engleski

‘Desperate, but not serious’ – an academic exposition on the structure of development components

As literate humans we have been taught to pride ourselves in belonging to a species that not only produced a civilisation, but managed to do so through increasingly efficient use of natural resources, thanks to the ingenuity of technological invention. Such a narrative ignores other necessary components of the civilisation construction and maintenance which co-evolve with technology. Most of what produced our current civilisation (and its crisis) resulted from the ‘developmentalist project’ whose basic ontological components are: (1) technological mechanisms of energy conversions, (2) social structures that utilise the energy and maintain the mechanisms, and (3) the governance ‘mechanisms’ that distribute the energy through social structures (Pomeranz 2009). How we choose to put these components together into an explanatory narrative of sustainability affects the strategies with which we approach socio-metabolic reproduction. In the discourse borrowed from philosophy of physics (and why not, short of other dominating universal explanatory discourse?) we are witnessing a struggle between constructive and principle explanatory ontologies. Constructive ontologies try to reconstruct the mechanism behind the nature-civilisation complex, whilst principle ontologies provide unexceptional generalizations of the desirable future outcomes regardless of the structure. Can intellectual friction between the two explanatory worldviews give rise to a voice that speaks from a disciplinarily straddling perspective, and thus describes more properly the constraints and potentials humanity experiences today?

scientific explanation, developmentalism, degrowth, revolution, reform

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