DevelopmentPLUS is the online component of the SID quarterly journal Development. It features news about the latest journal's issues, dialogues and launch events, additional articles and interviews. Content previous to September 2012 can be found here
Sustainability: Looking for alternatives. DevelopmentPLUS conversation (III)
Take a moment to join in the conversation!
The third set of authors in the DevelopmentPLUS tasters of volume 54 no 2 on Challenges to Sustainability reflect on some of the new proposals for alternative ways or organizing and seeing that can help meet the challenges to mainstream development.
How do we make the change to sustainability happen? The journal Development has a long tradition of searching out alternatives to unsustainable development practices and proposing fresh and new ideas to move forward. This month, DevelopmentPLUS highlights Development 54.2 authors points of view about sustainability. The first round presented provocative critiques of sustainable development by Arturo Escobar, Jayati Ghosh, Jan Pronk and Nicola Bullard. The second round presented views about un-sustainability from the Pacific, The Caribbean and Serbia by Teresa Teaiwa, Peggy Antrobus and Jasmina Kijevcanin.
Gillians Youngs: Perhaps digital globalization does mean that the territorial walls of states are beginning to tumble down under the pressure of a growing global virtual community based on human rights and democratic principles. Key however is the grassroots horizontal nature of this pressure and there is much to celebrate in the peaceful role of ICTs as part of making that a real force for change.
Kathryn Cox-Shrader: As we broaden our notion of what design means, and we come to understand everything we do as design.We are all designers, with agency, responsibility, and the capacity for creativity. And by understanding our design as ecological, we also realize that everything we design is connected to our ecology. We are no more separate from our designs than we are from our ecologies.We are only as sustainable as our ecosystems; we are only as resilient as our design.
Lau Kin Chi: The challenge is to offer alternative thoughts, as well as to foster, and connect alternative practices. The question of our responsibility to future generations with regard to our ways of production and consumption is certainly concerned with political and ethical questions. However, this question cannot be properly answered within what we commonly understand as the political and ethical dimensions; that is, the mechanisms of democracy, law and rights, together with the sensitized individual in our current global of individualism, are not an answer to our present plight which prompts us to broach the question of the compatibility between economic growth and sustainability.
With this banner, Development is on the Guardian Global Development website this month!
Photo: Sean Rogers1/flickr
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