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Pathways to Sustainability: Perspectives and Provocations

By sketching out the conceptual framework for research at the Economic and Social Research Council-funded STEPS (Social, Technological, and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre at Sussex University, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Andy Stirling, in Dynamic Sustainabilities, seek to reframe the contested concept of sustainability. This is not a project for the faint-hearted, given the fierce debates surrounding the concept and the many divergent programmes of action for which it has been invoked. In calling for ` a more concrete clarification of what is meant by sustainability' '' (page 41), the authors are not seeking some new, more authoritative definition with which to adjudicate what is and is not sustainable. Instead they make the very process of clarifying the diversity of sustainability framings and the pathways for achieving them central to what sustainability is all about. Sustainability, they explain, is not some fixed state to be achieved but ` necessarily a political process ... [that] requires an opening up of debate through a diversification of knowledge bases and processes of inclusive deliberation at all steps'' (page 64). This analytical emphasis on understanding relations and dynamic processes rather than identifying essential qualities is increasingly common across the social sciences, particularly in the UK, but the stance adopted by the STEPS team is distinctive in several important respects. Unlike so much actor-network-theory-inspired work, the tone here is pragmatic and the prose accessible. In Dynamic Sustainabilities the authors speak of science and the policy process in ways that will be recognizable to practitioners and should prove interesting too, insofar as they seek to distil for practitioners some practical lessons about the challenges for policy making posed by new understandings of complexity, dynamics, incomplete knowledge, and contested values. In keeping with this practical policy orientation, the authors avoid abstract philosophizing, even as the very suggestive metaphor of sustainability `pathways' begs important questions about the philosophical grounds for understanding and evaluating them. The authors acknowledge constructivist insights about the plurality of environmental knowledge, values, and experience, but eschew the trendy postnaturalist ideas of multiplicity and enactment variously inspired by Bruno Latour and Annemarie Mol. Instead they uphold a traditional Cartesian metaphysics in which competing sustainability narratives are understood as subjective framings, or perspectives, on the same underlying objective reality, rather than, as Mol might say, as practical enactments of Pathways to sustainability: perspectives and provocationsA