School of Social and Political Science

Description

The last few years have seen a multiplication of calls for placing the struggle against inequality and injustice at the heart of environmental activism and politics. Yet the articulation of environmental sustainability and social justice has been addressed in ways that sometimes reinforce the idea of necessary trade-offs between them. By contrast, in this paper, we mobilise an understanding of social sustainability that places social justice and equality at the heart of initiatives for ecological transformation. We apply this perspective to carry out a critical conceptual review of how different traditions of scholarship on agri-food systems transitions and transformations theorise, conceptualise, and research the relationship between inequality and unsustainability. Our review, in the paper that this presentation draws on, included studies on ‘sustainability transitions’ and on Alternative Food Networks and food justice studies, as well as critical agrarian studies, and Global Value Chain perspectives. Overall, our review showed that, whilst both inequality and unsustainability are discussed in the literature on agri-food systems transformations, the structural relationship between them, i.e. what we call the inequality/unsustainability nexus, is less fully theorised. We argue that a theorisation of the nexus offers both a more structural approach, drawing attention to how social relations of inequality produced and reproduced by capitalism are central to the continued production of unsustainability – also in transition initiatives; and a more strategic approach, encouraging alliances starting from struggles for livelihoods and social equality to address environmental aims.

Presenter Bios:

Rachel Carlile is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, carrying out ethnographic research into agroecology and alternative food economies in Northern England. Alongside this, she is carrying out research with colleagues on the inequality - unsustainability nexus in agri-food transitions, and on urban agriculture and housing.

Isabelle Darmon is a lecturer in Sociology and Sustainable Development at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in the domains of cultural sociology, critical theory and sociology of global environment and sustainability. She is currently developing the notion of the inequality-unsustainability nexus, theoretically as well as in the more specific empirical field of food and agriculture.