Ecological Limits of Development

Kish, Kaitlin; Quilley, Stephen

doi:10.4324/9781003087526

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 301 publications

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“…When expansion of a system is constrained or facing a countering process, in the resulting period of crisis the system is reshaping and transforming. This question is not hypothetical in a world reaching multiple limits (environmental, economic, social, political and scientific-technical) and facing multiple crises, conflicts and catastrophes (see Figure 1 and further Scheffran, 2021, leading to an "Anthropocene crisis" (Valladares et al, 2019;Simon, 2020;Collste et al, 2021;Kennel, 2021;Kim and Kotze, 2021;Kish and Quilley, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Bouchard, 2022).…”

Section: Multiple Limits and Crises In The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

Limits to the Anthropocene: geopolitical conflict or cooperative governance?

Scheffran

2023

Front. Polit. Sci.

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In the Anthropocene the world is facing an acceleration of human growth and its impact on nature. The expansionist world order which emerged from Europe since colonial times is reaching multiple limits (environmental, economic, social, political and scientific-technical), increasing marginal costs and risks which trigger multiple crises, conflicts and catastrophes that challenge this world order. Alternative futures range from a collapse of human civilization to geopolitical power competition and conflict between rivals to disruptive technical innovations and systemic transformation of the economy and society within natural boundaries. In response to geopolitical conflicts and their consequences, such as climate change and the Russia-Ukraine war, efforts of cooperative governance can help to mitigate, adapt to and manage complex crisis landscapes. Instead of an epochal turn (Zeitenwende) for arms race and war, more promising are sustainable climate protection and a peaceful energy transition within planetary boundaries. To further prevent escalating and mutually enforcing crisis dynamics and geopolitical conflicts in the Anthropocene, cooperative governance needs to adjust to the world's complexity and move from a negative nexus of problems to a positive nexus of solutions. The interaction between geopolitics and governance and the transition from risk cascades to synergies is discussed for the energy-security nexus and the climate-conflict-migration nexus. Energy conflicts can be contained by diminishing land competition and biodiversity loss, as well as risky dependencies on strategic raw materials and conflict minerals. Measures for a sustainable energy transition include energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy and decarbonization, a circular economy and nature-based solutions. To prevent risk multiplication in the climate-conflict-migration nexus, synergies in climate, migration and security policy facilitate integrative solutions for a socio-ecological transformation based on mitigation and adaptation, conflict resolution and environmental peacebuilding, aiming for a mutual enforcement of sustainability and peace.

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Section: Multiple Limits and Crises In The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

Limits to the Anthropocene: geopolitical conflict or cooperative governance?

Scheffran

2023

Front. Polit. Sci.

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“…Even a levelling of growth trajectories would entail the re-embedding of economic and social life, an order of magnitude step-down in spatial mobility and a reduction in the autonomy and choices that have come to define late-modern societies. This autonomy is so taken for granted that even gender and sex have come to be construed as choiceswithout any regard to the kind of social complexity that makes such a conception even thinkable [8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Complete Act: Conservatism, Distributism and the Pattern Language for Sustainability

Quilley

2023

CiS

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Linking Norbert Elias's concept of the triad of controls, to Andrew Willard Jones' analysis of the 'complete act', the paper outlines the relation between culture and personality and the implications of this for any project of localization and the re-embedding of the economy. Re-iterating the reality that degrowth cannot be a liberal project, the paper goes on to explore the relation between Western individualism and Judeo-Christianity. Shorn of the overarching ontology and orienting architecture of Christianity, individualism has become corrosive, unstable and, in the end, self-destructive. The socially conservative preoccupation with a decline in virtue is linked to eroding social capital, anomie, and unhappiness arising from a surfeit of freedom. Hyper-social and -spatial mobility is linked to the suppression of the domain of Livelihood, with its bottom-up, communitarian and family-based forms of social regulation; and a corollary expansion of both top-down collectivist regulation by the State and the transactional logic of the Market. Livelihood is a function of embedded individuals enmeshed in relations not only with other individuals and groups, but with God. In contrast, the materialist metaphysics of Market and State both depend on disembedded, free-wheeling citizen-consumers, severed from any relation to transcendent values. But these same phenomena are also the principal drivers of consumption and ecological degradation. On this basis it is argued that any culture of ecological restraint predicated on the re-embedding of markets must also entail an ontological re-embedding of the sacred conception of the individual (the Imago Dei) into a relation with the divine. Such a project implies a very different understanding of freedom predicated on an external, legitimate authority; a freedom that is 'fullest not when it serves itself but when it serves truths freely held" ([1], Loc. 419). Applying Christopher Alexander's theory of pattern languages, the paper goes on to explore what such a sustainability project might look like.

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Schumacher against globalism and ecomodernism: Ecology, subsidiarity and the politics of scale

Quilley

2024

European Journal of Social Theory

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E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful is one of the most succinct elaborations of Catholic social teaching (CST) and ‘distributism’ – construed as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. Extending the logic of Polanyi, both market and state, and their right- and left-wing ideological expressions, are shown to be contending forms of collectivism – in that both aggregate the agency of disembedded ‘billiard ball’ individuals. Schumacher’s socio-economic vision is rooted in Livelihood and is orthogonal to both left and right, creating an opportunity for an alternative to modernity involving patterns of embedded production, consumption and reproduction (family, household and place-bound community). ‘Smallness’ and ‘localness’ speak to forms of embedded social capital that are ‘sticky’, viscous and relational, more ascriptive and less fluid. But for precisely this reason, the political agenda implicit in Schumacher’s vision is not only post-liberal, but explicitly both covenantal and Christian. It requires the ontology of sovereign, self-actualizing individuals to be reconnected and constrained through a transcendent relationality with God. Small is Beautiful is shown to be diametrically opposed to the eco-modernist, gnostic and sometimes even transhumanist worldview of global environmentalism.

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Ecological Limits of Development

Cited by 3 publications

References 301 publications

Limits to the Anthropocene: geopolitical conflict or cooperative governance?

Limits to the Anthropocene: geopolitical conflict or cooperative governance?

A Complete Act: Conservatism, Distributism and the Pattern Language for Sustainability

Schumacher against globalism and ecomodernism: Ecology, subsidiarity and the politics of scale

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