How can we govern if we don’t see our feet? Speaking of the matter of sustainability transitions

Sustainability transitions bring together many different disciplines focussing on the interrelations between the social and the material. The burgeoning field of transition studies is becoming more inter-disciplinary, less normative, less modernist in nature, and more open to both discursive and material dynamics (e.g. Bosman et al., 2018; Moss et al., 2016). Social-ecological systems thinking, already sensitive to ecological relations and vulnerabilities in their governance thinking, is similarly opening up to other disciplines, and considering the social and discursive with more care and open minds (e.g. Partelow, 2018). In geography and anthropology, a turn to the body, to materiality and to affect preceded these developments, sometimes inspired by Deleuzian theory, sometimes simply through careful observation (e.g. Davidson et al., 2013). Policy studies and planning, meanwhile, have picked up on the need to contribute to transitions and the pathways of sustainable development.

The contributions to this special issue explicitly aim to contribute to these inter-disciplinary debates on governance for sustainability. They explore the integration of insights from various disciplines to regain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of material environments, both natural and human-made, on the formation and functioning of communities, their cultures, and their governance systems. The collection aims to contribute to this collective re-balancing of theories between discursive and material by highlighting how both connect: in governance, where collectively binding decisions are made to shape, exploit and protect the environment while the wider social issues and governance are simultaneously shaped by its material substrate.

Nobody wants a return to material determinism (Marxist or otherwise) which dominated anthropology for a while, nor should we be waiting for a comeback of historicist approaches to landscape design, where the landscape can dictate what is coming next. This Special Issue therefore draws on evolutionary governance theory (EGT) (Van Assche et al., 2013), together with a variety of other perspectives, and puts forward the concept of material dependencies as a useful way to connect governance, discourse, and environment. Material dependencies are effects of the material world on the functioning of governance, and the legacies they leave (Van Assche et al., 2017). These effects can be direct or indirect, as governance structures, procedures, institutions, and decisions, all of which can be framed, constrained, and enabled by natural and human-made environments and their objects and obstacles. More indirectly, the communities which develop in a particular environment, are shaped in a myriad of ways by that environment, with materially-dependent practices, values and narratives, then seeping into governance systems (Davidson et al., 2013).

The key framing paper by the Guest Editors (Van Assche et al., 2022) locates the importance of materiality for any real understanding of sustainability transitions. They connect the idea of material dependency to the idea of material events. Before material dependencies develop, material events need to occur. Things happening in the environment can be observed (or not) in governance, they can have effects without being directly observed and these effects can be slow, fast, modest, and disruptive. The observation of such effects makes a difference, as it can lay the groundwork for responses, which in turn, can become part of coordinated strategies. Material events thus bring attention to links between material changes and their observation and interpretation in governance, which can give rise to material dependencies. If unobserved, material events lead to material dependencies, which can make them more deeply rooted and less manageable, but not necessarily more problematic for sustainability transition.

Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk (2022) present a remarkable case of a community established under extreme circumstances; the town of Tiksi, a Soviet creation on the Arctic Ocean near the mouth of the river Lena. When Soviet development pressure eased and the Soviet economic planning network unraveled, Tiksi shrank. New opportunities are now opening up with climate change, but they remain mostly theoretical. While this partly reflects material dependencies, a history of Soviets downplaying the harshness of the environment and the creep of material dependencies, the authors demonstrate that material dependencies are not straightjackets. Local initiatives represent a breaking of path dependencies in governance, which helps transform material dependencies, and helps to seeopportunities emerging from climate change.

Schluter and Kluger (2022), meanwhile looked at scallop culture in Peru, starting from an almost opposite situation in that little planning or regulation was involved in its early stages. They present a detailed analysis of quickly evolving rights (especially space rights) in combination with lingering informal institutions. They demonstrate how material dependencies (natural, human, hybrid) quickly emerge, and transform in a short history of governance. They systematically link the evolution of material dependencies to the development of path dependencies, interdependencies, and goal dependencies, a concept developed in EGT to denote the effect of visions of the future on the functioning of governance. Diverse material dependencies shaped and were shaped by path dependencies and goal dependencies, leading to a situation where small entrepreneurs became labourers of larger ones. A seemingly rigid relation, nevertheless kept deliberately open by maintaining a set of informal institutions.

Haikola and Anshelm (2022), in their insightful analysis of evolving Swedish high-speed rail discourse, identify financing, social engineering and fatalism as central themes. They find these themes in four storylines which formed a discourse coalition supporting the naturalization of existing governance, coordinated around existing infrastructure. This coalition was opposed by a different coalition more positive about high-speed rail, less tied by existing infrastructure, and understanding the break with existing infrastructure as a sign of modernization, of a state capable of altering landscapes and reinvention governance.

Lea, Buchanan, Fuller and Waitt (2022) consider changing infrastructures and discourses on cycling in Sydney, Australia, and confront a situation where everybody is in favour of cycling yet conflicts around it abound. They plea for a return to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the recently more popular assemblage theory, to think together materiality, governance and sustainability. Whereas no one argues with sustainability, nor with cycling as a manifestation of it, the actual production of policy in the existing political and cultural landscape, as well as the production of meaning and affect through cycling in the existing urban landscape, are mediated in ways not explored in most policy-related literatures, nor in the current mainstream of assemblage theory.

Finally, the last paper by Pellizoni and Centeneri (2022), tackles the issue of sustainability transitions and material dependence head on by taking an important historical detour. They dig deep into intellectual history and distinguish four understandings of the relation between humans and their material environment, four ways to understand dependency, and as corollary agency. They recognize these four perspectives in most attempts to understand and organize sustainability transitions. In agriculture, the authors recognize three of the four accounts underpinning respectively industrial agriculture, ecosystem services and earth restoration programmes, three manners to overcome material dependency by mastering the world. Peasant agroecology, they argue, is emanating from the fourth one and does not aim at mastery but acknowledges dependency as positive, as a formative limit. It points us in the direction of caring, but also makes us aware of our own vulnerability. This plea for human modesty can inspire new modes of observation in governance and, in our words, an increasing awareness of material events (creating the human dependencies described by the authors) and of material dependencies. The approach could make material dependencies more manageable, give direction to transition (maybe paradoxically) by lowering management ambitions.

The diverse contributions cover a wide array of dependencies of communities on their material environment and discern the impacts in ever changing governance systems. Infrastructures guide behaviour as well as governance, as things tend to get coordinated around them. Climate can be ignored, leading to material events turning into less manageable material dependencies. The authors point at the interplay between material factors, in the ecological system, between those and events and dependencies in the governance system, and, importantly, between material dependencies and the other dependencies distinguished by EGT: path-, inter- and goal dependencies. Some of this remains unobserved within the governance system and by the academics observing, trapped in either disciplinary or normative agendas (Hillier, 2003; Moss et al., 2016).

These complications in the pathways between materiality, discourse and governance makes sustainability transitions harder to govern and harder to imagine: what would it even look like? Beyond a negative answer (I.e. ‘not ruining the environment we depend upon’) and a slightly evasive answer – (i.e. ‘looking forward a few generations’), it is hard to say in general what sustainability, transition, and sustainability transition would look like. This, however, might not be a major problem. What all the contributions in this special issue touch upon, in the spirit of EGT, is that dependencies are not only limitations on human activity and steering, and that their partly opaque entwining is not a problem for those who want to govern transitions. Dependencies are also enabling and potentially, even guiding factors. Their unobserved entanglements can be productive and creative, as well as scary (Van Assche et al., 2013). In Deleuzian fashion, one can say that the rhizomatic activity starting from encounters between the material and the discursive, and between discourse and organization creates new virtuality all the time, new imaginaries of relations between humans and their environment, and new potentialities for organizing ourselves differently (Shields, 2013). If we – with Lacan – accept that the Real is not only outside, but also inside us and that it both limits and enables how we can build ourselves and navigate in the world, then our management aspirations might be slightly constrained, but this creates room for new encounters (Gunder & Hillier, 2016). Rebuilding the world into a sustainable paradise is simply not possible if we refuse to look at ourselves, our deep investment in fantasies of control, of distance, and of harmony.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).