Project description
This research project funded by the Chilean National Research and Development Agency (ANID) is to be understood as part of the agenda opened by the 2013 World Social Science Report, which challenged the social sciences as a whole to think about a transition towards socio-ecological sustainability. The project was articulated around two broad assumptions: (1) the globally prevailing socio-cultural model is known to be inherently unsustainable from a socio-ecological perspective, and yet global and national policies and institutions are set to keep it relatively intact, thus “sustaining the unsustainable”; and (2) Existing openings that seek to break the pattern of “sustaining the unsustainable” can be found in the form of citizen-led initiatives, which are more or less articulated among themselves and with their institutional context. The project envisioned studying both the logics of sustaining unsustainability and the emergence (and limits) of more or less institutionalized collective experiences and practices that constitute new ways of doing, organizing, interpreting and knowing for future-capable societies. The research question read: in a general context dominated by status quo or incrementalistic approaches, who are the agents of change and how do they seek to enact institutional changes and the transformation of the socio-material context of unsustainability?
The objective of this project was to contribute to the global and multidisciplinary reflections on the barriers and leverage points for a transition towards socio-ecological sustainability, from the particular context of Chile, which is widely framed as a case of “successful adoption” of discursive and institutional matrices shaped after spatiotemporal contextual experiences in the global north. This brings south-north relations, dynamics of adoption but also of resistance into focus in a singular light, showcasing ambivalences, tensions, and contradictions of such transfer processes and allowing for an analysis of the global imbrications of unsustainable forms of production and consumption.
Related Publications
Vanhulst, Julien, Karla Gonzalez Tapia, Adrian E. Beling, Ricardo Rivas, and Rachel Elfant (2022). “From NIMBY to Transformation? Lessons from Four Case Studies in the Maule Region in Chile.” Local Environment 27, no. 8 (August 3, 2022): 988–1006. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2022.2091529
Pelfini, Alejandro, Adrian E. Beling, and Julien Vanhulst (2022). “Semi-Peripheral Ecological Modernization and Environmental Governance in Chile: Locked into the Iron Cage of Unsustainability?” Transcience. A Journal of Global Studies, 13, no. 2: 1–18.
Vanhulst, J., Adrian E. Beling (2021). Mapping environmental governance research field in Chile: a bibliometric and network analysis. Sustainability 13(11), 6484; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116484