Control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability

Figures & data

Table 1. Materializations of control, care, and conviviality across different political dimensions.

Dimensions of political processes	Domination	Control	Care	Conviviality
Prevalent ontology	Categorically bounded India: by helping to create conditions of famine and underdevelopment, self-serving colonial exploitation sets the stage for the “Green Revolution” (GR)	Categorically bordered India: the GR “high-yielding varieties (HYV) package” frames food security as national self-sufficiency through enhanced productivity of cheap calories through monocultures of wheat and rice. Belgium: the understanding of GMO field trials as semi-controlled environments with clear insides and outsides	Interactively relational India: emergent grassroots actions and socio-ecological relations condition durable regional variabilities in the uptake of GR and in adaptation practices	Holistically relational India: the politics of agroecology movements for sustainability that can encompass whole societies and material cultures (including plural human-nature relations)
Mode of engagement	Totalizing Othering India: “superiorized” interests colonize territory; dispossess targeted castes and classes; “inferiorize” and exploit through gendered racialization; objectifying “inferiorized” people alongside extracted “natural resources.” Belgium: “superiorized” interests colonize territory; objectifying “inferiorized” people alongside extracted “natural resources”	Instrumental manipulation Belgium: materializing control relations to “engineer” for high performance, by manipulating selected crop genes, in ostensibly “Objective” ways. India: instrumental “industrial tools” of GR include subsidized private groundwater extraction for monocultures of just a few hybrid varieties of cereals, (re)producing marginalization of smallholders and workers	Reflexive commitment India: local cultural-ecological conditions push back against GR varieties. Seasonal variations switch between rainfed and irrigated crops and fallows. Manual plowing co-exists with tractors. Welfare entitlements reduce dependence of landless workers on dominant castes, opening up spaces for egalitarian struggles. Belgium: ECJ ruling acknowledges scientific uncertainty and affirms precaution as guiding principle for GMO assessment. Freedom of information request by civil society reveals influence of corporate lobbying	Immersive equality India: pluralities of interests and identities engage with each other in multiple ways on equal terms, across social movements, struggling against overarching gradients of power or privilege that “inferiorize” particular actors and “superiorize” others
Manner of materialization	Identity imposition India and Belgium: entire new identities are created and rigidly imposed as a means to violent “inferiorization,” devastating objectification, and unbridled exploitation	Comprehensive instrumentalization India: GR policies entrench marketization around agrochemicals, seed dealing, and procurement of credit, also through public extension services. Belgium: public policies instrumentalize in favor of biotech interests through tax shelters, public–private partnerships, and erosions of EU biosafety regulations using field trials	Assemblages of practices India: women’s work groups bargain for higher agricultural wages, dignified work, struggle to use village commons interwoven with challenging casteism. Struggles for accountability and welfare entitlements are intrinsic to livelihoods	Socio-material wholes Belgium: civil society demands to assess field trials in their full socio-ecological context, to include intersecting socio-economic drivers and ecological impacts. India: agroecology social movements tackling caste and gender inequalities entangled with environmental change in farming (and beyond)
Affordance of agency	Subject over all else General: one class of social actors privileged as the “superiorized” Self, enjoy cultural–political norms under which patterns of entitlement and valuation uphold their interests (and recognize only their identities)—essentially Objectifying “inferiorised” Others	Subject over Object Belgium: notional “switching” of genes “on” and “off,” as directed by biotechnologists as a class of “superiorized” subjects-who-know. India: individualizing of risk and coping strategies. Multiple cropping seasons aggravate extraction of groundwater as an object (to serve human subjects’ needs constructed by the GR model). “Inferiorized” laboring classes are displaced by mechanization	“Objects” approached as subjects India: in situ practices (of seed breeding and exchange) based on principles of cultural biodiversity and dynamism, to highlight caring for nature’s agency in interdependent co-evolution of seeds with their socio-ecological milieus	Su/o-bjects entangle as collectives India: nurturing conditions of democratic parity across multiple dimensions of relations between humans and with nature. Contrasting social and ecological actors thus enjoy institutional norms under which patterns of innovation and valuation repair the damage associated with “inferiorization” and Objectification (for socio-ecological justice). Former colonial “Objects” are thus engaged with/as decolonial subjects
Propagating processes	Violent oppression India: conditions of dispossession from land and water established through colonial, gendered, and casteist violence, continuing in post-colonial times, also in the form of dominating violence directed against objectified nature	Technocratic determinism Belgium: expert hegemony in (policy) narratives of standardization and economic growth. India: enforced standardization of agrarian practices implicated in the GR model based on “modern” techno-sciences (e.g., HYV monocultures and focus on calories for (mal)nutrition)	Autonomous reciprocity India: practices of labor exchange and working women’s inter-caste solidarity employed to cope with economic and ecological distress. Enabling of complex adaptation to local settings” (e.g., uncultivated land used for grazing and fodder). Equal access for all to village commons	Mutualism for decolonial self-realization India: hopes for conviviality enable struggles against injustices produced by power and privilege. Autonomy and self-realization between interrelated interests and actors throughout wider socio-material wholes, with the potential to enable more comprehensively mutualistic relations, within and across societies, free from deeper and wider gradients of coloniality in all its forms including caste and gender