Just Socioecological Transformations: Linking ideas and structures, personal and collective change
Abstract: The book addresses two opposing trends in transformations literature. First, the widespread co-optation of transformations and transformative change in sustainability science and policy. Second, the narrow framing of ‘radical’ socioecological transformations that includes only the structural/systemic aspects of socioecological destruction, but ignore the ideational, including ontological foundations of socioecological crises, and which similarly considers only social movements, disobedience, and insurgency as key strategies for ‘radical’ transformations, ignoring contemplative politics and the inner work of self-transformation, as relevant responses to transformations. In response to these two trends, the book sets two aims. First, to reclaim socioecological transformations as radical, justice-centred concept and praxis, which tackle the deeper roots of the current socioecological violence and oppression, that touches deep down to the materialist-dualist worldview that has helped the establishment and maintenance of the colonial-racist-capitalist structures of oppression. Second, it aims to expand the meaning of radical transformations to include, in addition to resistance of current structures, the strategies and responses that challenge and seek to reinvent the dualist-materialist worldview onto which those structures rest. Such strategies and responses of transformations include in addition to active resistance, also the practice and embodiment of deep interconnectedness, kindness and openness, which help us perceive and experience ourselves as part-wholes of One existence.
The book builds a case that just socioecological transformations must involve ontological undoing and unlearning of the dominant Eurocentric dualist-materialist worldview, as well as opening to ontologies that teach unity and radical interconnectedness. Transforming societal structures and mechanisms requires transforming the ideational and ontological foundations that enables and maintains the structures of oppression. In other words, it requires addressing the deeper roots (or ‘radicalis’ in Latin) of systemic causes of socioecological violence and destruction, associated with the ideational and ontological aspects as key to transformations. In addition to the political ontology and associated structural violence and power struggles, multiple justice dimensions (e.g. multispecies, intersectional, epistemic, situated or experienced justice) are at the core of this transformative process.
The book features 15 chapters. Jointly, they highlight the ontological biases as the foundations of socioecological crises, the different ways of organising society (e.g. degrowth principles in managing tourism) and societal institutions such as education, as well as the examples of co-optation and deliberate narrowing down of radical transformations in policy processes surrounding green transition and global deforestation debates. Empirically, the book explores initiatives and attempts at transformations across geographies, policy processes, societies, and social movements in the Minority and the Majority Worlds. The first four chapters reflect on (i) concepts such as radical interconnectedness, as emerging from the eastern teachings and traditions, (ii) deep relationality drawing from Yup’ik indigenous peoples in Alaska, (iii) relevance of ancestral knowledge and rituals of Yawanawá peoples for personal transformations, and (iv) the ontological shifts through the work with land and more-than-human across regenerative farms in the Minority and the Majority Worlds. The rest of the book present attempts at transformations, some of which involve social mobilization and action at higher institutional levels, while others are examples of citizens and communities coming together at grassroot, village, or municipality levels. They outline the challenges related to ecological livelihoods in small-scale farmers in Finland, practitioners and municipalities engagements for a place-based shadow forests in Sweden, citizen movements for degrowth tourism in Spain, and decolonization and resistance in intercultural education in Ecuador and epistmeicide and scolasticide in Palestine. Finally, cooptation of transformations in policy processes related to EU green transition and bioeconomy and the EU-driven anti-deforestation policies in Honduras, and their engagement with different indigenous groups in the country.
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