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ABSTRACT
Municipal governments and community organisations are key stakeholders in the mobilisation of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through opportunities to make and implement sustainability policies at local levels. However, as perceptions of sustainability are normalised through globalising, colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist discourses, alternative stories of sustainability become marginalised. In response, this article positions diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting perceptions of sustainability within a relational assemblage to map the affects of difference between normalising and alternative perceptions of sustainability in local governance contexts of Saskatchewan, Canada. This article adopts cartographic and diffractive storytelling to map diverse perceptions of sustainability gathered through a series of focus groups and a Skills Forum event, as part of the Governing Sustainable Municipalities (GSM) project. By reading perceptions of sustainability through each other, economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability and diverse perceptions of sustainability from diverse stakeholders come into an entangled/differentiated relationship. As there is no central point of reference in a relational assemblage, heterogeneous perceptions of sustainability are held together through complex patternings of diverse, multiple, and often sticky, uneven knottings that dislodge hierarchical assumptions about what counts as sustainability. Providing an emplaced and situated account of perceptions of sustainability, we illustrate how municipal and organisational actors can transform through co-implicated relationships with social and material forces. To this end, assemblage thinking provides important anticolonial possibilities for sustainability policy making and implementation in the municipal sector.
Author contributions
Loleen Berdahl conceived of the GSM project, with funding acquired from the Future Skills Centre (FSC). K.R., M.I., E.D., C.M., T.A., and M.L. were involved in the study administration and implementation. MH and KR conceived the paper idea. K.R. wrote Cobbling and stitching different perceptions of sustainability together, Cartographic and diffractive storytelling, Perceptions of sustainability: Making sense of the data, Ethical uncommon worldings of municipal and organisation sustainability policy, and parts of the Background and (In)Conclusion: Thinking beyond pragmatics to advance sustainability policy making and implementation through an anticolonial praxis. M.I., E.D., H.O., and M.L. wrote parts of the Background and Perceptions of sustainability: Making sense of the data. A.M. wrote parts of the Ethical uncommon worldings of municipal and organisation sustainability policy, Perceptions of sustainability: Making sense of the data, and (In)Conclusion: Thinking beyond pragmatics to advance sustainability policy making and implementation through an anticolonial praxis. C.M., H.O., A.M., and T.A. wrote parts of Perceptions of sustainability: Making sense of the data and (In)Conclusion: Thinking beyond pragmatics to advance sustainability policy making and implementation through an anticolonial praxis. MH reviewed and edited the manuscript, supported by all authors. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement
The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans – TCPS 2 (2018) and approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Saskatchewan on: January 20, 2023 (BEH: 3847).
Informed Consent Statement
Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study.
Acknowledgments
Writing from Treaty 1, Treaty 4, and Treaty 6 Territories, the traditional Indigenous territory of the Cree, Dakota, Dené, Lakota, Métis, and Saulteaux, we pay our deepest respects to the many First Nations and Métis peoples whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations. We give thanks to the Elders and Knowledge Keepers, those with us today and those who are no longer with us, for their stewardship and teachings. May we all continue to walk together towards truth and reconciliation and reaffirm our relationship with one another. We also give thanks and gratitude for the municipal and community stakeholders who took part in this study. We enjoyed learning from you and hope we can continue to build a more sustainable and just Saskatchewan.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 SDGs include, no poverty, zero hunger, good health and wellbeing, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, reduced inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water, life on land, peace, justice, and strong institutions, partnerships for the goals (United Nations Citation2015).
2 Ontology being the form and nature of reality.
3 We acknowledge Indigenous relationships with Land are not set within possession, rather a living-with, and that by association the term dispossession is a western term. Without intending to trap Indigenous ontologies in western humanist premises, we deliberately use dispossession to highlight the colonial settler’s response-ability to reconciliation.
4 Whereas decolonisation suggests an appropriation of Indigenous resurgence and survivance, an anticolonial praxis lets us stand-with in the pursuit of good relations (Liboiron Citation2021; TallBear Citation2014). Within this, a praxis is the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realising, or practicing a theory, lesson, or skill in an embodied way (Page Citation2020).
5 The relational assemblage we adopt in this article is not commensurate with Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT); but rather, Deleuze and Guattari’s (Citation1983; Citation1988) rhizomic principles that describes change with rupture. That is, while both ANT and assemblage thinking have a relational view of the world and critically adopt socio-material entanglements, assemblage thinking departs from ANT through its approach to conceptual openness to the unexpected (McFarlane Citation2011). While ANT is set within fixed and stable actuality, assemblage thinking is concerned with potentialities and possibilities within the virtual; through processes of becoming through the affected/affecting relationship (Fox and Alldred Citation2015; Müller and Schurr Citation2016).
6 Reworldings is a term we use to denote the pluralities and potentialities of worldmaking practices through performative accounts; we are not just naming relational ethics in this article, but through performative accounts, we bring relational ethics into being.
7 Worldviews are how we make sense of the world through our cognitive orientations, and the themes, premises, values, ethical, and philosophical systems that make our activities and habits feel normal (Wooltorton, Poelina, and Collard Citation2022).
8 Through radical relationality of cartographic and diffractive storytelling, we position Indigenous principles of relationality in conversation with the European cannon of posthumanist performativity. Given that authors in this article come from diverse backgrounds, we seek to avoid appropriation, tokenistic gestures, and/or extraction of Indigenous ontologies from a western lens. We thoroughly acknowledge that relational ontologies are more developed in Indigenous studies in comparison with scholarship in posthumanisms (and new materialisms), and therefore, we are not intending to clear the ground in establishing new terrain but our iteration of posthumanist performativity through cartographic and diffractive storytelling seeks to expand, or enact a thinking-with, Indigenous, feminist, critical, and poststructural scholarship that precedes it (Ahmed Citation2008; Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt Citation2020).
9 We adopt wholistic rather than holistic in this article as a strategy to speak to the whole rather than take up a deficit standpoint (i.e., hole) (Toulouse Citation2021).
10 Paying close attention to specificity, and to avoid conflating terms, it is important to differentiate between affect, feeling, and emotion. Affect is an unconscious and pre-personal body intensity, while emotion rises from primordial feelings that are conscious and attributed to an already constituted subject (Massumi Citation2015; Citation2021; Shaviro Citation2007).
11 The SDG focus within the GSM project included: 8.3 – Growth of new and existing enterprises; 8.9 – A sustainable tourism industry; 12.5 – Waste reduction and recycling; 11.7 – Safe and accessible green public spaces; 11.1 – Safe and affordable housing; 16.7 – Responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making; 16.10 – Equitable public access to information; 17.17 – Encourage and promote partnerships; 6.5 – Integrated water management; 7.1 – Improved energy efficiency; 13.1 – Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters; and 15.1 – Ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services.
12 We deliberately use the term, intraact, here in taking up Karen Barad’s (Citation2007) ontological orientations of agency, in that agency is understood as distinct in relation to mutual entanglements, rather than existing as an individual element (as the term interaction would propose).
13 GSM project deliverables can be found on the GSM website: https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research-ideas/projects-and-labs/governing-sustainable-municipalities-project.php#ProjectOutcomes