The nineteenth-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau observed in Walden (1854) that objects on his desk ‘required to be dusted daily’, yet ‘the furniture of my mind was all undusted still’. As the metaphor suggests, how we interpret complex phenomena will be conditioned by our preexisting beliefs and conceptual frameworks – a reality that we too often overlook precisely because they are so familiar and comfortable. In much the same way that we stop seeing the furnishings of our homes, we lose sight of the furnishings of our minds.
Contemporary ‘sustainability’ discourse might have struck Thoreau – an environmentalist and social activist himself – as in need of a good dusting, if not more. From this perspective, a recent seminar titled ‘Critical Sustainability Studies: Trust and Tensions in Knowledge Production’ brought welcome scrutiny to some of the field’s core concepts. Organised by the University of Oslo Centre for Global Sustainability’s thematic area on Knowledge, Technology, and Trust, in cooperation with the research groups Sustainability Law and Knowledge in Translation (KNOWIT), the seminar critiqued how ‘sustainability challenges’ are ‘conceptualized, labelled, and articulated’ and how ‘such forms of knowledge production impact the solutions we can perceive and the actions we can envisage’.
What is sustainability science?
The first presentation by Sarah Cornell, a principal researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and associate professor in sustainability science at Stockholm University, called upon us to critique, and grapple with the complexities of, sustainability challenges and technological responses. Both are prerequisites to the restoration of trust in sustainability science and associated institutions.
Observing that sustainability science is fundamentally ‘committed to moving knowledge to societal action’, Cornell emphasised multiple concerns about resort to terms such as ‘crisis’ and ‘catastrophe’ in framing sustainability challenges. For some, this framing promotes despair, which ultimately proves ‘disempowering’. For others, it promotes technical and quantitative ‘redemption narratives’ implicitly focused on those who might be affected in the future – saving us ‘just in the nick of time’ – while ignoring those already affected today. The latter dynamic, Cornell argues, reflects the ‘hegemonic position’ of quantitative sciences and the correlative side-lining of disciplines that promote differing social and cultural understandings of the world.
In addition to advancing a more balanced and multidisciplinary approach to conceptualising sustainability challenges, Cornell’s presentation underscored that restoring trust will require broader public recognition of the complexities and uncertainties arising from the interaction between ecological and social systems. This reveals a further pathology of excessive technical/quantitative framing – the implicit suggestion that more data will necessarily produce more certainty and that ‘reductive techno-solutions’ can provide comprehensive responses to sustainability challenges.
Such accounts hold constant the economic and administrative systems generating bad incentives in the first place, while ignoring viable alternatives. It would be preferable, Cornell argues, to view various modalities of regulation as contributing to a complex ‘regulatory ecology’ that invites broader participation and dialogue in framing and responding to sustainability problems.
What is gender?
The second presentation by Hil Ousland Vandeskog, a post-doctoral researcher at SUSTAINIT at the University of Oslo and affiliate of Imperial College London, explored and critiqued how the concept of ‘gender’ has been deployed by Norwegian aid Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). In so doing, Vandeskog’s work exposes tensions and inconsistencies that tether development aid policy to the interests of some while leaving others behind.
Applying corpus linguistics methods to Norwegian development aid NGO texts, Vandeskog has investigated both whether the 2015 introduction of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) prompted any shifts in their deployment of the concept of gender, and whether any systematic differences appear across genres of texts. Intriguingly, this analysis revealed ‘no substantial transformation in the discursive articulation’ of gender following the SDGs’ adoption. However, the genre of the text – categorised by reference to ‘policy’, ‘strategy’, or ‘programme’ – was found to have ‘a more significant impact on discursive patterns’. While much research along these lines remains to be done, these results imply some degree of instrumental use of the term ‘gender’, perhaps driven by the intended audience, regardless of the concept’s conceptual breadth.
Consistent with Cornell’s analysis, Vandeskog’s analysis of how critical terms are defined and deployed in sustainability discourse revealed implicit framing that systematically favours certain issues and interests while side-lining others. Currently, ‘gender’ functions as a charged ‘buzzword’ in sustainable development discourse, effectively operating as a synonym for ‘women’s rights and protection’. Vandeskog contextualised this by reference to contentious global politics concerning a range of other issues and interests that might just as readily have been linked with the concept of gender – notably, gender identity and sexual orientation – revealing their marginalisation in sustainable development aid policy. In this manner, Vandeskog’s analysis shines a bright light on the contingent and iterative nature of ‘meaning-making’ in sustainability discourse. It also invites us to scrutinise the implicit premises baked into the rhetorical narrowing of complex concepts like ‘gender’.
Broadening Dialogue
Although they approach these dynamics from different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, Cornell’s and Vandeskog’s analyses similarly challenge us to unpack and critique the framing devices and terminologies that have become all too familiar and comfortable in sustainability discourse. As each of them emphasised, the way forward involves broadening the dialogue to acknowledge marginalised perspectives – in Vandeskog’s words, to ‘talk to more people than you think you need to’. The challenge is not merely to hear how the marginalised answer the questions dominating the discourse, but to hear their perspectives on whether those questions even make sense.
