be debated in a way that actually allows the perspectives, the goals, the priorities that they represent to have a space at the table and in reality.

None of this, of course, happens on a kind of level playing field. Essential to our Pathways Approach and seeing how these pathways actually unfold in the world is a concern with governance in its very broadest sense. By governance we mean, broadly, political and institutional processes including very much those of power and knowledge which shape which pathways come to dominate and which are excluded, hidden or remain as those kind of footprints.

In practice, as we find, its governance pressures of various kinds that often promote and kind of maintain a sort of lock-in to a singular dominate narrative and pathway to the exclusion of others. This, one can term, a kind of politics of closing down. In many fields we see a closing down in at least two senses; away from the multiplicity of possible and narratives and pathways towards singular ones and also a way, very often, from these styles of intervention that would recognize that we can’t control everything. We need to respond and be resilient and robust towards narratives that are emphasizing stability.

We’ve seen this kind of closing down over and over again in many of the cases that we’ve looked at. There are a lot of governance pressures and processes in play. They include political interests; they include the ways in which political economy often gets institutionalized into routine responses. It’s the way in outbreak management that the WHO or the Centers for Disease Control are used to operating. There are often powerful financial and commercial interests behind these narratives. Outbreak control measures through antivirals and that scene, for instance, play right into the interests of the pharmaceutical companies; promoting them.

The politics of science advice; which kinds of metals get to pronounce upon the world and carry authority? As well as the roles of media and popular knowledge which can, in turn, play into a kind of disciplining of sometimes local subjectivity so that field practitioners and sometimes even local people themselves come to internalize these as the ways as doing things. We see a number of pressures sometimes pushing towards this kind of closing down; towards singularity and towards stability.

This means that what we need to be thinking about is how we might counter those pressures and begin to think about opening up. I’m now going to hand over to Andy who is going to take us through some of those opening up processes. Also, before doing that to think about how some of those same closings down operate in relation to innovation too.

Andy, this is now for you. We’re going to do the tag-team talk.

Andy Stirling: Seamless changeover.

Melissa Leach: Seamless changeover.

Andy Stirling: Hopefully.

Melissa Leach: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: Well, thank you Melissa.

[Applause]

Andy Stirling: Well, Melissa I just want to join this room in thanking Ed and the whole team for getting us over. It’s been a real buzz so far and this is just the beginning. It’s wonderful to see such a great crew of folk here. I hope we have a lot of time for discussion.

Without further ado in Ed’s introduction—a rather gracious but intimidating introduction at the beginning you emphasized the interest of some of the sponsors of this event and much else going on here in solutions. One way of thinking about this dynamic around solution, this interest in solutions which is evasive in governance and politics and all sorts of areas, is to think about what Melissa just left off on. We’re talking about these kinds of processes, these pathways towards desirable ends.

These pathways have complex dynamics of their own. This is not just a matter that critically oriented social researchers might pick up and point out. This is the mainstay of work on innovation over decades. Innovation is a language we use—never mind sustainability—it’s the language we use about change. Especially that transformative change of the kind that’s central to the imperatives of sustainability and being as challenging and global as they are.

Here, we are tapping into a narrative which is arguably right at the core of the enlightenment project of modernity; of what industrial civilizations embarked upon. In the spirit of social and insights in a number of fields it could say that this myth of progress represents the creation myth of the kinds of societies that are implicated in the challenges of sustainability and all their forms ranging from climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, et cetera, et cetera. Not to mention global inequalities.

You can’t stop progress is the classic kind of phrase that gets used on all sides of debates. Whether it be a fatalistic kind of, “Oh well, you can’t stop progress,” or actually an imperative to actually support those things that happen to be emerging from innovation systems. An example of the iconic status of this is this cover from The Economist who used the phrase when they were lamenting the consequence of the global financial crash and the implication of technology in that. Hey, what can we do about it? This is inevitable.

Even a high agency group such as The Economist address had that idea that basically the kinds of change emerging societies are hardwired. It’s progress. It’s not a matter to look at normatively. This is where the sustainability agenda—why we and I believe our colleagues here really regard it as having traction so many years after it was first introduced in the ’80s. It challenges that enlightenment vision. It says it’s not just something that emerges contingently from historical processes and parallelization. We can look at it and judge it by criteria or wellbeing of environmental integrity of social equity. Just to reflect on how pervasive this myth of progress, this narrative of progress is in thinking about solutions and about innovation in general, you don’t normally associate these characters together as coming from the same point of view.

Premier Wen Jiabao formerly Premier of China, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, President Obama, of course, all of whom along with virtually every world leader we might choose to look at and every business leader make remarks routinely about the need to make progress in some undefined way. That innovation is the way to get progress, that technology from science is the means to drive that. Undifferentiated way forward.

In the European Union where we are interested enough to live with its many crises at the moment this is particularly pronounced. The center crisis accentuates this; the European Union has this existential hopes for innovation as a means to deliver this. When we think about these challenges of sustainability and of the pathways of alternatives that we face we are doing so against this back draw of this uncritical idea that innovation—those thing that happen simply unfold in a way that’s determined by the system itself.

What’s going on here is essentially an idea, an underlying idea at the deepest level that where technology and science, change in knowledge more generally, organizational change in the broadest senses of innovation. They are a one-track process; hardwired. This is put very well by Lorbroah’s —president of the British Academy of Engineering some years ago. It’s often people are a little bit coy about expressing this vision; this one-track vision of progress against which sustainability contends.

He put it really nicely in these reflections broadcast around the world. History is a race to advance technology. The technology will determine the future of the human race; an interesting conjunction of the word race here. What are? We’re a race but we’re a race.

The great challenge of government is to strive to stay in the race. Now you see some classic European pessimism there; the US never talked about striving to stay in it; you wanna win it. We wanna just stay in it.

[Laughing]

That’s success for us Europeans. Of Britain it’s bumping along somewhere below that. The role of the public is to give technology the status it deserves.

Now I’m not just picking on this guy as a sort of random, juicy sort of straw dog. This, I think, you will recognize as the underpinnings of the narrative behind the statements of leading world figures of the kind I just mentioned. Innovation, progress in general in the context of sustainability as much as anywhere else the default way of thinking about it is that it’s homogeneous. There’s no great point in distinctions; that’s sort of self-referential, bit of a waste of time, let’s get on with it, let’s have solutions, or the solutions were less evident; that’s what we’re going to do. The solutions.

In other words we’re suppressing the discourse of choice. The questions reduce to how much, how fast, possibly yes or no in some kind of binary fashion. Who’s leading this race and what gets occluded from this are serious attention to questions like which way, what are the alternatives, says who and why?

Now, one might think okay, why have you banged on so much about it Andy, flowing on from Melissa’s global challenges of sustainability because that’s a whole point. Sustainability been beyond that. Well, is it? Because what is the normal way in which we hear? I think it’s true also over here like it is in Europe; it’s certainly the case in Europe about sustainability in high-level governance.

For all the work that people like us are trying to do it’s the transition; the sustainability transition. Here is a plamempses of high-profile policy documents from European international settings speaking of this just in the context of energy. The transition. The transition.

We have all sorts of roadmaps, we have all sorts of models, we have guidebooks, handbooks, we have manuals. Interesting actually in roadmaps, I don’t know about you guys, but the only time when you need a roadmap when there’s lots of different choices about where to go. Yet, roadmaps tend to be used in a fashion in this debate just plotting out the road. Well, if it’s any one road who needs a map?

It’s very old conjunction of language where quite explicitly, in this case here, very influential document recently on the European vision for sustainable energy futures at what cost and at what speed. Explicitly highlighting the two very under ambitious parameters about how fast do we go down this particular inevitable ride? Yet huge questions. What are we talking about here? Are we talking about nuclear? Are we talking about carbon capture? Are we talking about large-scale centralized renewables? Distributed renewables? What actually are we speaking of?

You see the impoverished nature of this language. When we try and address the kind of agenda that Melissa set up. The closing-down mechanisms are not just around the narratives. They’re also reinforced by all sorts of powerful material processes. Just very quickly coming out of the literature on innovation we can just identify a number of processes under which this take place which are well documented, well understood.

For instance looking at the example picked up by Melissa about sustainable food futures, there are a number of different pathways; of innovation trajectories. Not speaking here specifically of technologies, but of institutions, behaviors, practices in the general sense. There are a number of pathways through which we might claim or various actors might plausibly claim, notwithstanding our own individual judgment—these are in the debate—of present solutions; sustainable solutions.

You have conventional industrial hybrids in part, participatory breeding, here I’m just speaking of seeing to production techniques. Open source sharing practices in the development of seeds. You have various kinds of high-tech solutions like transgenic, but also cysgenics. It’s interesting how often genetic engineering gets talked about as one lump, undifferentiated things when in fact there are all sorts of very different practices between the ways of using advanced biotechnology which actually have hugely different political economic consequences and get lumped together in a set-piece debates.

We, of course, have more esoteric things like synthetic biology and so forth. Now the point is there’s a whole bunch of practices beyond this as well. Go back to the point Melissa made in the beginning; not all of these approaches, although they are all conceivable, potentially feasible and viable will not all prove realizable. History makes choices. The processes through which it does that you can see it through examples like the space program is half a century old. What were the conditions under which that iconic notion of progress came and went in that form that it was?

Processes such as social shaping of technology, the way in which expectations about the way innovation will precede influence the actualities in a reinforcing cycle. The way technologies are co-constructed with society and the imaginations that Melissa referred to in some of the discussion of narratives earlier. Path dependency such are embodied famously in the QWERTY keyboard for more than a century. There are no pathal interest defending the QWERTY keyboard and yet just that contingent, historical force of externalities to practice mean that despite moving from the mechanical typewriter to a very, very different sort of golf ball sort of typewriters which don’t need the—don’t worry about the blocking of the print heads, to computers and now to touch screens where the reasons for the QWERTY layout are well and truly disposed of. We still find ourselves irreversibly locked in in ways that are implicated in some—all sorts of health/harm to do with these keyboards are not optimal for typing.

Anyway, the point is you don’t need powerful interest in order to actually get this thing going. You have historical contingency, path dependency; these matters are really well explored in innovation literatures. Likewise politics and philosophy technology talk about more powerful processes of autonomy, entrapment, regulatory capture, alignment between different kinds of institution which gives—reinforced some processes rather than others. Such as gives rise to the urban automobile being privileged in the cities of certain antiquity but not of others, of course.

The point is even when we are consumer markets which are highly competitive like, for instance, for software we find these same kinds of processes of lock-in taking place. There are a dynamics around solutions; solutions are like chicks in a nest. They compete with one another, they exclude each other, they close down in ways that are very powerful beyond just the narratives.

Language of solutions is not the end. We have to look at the dynamics or the different pathways. We have to think critically about whose pathways are being privileged, whose are being excluded. We need to, in other words, open up not only the narratives but our understandings of the systems and be much more alert and alive to the role of power in those systems that we face; power in defining and pursuing different solutions.

Moving beyond stability control where stability in the language Melissa was using is about presuming that whatever trajectories—the incumbent trajectory, the role of governance is to make that stable; dynamically stable as a trajectory. Rather than challenging it, rather than looking at transformative qualities as well.

Just to return, before I finish, to the example Melissa gave—the concrete example below; opening up different approaches to sustainable food futures in East Africa. There were, in the context of the debate there, as Melissa outlined, a whole series of different actors competing with one another with their different narratives and stories about what might offer ways to improve the productivity and drought resilience, especially under climate change in that area. The STEPS Centre went in a particular project to engage with the scientists and local folk in very different settings; men, women, highland, lowland, high income, low income.

Talk in-depth with them about the kinds of responses that the understood to be appropriate to make more resilient to the kinds of draughts that are being experienced in ways that might be more sustainable. Identifying in that way multiple pathways, involving maze which is the favored strategy among the more high influence institution, but also involving other strategies looking at more indigenous crops perhaps where the seeds are shared more routinely still despite pressures among the people involved.

Just to illustrate the kind of thing practically that we—one might do to try and illuminate these alternative pathways, encourage debate about them in a way power operates we just distinguish between strategies based on those interactions between those pathways involve low maze, those involve high maze usage, low external inputs, high external inputs, chemicals, fertilizers infrastructures. I won’t go into it now, but a variety of really quite distinct strategies emerge from these deliberations with the people of different—the different actors, those in the villages, but actually practicing the agriculture, those working for government and corporations trying to help in various ways.

Each one of these—the devil is in the detail. Each one has claims to be more sustainable but actually the consequences unfold; it’s like a fractal structure where the actual implications for the livelihoods and the political economy are right in the detail. You can’t easily make distinctions at a high level.

Going into that detail with people using an approach called multi-criteria mapping which is just an approach then look at people’s uncertainties, look at their assumptions, put it up on a screen conscionably but also explore the qualitative assumptions. I’m not going to go into the full detail here. You just see a horrible list of those different strategies which we’ve gone through with people deliberated, people understood what it was that we were speaking of. We then take a particular perspective.

Like here you have farmers in a particular setting, women farmers in a particular setting. You see the enormous uncertainty. On the left-hand side you see a judgment that it’s a poor strategy. On the right a judgment that is a positive strategy for sustainable. There’s the lengths of the bars show the degree of uncertainty even within a particular group about whether this will turn out for the best or worst and the conditions under which it might work and might not work.

Conventional approaches don’t reveal this kind of uncertainty. Here’s another group. This time farmers in a different setting where you see similar patterns but there are crucial differences between them; especially qualitatively, in the stories people are telling, the assumptions they make and the conditions under which certain strategies might work and others not. There’s not a lot of time now to go into detail; it’s a very detailed chart. I hope you get the picture here about the kinds of practical method that can be employed. This is only one among many. We’re experimenting as our colleagues here and elsewhere with all sorts of different methods.

Instead of saying hey, what’s the solution? Say what might be the solutions? Explore the conditions under which these different solutions come to the fore as being prominent or not and highlight the role that might be play for diversity; deliberate diversification across them.

To summarize what we’ve both been banging on about, then, we face, in looking for solutions to the challenges of sustainability, innovation for sustainable in its broadest sense a world in which there are many possible pathways to sustainable future in food, in agriculture, in transport, in waste. There isn’t just one hardwired. The conventional way in which we look at these, in which assessment, appraisal methods of all kinds, consensus conferences, looking at consensus or cost benefit analysis, looking at the bottom line is like this; with very discrete estimates of how risky or how sustainable different options might be.

Apparently giving a clear picture of which is better, which is worse based on very narrow approaches, single case-by-case analysis, aggregating different things, looking at the average, suppressing uncertainty turning it into probabilities. All these different techniques get used to give this kind of picture. Then that is represented to governance discourses as a single solution which then reinforces this process of lock-in and exclusion.

What we’re talking about with this agenda around opening up pathways to sustainability is that each of these levels doing things differently. At this level broaden out the inputs to appraisal; the types of issues that are taken account of, the options, the practices that might be part of solutions in different settings. Looking at context, looking at uncertainty seriously, getting a picture more like this.

Broader inputs to appraisal. Then, when appraisal speaks to power not just still as a consensus conference with—or a big integrated model then saying okay, we’ve done an enormous amount of work so you can be much more confident in our single answer; instead, giving plural and conditional answers. The conditions under which this might be better or that might be better. Informing a broader governance debate much more aware of the effects of power. Not only in the systems under scrutiny but in the way the knowledge has been produced as well. The way revealing how power might close it down but if you look behind the scenes you see other pictures.

This, in turn, informs not anything goes because plenty of things are ruled out by this sort of experience because nobody actually favors them when you look at them with the cold light of symmetry that this does. It shows the value of diversity, of militating against lock-in, of learning from different practices. Helping catalyze more accountability because it’s clear why one would do A rather than B only under condition X or perspective X or perspective Y. It makes it more accountable why we do one thing rather than another.

In sum, then, what we’re talking about here is a new politics of sustainability; not being afraid to recognize that sustainability is political and that’s not a bad thing. That’s inevitable, it’s also desirable. We have political deliberation, political debate. We need political engagement; we need to make sure the marginal players are at the table because their pathways are typically the ones that disappear first.

It may involve antagonistic confrontation, skepticism. Skepticism is, after all, a defining quality; an enlightenment quality of science. Yet we suppress it often in debates about sustainability. In a rush to a solution skepticism and dissent go out of the window. They are just as important as quality control in sustainability as they are in science. If we do these things then our argument is none of us need to achieve some transcendent quality individually of reflexivity but society and governance at large through being aware of itself, being aware how power can occlude views and how pathways lock in can, in a distributed way, become more reflexive about pathways to sustainability. In the process be more democratic and more robust at the same time. Thanks a lot.

[Applause]

Ed Hackett: Well, thanks very much both of you. Andy, what’s the bottom line?

[Laughing]

Andy Stirling: Bottom line is we don’t know.

Ed Hackett: The floor now is open for questions, please. Digest the ideas, digest the food. I think it’s—yeah, please.

Audience: Thank you very much for such an enlightening talk and then—thank you Ed for recognizing them and bringing them here.

Ed Hackett: And Haley. Haley co-authored and co-sponsored this whole thing.

Audience: And Haley as well.

This is a very core of what we also trying to do at ASU and then we also have a sort of a research cluster which we name as [inaudible] imagination. I follow your work quite regularly because of [inaudible], I know both of you know him very well. One of the challenges which we have faced, which you also mentioned repeatedly, is the multiple ways of knowing and bringing them into policy.

I’m sure you have also encountered the same thing. We are the product of one way of knowing. We are the product of enlightened era and then there’s one way of rationalized way of knowing and acknowledging and proving that that’s the knowledge and that’s the scientific truth. We try to picture it here in every University City. If we don’t perpetuate and we don’t—we reward it appropriately as well. In order for us to survive too, sometime we have to do it even if we don’t want.

In that challenges how do we—in that setting how do we encounter and how do we challenge this knowledge system and break it away and start demonstrating differently?

Melissa Leach: Well, I’m sure Andy will have things to say—is this working [inaudible].

Ed Hackett: You guys hear?

Melisa Leach: Can you hear?

Ed Hackett: No?

Melissa Leach: No. No, it’s not. I see it’s supposed to. Or I’ve muted it. Okay, that’s better.

Absolutely appreciate the challenge. The first thing I’d say is that I think there are multiple ways of knowing, within any discipline, as well as across them even in a university setting. One of the things that—one of the challenges I think to all of us, even if we’re working in a university, is to be aware of and be more cognizant of how our own particular positions from the discipline we’re trained in and from the particular position we occupy with respect some of those very real pressures everyone’s facing. To go for funding, to achieve promotions, to publish in the right places and so on affect the kind of ways of knowing that we’re developing.

By actually acknowledging those quite explicitly one’s going some of the way towards actually moving beyond them. Because you accept that your position is enabling you to look at the world in one way and closing off other routes. Then, I think part of the task is to think about collaborating with others within—sometimes within a university setting, help bringing other disciplinary perspectives, other ways of thinking about an issue to bear, but in forms of collaboration that aren’t just about okay, getting people around a room who offer different perspective. Somehow we can squash them together and produce better knowledge. To appreciate that we need deliberation because those different forms of partiality have often different morals and politics behind them.

There are forms of knowing have social and political lives to them. We need to be aware of those and bring them into the same frame. Then, of course, there are all those other ways of knowing out there that are not conditioned by the framings and the assumptions and the histories of academia and enlightenment thinking. Including the field-level knowledge that’s generated by people working in practice and many of the settings that we work in.

People who are—whose knowledge is shaped by experiences of various kinds of being poor, of being hungry, of living with diseases. I think collaboration is a way forward, but it’s collaboration that’s about deliberation and it requires a certain humility too about the forms of knowing that we have and the realization that they’re always partial in position.

Andy Stirling: Just very quickly, in line with that.

Melissa Leach: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: We don’t have many—I mean it’s a very ambitious undertaking of what we’re about—trying to impede this.

Melissa Leach: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: One thing that’s in our favor is actually things are not as closed down as they seem. Not that actor on the particular perspective irrevocably have a different position. Social phenomena are very complex and actually the enlightenment [inaudible] that you’re speaking about is [inaudible] assumptions that we were tilting at.

If you get a modeler in a bar and talk to them there about their actives you’ll get some very interesting critical discourses coming out there. People perform, has Steve Hillgarner has put, people perform these things as a social process in one context but the same actors are capable of inner deliberation. The reason deliberation has the value it’s the same actors can see these other story lines if the power arena is somewhat shifted and they get a chance to. I think that’s a glimpse of hope; we’re not all just locked into our single act of views. We can access other discourses as well.

Ed Hackett: I have Dave Guston and Mike and then—Michael then two more which of these two will look in my camera.

Audience: Thank you so much. I really appreciate both the ambition of this and the reflexive turn that you take in trying to combine those two things is incredibly difficult. Because on the one hand somebody’s gonna accuse you of hubristic technocratic approach and on the other hand somebody’s gonna accuse you of actually not getting to solutions. I think you’ve managed to put those two things together quite marvelously so far.

I wanna challenge you with something that we’ve been struggling with at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society that I direct here because our framework of anticipatory governances significantly sympathetic to what you’ve articulated here. That’s the sort of time element and how we approach maybe, in your language, the imaginations and the various futures.

I wanna just focus in on one little word to emphasize this reflexive approach and it—you articulate a set of possible pathways. I think one of the words that we’ve been using in that neighborhood instead is plausible. I wanna make, in essence, a pitch for plausibility here because I think possible is too easily reduced to how it is that we model this thing. Okay, so possible is a quantitative term about which—and a physical science; does it contradict known natural laws kind of thing. I don’t think that’s actually a conversation that, seeing the rest of your presentation, you necessarily want these dialogs to focus on.

Instead something, a concept like plausibility gives us a freer reign, freer imaginative reign and it is one of those things that we’re sort of exploring as connecting knowledge to action in possibly a more direct fashion. Because sort of etiologically plausibility is that thing that gets you out of your chair and makes you go like this. In that sense it’s different than credibility and legitimacy and possibility and so forth.

Ed Hackett: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: Yeah, well sorry. Very quickly I mean absolutely right, Dave.

Melissa Leach: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: I mean there are, in fact, various—we speak in various contexts of possibility, reliability, feasibility, viability, plausibility. These things all reach to the different nested layers of the onion which condition these things. You’re absolutely right. Rather than possible, plausible is a better word for all the reasons you’ve said so well.

Audience: Thank you very much for the talk; that was great. I had a question at the very beginning. You brought up the idea of the cycle of failure as a dynamic today. I find interesting, taking a more of ammeta approach that the Pathways Approach is a result of the dynamic of failure because it’s saying okay, let’s try this a different way. I wonder if the problem is the dynamic of failure or if it’s the way we deal with failure as a society or at least at this type of knowledge [inaudible] society that we are a part of.

Melissa Leach: Okay, that’s an interesting question. I mean that dynamic of failure isn’t the only sort of, as it were, origin of the Pathways Approach and in a way one could take two ways into this. The starting point—I mean there’s one starting point that says we’re on a road to—on a motorway towards races to progress and the way that Andy outlined which are inherently unsustainable by any criterion of social equity and environmental integrity. Part of the opening up question is to think about multiple routes to sustainability.

That dynamic of failure quite interestingly can come into play around any of those pathways. Even those that claim they’re moving towards fixing the environment. I mean I’ve seen this a great deal in the places that I’ve originally sort of come from around working around either health issues where one’s had very kind of singular solutions about dealing with outbreaks and then they get resisted by local people. Or, indeed, attempting to manage environments; to manage forests and rangelands in ways that inherently don’t fit the dynamic nature of ecology.

I think those offer two slightly different ways into this Pathways Approach. I don’t think—I mean I think that that dynamic of failure and reflection on it is one route through which society might try to think differently. I don’t think it’s—I don’t think it’s the only one. I think there are sometimes the motorways that are taking us, as it were, in unsustainable directions aren’t failing at all. They’re actually being remarkably successful precisely because they’re backed by the kinds of both hard political economic power relations and softer processes of lock-in and momentum and so on that Andy drew attention to.

They don’t necessarily fail. That, in a way, is more of problem. We need to be opening up those as well and showing there that the directions we’re going in aren’t necessarily the ones that certainly many of those moral and social criteria we would wanna [inaudible].

Andy Stirling: There’s a meta-level reflection on failure. There’s reflective on failures that are instantiated in ways that are unequivocal which does happen. There are such things as unequivocal failures. On the other hand there is reflection about this notion of failure which I think is absolutely as rarified in this enlightenment way as solutions. The whole point is, which sustainability especially has taught us, although it’s part of the human experience, is that actually what constitutes a failure will look differently in different settings, under different perspectives and under assumptions and conditions.

Actually to problematize that and actually the way failure contributes is yes, you learn even when something’s unequivocally a failure, but you also learn what constitutes the possibility of failure as well.

Melissa Leach: Yeah, that’s right.

Andy Stirling: You have to look critically at what—as critically at failure as we do at what constitutes solutions.

Melissa Leach: Yeah, just to add; I mean failure can be a crucial learning moment. I mean one of the—this dynamic of failure that we were talking about is where actually the response to failure is to say okay, well it was an implementation failure so we just need to do the same thing with more force and more effectiveness; put more resources into it. Instead of questioning the basic assumptions and parameters and framings which led you in that route which possibly was the wrong route in the first place.

Using failure as an opportunity for critical reflection I think is crucial.

Ed Hackett: Next question I have over here by the windows.

Audience: Okay, I’m Paul. I’m an architect here in town and I have, I believe, a global perspective on architecture, sustainability and what our responsibilities are as a society in the global perspective. I wonder sometimes, and we could talk for hours about the fact that we spend our environmental capital like drunken sailors as a society globally. I wanted to hone in on one thing. I like the system a lot. I like that you can quantitatively look at the things and bring lots of discussions together around issues.

I wondered, as we start to approach this sort of—this level of a nine billion in population and we start to look at can a planet really sustain those kinds of numbers. As you start to develop a narrative and develop the stories and deploy this system how much conversation are you generating or hearing around this whole issue about our—the proliferation of human beings on the planet?

Melissa Leach: Okay.

Andy Stirling: Well, but I mean very quickly that’s a very deep and pervasive question that is difficult to very quickly answer. I would say that embodies not an illegitimate but a very particular framing for some very potent baggage. Yes, not to diminish the population especially in countries which have high consumption and among populations of those countries, the affluent ones with high consumption, population of affluent people is a problem.

Population can easily descend into fear of the poor which is somewhat paradoxical. Actually, there are also other framings that it’s consumption itself. For instance in terms of innovation the world spends 30 to 40 percent of its inoperative resources on strategies associated with organized violence in support of the military. Maybe that’s the way of framing the problem.

There’s no one transcendent way of framing this problem but population—it seems to be among the more popular. We need to reflect in the spirit of reflexiveness about power especially why it is the population tends to come to the fore as often as it does and why it often, in itself, takes the form of fear of the poor. With those things looked at with a cold, hard light then I think it’s part of the mix but it’s not the only one. Other things are more missed out.

Ed Hackett: Thanks very much for a really interesting talk. I apologize in advance for this question maybe a little bit unfair but I just wanna push you on some of the suggestions you made particularly about politics. There was something I think Andy said about the suppression of sort of discourses of choice that struck me. On the one hand yes, there are these sort of imaginations about the linearity and in a sense singularity of trajectories of progress and so forth.

On the other hand many societies contending with problems of sustainability also have built into their political systems mechanisms of self-reflexivity that in fact upon scrutiny, and lots of people in STS have done this work as well as in other doings. Upon scrutiny it turns out there are forms of reflexivity that are present there that maybe denied in the overall sort of singularity of the narrative but are there in practice, right?

It seems to me that the simple sort of abstract and vocation of deliberation of reflexivity and contestation, et cetera, et cetera, to some degree negates the forms of deliberation contestation et cetera that are there on the ground already. My question for you is how do you—the projects of—how does the problem of thinking through the forms of politics appropriate to problems of sustainability particularly on a global level; on a trans-political level figure into this?

An example; I was thinking about the World Bank’s ranking of legal systems as spaces that are amenable to sustainable innovation as a sort of globalizing—as a sort of move to make apples and oranges into apples and apples and to find the kind of spaces of normativity you might say. I mean the kinds of politics, the kinds of regimes of politics that are appropriate to addressing and finding solutions for sustainability. I wonder if you just comment on that.

Melissa Leach: Okay. You wanna get that one?

Andy Stirling: Should I take off?

Melissa Leach: Yeah.

Andy Stirling: All right, it’s a very good point. We are prone—as it’s sort of very well established especially in trendy academic circles that we’re a part of to say oh yes, these quantitative models, oh dear, dear they’re very simplistic and reductive. What we need is qualitative approaches, deliberation, participation. As if that’s self-evidently gonna solve the problem. That’s a dangerous language because the basic dynamic which we’ve tried to point up to, deliberation is not a means—is not an ends in itself. It’s a means to the end of scrutinizing the dynamics of the complex system that constitutes knowledge itself; and especially power.

If deliberation is pursued, if we think well, we got some harbor massian scheme, great. Have we got all our criteria ticked? Yes, great, then we’ve got powers excluded. Then we can take a consensus and we’ve done it. Then it’s a very dangerous approach. Because participator and deliberative practices of all kinds are just as prone to the dynamics of justification; to cranking out one answer, suppressing diversity. Maybe it’ll be diversity at the inputs but at the outputs in the chart I showed it’s suppressed. That’s why it’s consensus conferences. That’s why it’s citizen’s jury verdicts.

That’s the value. That’s political commodities that those things are charged with delivering just like the aggregate solutions of modeling. It’s the same dynamic. The purpose—these practices are means to the end of scrutinizing, challenging power. Not dispensing with it because it can’t be dispensed with. Anyway it’s not something that we want to dispense with because you don’t achieve any sort of change without exercising agency, death or power. Especially ambitious, transformative change needs one to think about that as a positive thing.

You’re absolutely right in interrogating that and we’re not trying to say there are panaciers that are deliberate fixes; these are a means to that end.

Melissa Leach: Absolutely. I think, just to add to that, in the different projects and cases we’ve been involved with. We think very eclectic actually in thinking about which spaces are appropriate for doing politics around different issues and different settings. Sometimes it is about working with international agencies and global governments arrangements. Sometimes it’s about what’s going on in national governments. Sometimes it’s working with networks of social movements. Sometimes it’s about community activism and the way it’s engaging with other kinds of agencies.

Those are all areas about it were governance and politics that different literatures have thought about that occupy different spaces and arenas. The general points and principals that Andy’s outlined about looking for deliberation and multiplicity, but also recognizing how power relations shape how that happens in any given space holds across the spaces. That’s the way we’ve tended to take this forward.

Ed Hackett: I think questions [inaudible]. Unless I see a question from the quiet side of the room then we’ll [inaudible] okay?

Audience: Thanks for a really fascinating talk and my question actually follows up really well on what you were just addressing. It’s a rather practical question. How do you really see governance structures as needing to change in very practical ways? Bureaucracies; what shifts do we need to have? I mean obviously bureaucracies are very entrenched in the way that they operate and so kind of how do we get from point A to the ideas that you’re putting forth?

What changes do we need to see in decision making structures?

Melissa Leach: I think that’s a huge, really important question but one that only be answered either at the most general level of saying that what those—what one needs to see is an opening up of a recognition by the people who are part of those structures of the ways that their processes are conditioning; what they do and recognizing that that’s not the only way so that some of the opening up processes Andy was alluding to. Or it’s a question that has to relate to quite—it has to be answered in relation to quite specific issues and settings.

I mean, for instance, we hosted a workshop last week on controversies around pandemic flu which came up with some very specific arguments about how the WHO and the decision making processes around handling influenza needed to shift. It referred to some of these general things about opening up but as applied to the very specific political, economic, social challenges around that issue.

I think one needs to engage at both levels, actually.

Andy Stirling: Yeah. Institutions use structures and practices, convey uncertainties, convey different plural perspectives, convey different options, convey different settings. These are the sort of check—when they justify a policy they don’t say we—X is true, therefore Y. They say if X is true then Y. If Zed is true then A. it’s not our job as an institution concerned with appraisal in the broadest sense to tell society at large what is the best thing. It’s our job to illuminate the way A and B depend on X and Y.

In the end I don’t think we can put our faith in some sort of pristine practice, structure, institution, bureaucracy approach at all. This is an ongoing challenge. It’s a verb, not a noun. It’s something we’ve been engaged in since Babylon of challenging power. Not to dispense with power but to just keep it on its toes, keep it answerable and accountable. That doesn’t rest in a structure. That’s why we emphasize all the time politics. Cuz that’s where we see it in the end; the hope and democratic politics of that for resolving these issues. Not in structures and practices in any single sense.

Although you can do a lot to facilitate that politics by opening up in the ways we’ve tried to outline.

Ed Hackett: Our last question?

Audience: All right, so I agree with the different scales of governance and multiple pathways in trying to overcome problems that we have on a global scale. I guess what my question is is that it seems to me that true sustainability which would involve a political discourse globally of human rights and environmental sustainability would require major reforms to current institutions, systems of power and governance. Since much of those with resources and financial capitals create support and control our current hegemonic culture what is your organization’s idea to challenge these structures of power in order to promote ethical economics, social equity and environmental sustainability?

[Laughing]

Andy Stirling: I think—

Melissa Leach: Okay.

Andy Stirling: That’s one for you.

[Laughing]

Melissa Leach: I mean I think we’ve talked about a variety of the ways in which we’re seeking to challenge those structures of power at multiple scales through these arguments for processes of opening up and through working with partners in particular places. Whether those are community activists or key players who’ve got the scope to shift things a little bit within powerful international agency.

We’re also engaging, actually, at a global level around seizing opportunities where there might be moments for change. One that we’re very engaged with at the moment is the whole process post-Rio+20 to define a series of sustainable development goals for the world to be implemented in a post-2015 era as the success of such goals to the millennium development goals which have largely focused on resources for several poor countries. Now we’re engaged very much with others in arguments that we need a set of global goals which recognize the responsibilities of affluent people and places also to change lifestyles, to change consumption practices, to deal with problems of waste, to try and steer in a global sense global society within what people are recognizing as quite relevant zones of ecological turbulence and planetary boundaries beyond which the world will run into really major problems.

That’s a set of debates, negotiations. It’s a very complex policy process in which there are sort of micro opportunities to intervene so we’re doing that in a number of ways. I think that really points to the fact that I think one has to operate both in a way that’s clear about principals as we’ve tried to outline here but is also relative—quite opportunistic. Sometimes it’s a question of seeing an opening in some of these very powerful, often quite rigid structures, national and global, to say okay, here’s a little chink. Here’s a little chink and an opening to which one can begin to seed some alternative ways of thinking about and doing politics. The STG process at the moment possibly constitutes one of those.

Andy Stirling: We have learned a lesson there. We try to, from social movements, going back centuries about what you do when you’re David to the Goliath. I mean we’re just a little institute set on top of a hill in Southern England with our connections and so forth. When we engage in the way Melissa just said we’re not thinking that by setting out the priorities for the world this is in deterministic way going to percolate through. Of course not.

Ho Chi Minh, War of the Flea, Trojan horses, political judo; these are the sorts of things we’re thinking about where you take these moments of opportunity that Melissa just outlined and just try to just exert a little bit of an effort with like-minded actors at a crucial point; at a fulcrum. It’s like a dance; effecting change that way rather than set piece, trench lines of principals and practice, even though the principals and practices are part of the judo.

That’s what we’re trying to help do.

Ed Hackett: Well, we commend your efforts and hope to join.

[Applause]