Prefiguring sustainable living: an ecovillage story

ABSTRACT

Ecovillages are utopian communities that simultaneously critique the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) and prefigure alternative systems of production and consumption in everyday life, reconfiguring sustainability as both embedded in social structures and everyday practices. The paper explores how individuals navigate personal and collective meaning within interstitial spaces. Focusing on an Irish ecovillage, we analyse participants’ accounts of the ecovillage’s origin myth revealing nuances in their stories. While accounts coalesce around the significance of prefiguring sustainability, each telling also reveals particular aspects that are more personally meaningful for each participant. The paper has implications for policy and research that seeks to understand sustainability beyond both anarrow focus on individual behaviour and an abstract focus on macro-level structures, highlighting the role of experimental and discursive spaces where sustainable society is imagined and practised.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable consumption
• prefiguring sustainability
• grassroots initiatives
• ecovillage
• storytelling
• transformation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Examples of utopian experimentation include Buddhist and Christian utopian communities, the Utopian Socialist communities of the final decades of nineteenth century and the communes of the twentieth century countercultural movements including the Israeli Kibbutz, the hippy communes of the 1960s and the German Peaceniks (Birnbaum & Fox, 2014; Cooper & Baer, 2018; Dawson, 2013; Goell & Litfin, 2014; Trainer, 2000).

2. The concept of the DSP is divided into two domains – the cosmological realm – ‘a culture’s basic beliefs about the structure, constitution, and evolution of the concrete world and includes, inter alia, beliefs about natural hierarchy, atomism, and dominion’ (Kilbourne & Beckmann, 1998, p. 521), and the socio-economic domain which has three dimensions -economic, political, and technological. The latter domain refers to everyday interactions(Kilbourne & Beckmann, 1998). The economic dimension defines progress in terms of economic growth; it is the basis of the deregulation of markets, the rational man and the argument that the best way to allocate resources is through free markets (Kilbourne et al., 2002, 1997). The political dimension is defined by ‘possessive individualism, private property, and limited government’ (Polonsky et al., 2014, p. 525). Together these dimensions are the foundation of neoliberalism. The final dimension, the technological dimension proposes that technology exists to make life easier. Therefore technology is often promoted as the appropriate response to sustainable issues (Kilbourne et al., 2002, 1997).

3. It is understood that utopian conceptions of a better world is not the sole preserve of any particular political perspective (Levitas, 2003).

4. MILESECURE 2050 is a 3 year multi-disciplinary project which focused on transitioning to a low carbon society (see https://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/182180/en).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Casey

Dr Katherine Casey is a lecturer at Kent Business School, University of Kent. She holds a PhD in Marketing and an MSc in Marketing, Consumption & Society from the University of Limerick. Her research takes a critical perspective on sustainable consumption, production and disposal, the ethics of consumption, community-based initiatives, alternative food consumption, alternative food networks. Recent publications include work in the European Journal of Marketing and Macromarketing.

Maria Lichrou

Dr Maria Lichrou is a lecturer in Marketing at the University of Limerick Kemmy Business School. Her research builds on critical marketing and consumer research perspectives, with a focus on place, consumption and sustainability. Recent publications include work in Tourism Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management and Journal of Place Management and Development.

Lisa O’Malley

Professor Lisa O’Malley is a critical marketing scholar at the University of Limerick. Her research interests encompass consumer research, relationship marketing, sustainability, place and tourism. Recent publications include work in Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Consumption, Markets & Culture and Technology in Society. She is Deputy Chair of the Academy of Marketing and a member of the editorial boards of Marketing Theory and Journal of Marketing Management.