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Simon West, L. Jamila Haider, Tilman Hertz, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Michele-Lee Moore
Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shared spaces’ involving multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing. Diverse relational approaches to transformations are increasingly articulated by Indigenous, humanities, and social science scholars, practitioners, and activists from the Global South and North. Broadly, relational approaches enact alternatives to separable categories of society and nature, emphasise unfolding relations between human and non-human beings, and highlight the importance of ethical responsibilities and care for these relationships. Yet while it is important to recognise the collective significance of diverse relational lifeways, practices, and philosophies to transformations, it is also vital to recognise their differences: efforts to produce universal frameworks and toolboxes for applying relationality can reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices, hinder recognition of the significance of relational approaches, and marginalise more radical approaches. In this paper we explore five intersecting ‘relationalities’ currently contributing to discussions around transformations: (i) Indigenous-kinship, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment. We explore how these different relational approaches address key concepts in transformations research, including human-nature connectedness; agency and leadership; scale and scaling; time and change; and knowledge and action. We suggest that their diversity gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations.
There is widespread recognition in sustainability research, policy, practice, and activism of the need for radical social-ecological transformations to address interlinked challenges of social and environmental injustice, biodiversity loss, climate change, poverty, and pollution, among others (O’Brien 2012; IPBES 2019; IPCC 2023). These challenges have emerged in the context of intersecting processes of modernism, colonialism, and industrial capitalism designed to “sever relations between mind, body, and land” (Davis & Todd 2017:761). Mignolo & Walsh (2018:4) suggest that there is “no modernity without coloniality” and highlight their inextricability with the compound term ‘modernity/coloniality.’ Modernist-colonialist logics and practices are characterised by separable categories of society and nature, the belief in a single real world separable from socio-cultural perceptions of it, and the search for universal explanations and solutions (Hogan & Topkok 2015; Law 2015; Mignolo & Walsh 2018). These logics have shaped efforts to exploit nature through, for example, extractive resource use, as well as efforts to protect it through conservation and protected areas (Plumwood 1993; Büscher & Fletcher 2020). The scoping report for the forthcoming global assessment on transformative change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) states that transformation will entail “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including [development] paradigms, goals and values, needed for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human wellbeing and sustainable development” (IPBES 2021). A central aspect of transformations to sustainability therefore involves enacting alternatives to the modernist-colonialist paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene (Whyte 2017).
In the field of sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed to understand and advance transformations, including multi-level (Geels 2002), pathways (Leach et al. 2010), transformative adaptation (O’Brien 2012), and social-ecological approaches (Moore et al. 2014). While there has long been dissensus and dispute between these approaches (Geels 2010; Olsson et al. 2014; Stirling 2015) there has also been increasing cross-fertilization (Hölscher et al. 2018; Leach et al. 2018). This has been coupled with a shift away from advancing universal theoretical frameworks towards recognising sustainability transformations as “shared spaces” or matters of care and concern (Pereira et al. 2020; Pathways Network 2021), involving multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing (Martin & Mirraboopa 2003). For example, Scoones et al. (2020) argue for the need to take seriously the presence of plural knowledges, politics, and pathways in pursuit of transformations. This movement towards multiplicity can be understood as an intentional departure from the Western-centric (Lam et al. 2020) and positivist-centric (Lövbrand et al. 2015) nature of much sustainability science and part of broader efforts to decolonize and diversify knowledge and action around sustainability transformations (Chilisa 2017).
This recognition of multiplicity has been furthered by the growing articulation of diverse relational approaches to transformations as an avenue for Indigenous, humanities, and social science scholars from the Global South and North to inform knowledge and action towards sustainability (Kealiikanakaoleohaililani & Giardina 2016; Chan et al. 2018; Walsh et al. 2021; Gram-Hanssen et al. 2022; Rist et al. 2023). Notions of relationality are used across multiple knowledge and governance systems, scholarly traditions, interdisciplinary conversations, and lived experiences in different ways, for different purposes, with different power relations (Raymond et al. 2021; Gallegos-Riofrio et al. 2022; Gould et al. 2023). Common resonances among relational approaches include (i) the embodiment of, or desire to pursue, alternatives to separable categories of society and nature, (ii) a sense of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and mutuality between human and nonhuman beings, and (iii) an emphasis on ethical obligations, responsibilities, and care for these relationships (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; de la Cadena & Blaser 2018; Tynan 2021). Intercultural and interdisciplinary conversations around relational approaches to transformations have the potential to create alliances between alternatives to modernist-colonialist approaches in the Global North, land-based resurgence of Indigenous peoples around the world, and Global South communities of scholarship and action (Escobar 2015; Goodchild et al. 2021). Yet a lack of appreciation for the differences between relational approaches can reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices, hinder communication, and marginalise more radical or unfamiliar approaches (Watts 2013; Sundberg 2014; Böhme et al. 2022). This reveals the promises and tensions of working with notions of relationality in sustainability science: how to recognise the collective significance of relational approaches to sustainability transformations while retaining sensitivity to the diversity and context-specificity that constitute their very nature?
In this paper, we address this question by reviewing some of the diverse relational approaches that are currently informing transformations research and practice, focusing on transformations in relation to ecosystem management and governance. Our aim is to highlight the collective value of the diversity of relational approaches to sustainability transformations - not ‘closing down’ around a single notion of what relationality is, but recognising that relationalities are always situated, multiple, and emerging (Tynan 2021; Staffa et al. 2022). We begin by highlighting the diversity and politics of relational approaches and discuss the intricacies of making connections between those operating in Indigenous, Global South, and Global North contexts (Todd 2016). We continue by reflecting on our own positionality as a group of scholars in the context of the Special Issue to which this paper contributes. We then identify five broadly distinct yet intersecting relational approaches to sustainability transformations which we refer to as differing ‘relationalities’: (i) Indigenous-kinship, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) structural-dialectical, (iv) posthumanist-performative, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment. We explore how these differing relationalities – themselves composed of multiple approaches – each enrich understandings of key concepts in transformations research and practice: (i) human-nature interconnectedness; (ii) agency and leadership; (iii) scale and scaling; (iv) time and change; and (v) knowledge and action. We conclude by suggesting that the recognition of multiple relationalities leads to practices of transformations as “walking together” (Sundberg 2014) in a “world of many worlds” (de la Cadena & Blaser 2018), providing examples from our own experiences, and lend our support to initiatives that create spaces for intercultural dialogue and exchange around sustainability transformations (Goodchild 2021; Pereira et al. 2020).
Philosophical and practice traditions that identify (or have been identified) as relational are exceptionally diverse, including many different Indigenous (Graham 1999; Wilson 2008; Itsiipootsikimskai et al. 2023), Japanese (Cook & Wagenaar 2012), Chinese (Mesle 2008), African (Chilisa et al. 2017), Latin American (Gallegos-Riofrio et al. 2022), Indian (Shankar 2023), and medieval European philosophies (Brower 2001), as well as the thinking and practices of land-based communities such as pastoralists, farmers, and fishers across the Global South and North (Semplici et al. forthcoming). In the context of (Global North) social sciences and humanities – where the authors of this paper have most experience – relationality is often understood in terms of a relational ‘turn’ or direction in research inspired by philosophers including Dewey (1958), Whitehead (1978), and Deleuze & Guattari (1988), emerging in the 1980s across fields including human, cultural, and economic geography (Whatmore 2002; Boggs & Rantisi 2003), science and technology studies (Latour 1993), sociology (Emirbayer 1997; Donati 2021), anthropology (Ingold 2000), psychology (Hartig 1993), and many others. Among these approaches, understandings of relationality vary and have evolved in many directions, including assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006), social network and complexity studies (Bodin et al. 2011; Weinbaum 2015), the ‘ontological turn’ in social theory (Escobar 2007) including new materialism (Barad 2007) and posthumanism (Panelli 2010), and increasing engagement with Indigenous philosophy and practice (de la Cadena & Blaser 2018). This diversity both across and within knowledge systems highlights that the term relational is often itself used in a relational way, used to distinguish a given approach from the ‘atomistic,’ ‘essentialist’ or ‘substantialist’ approaches associated with modernist and Enlightenment European thinking, even though the dimensions of difference signified by the term may vary significantly (Selg & Ventsel 2020).
The diversity of relational thinking produces complex power relations and knowledge politics. Much (Global North) humanities and social science relational scholarship considers itself counter-hegemonic in the sense of critiquing and providing alternatives to still-dominant positivist approaches in science, policy, and practice . However, it can also reproduce Western-centrism, colonialism, and epistemic injustice where concepts of relationality are discussed without proper acknowledgment and engagement with Indigenous and Global South philosophies, scholarship and lived traditions (Watts 2013; Latulippe et al. 2023). Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2016) argues that, when Indigenous relationalities are mentioned in Western posthumanist scholarship, they are often used in support of the (theoretical) endeavour of the author without recognising the distinctiveness of Indigenous knowledge and governance systems or engaging with the political realities faced by Indigenous peoples. This is especially important given that, for many Indigenous peoples, practising and renewing relational knowledge, governance, and legal systems is not only a philosophical exercise but also a lived reality and an everyday struggle for existence in face of enormous ongoing colonial injustices, including those implemented by Western research practices (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Indeed, non-Indigenous scholar Juanita Sundberg (2014) describes how her use of posthumanism has sometimes reflected a disembedded and disembodied understanding of relationality within a deeply settler-colonial context - precisely what such scholarship ostensibly seeks to avoid. Meanwhile, other research has brought Indigenous relationalities into dialogue with Western relationalities in, e.g., systems thinking (Goodchild 2021) and human geography (Bawaka Country et al. 2016), through respectful and practice-oriented collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. It is vital to attend to the diversity and politics of relational approaches to transformations, if Global North relationalities are not to simply reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices in new guises (Kaul et al. 2022).
As an author group we are White environmental social scientists and humanities scholars located in the Global North, including Europe and the settler-colonial states of Australia and Canada. As such we recognise that we benefit from and are implicated in ongoing processes of colonialism and are committed to enacting an anti-colonial ethos in our work and everyday lives (Liboiron 2021). We have worked closely with colleagues in land-based and Indigenous communities across the Global South and North, who have challenged us, guided us, and continue to teach us about the complexities of anti-colonial work. At the same time, in the field of sustainability science we are part of a transdisciplinary community including natural scientists, engineers, and economists. Consequently, we often find ourselves situated at the interface between multiple worlds, knowledge practices, and audiences, and experience the tensions and contradictions that arise from this position (Gani and Khan 2024; Haraway 2016). We often make mistakes and are committed to learning from them (e.g. Gallegos-Riofrio et al. 2022; Gould et al. 2023) as well as publishing so that the struggle in constantly becoming differently is done ‘out loud’ and in conversation with communities of scholars and practitioners who are also engaging in this work.