Just transitions

Front matter

‘It is great to read one of the rare books responding to the challenge of an unfair world not with moral reproach, but with a subtle strategy of turning apparent trouble into an advantage. Combining urbanism, material flows and democracy might indeed be a way out. ’ Professor Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Director, Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen- Adria Universitaet, Vienna ‘The book provides material for understanding the science of sustainability and the practice of sustainable living. It X-rays, in a very lucid way, the complexity of transitions to sustainable economies. ’

Professor Kevin Chika Urama, Executive Director, African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS), and President, African Society for Ecological Economics (ASEE) ‘ A stimulating book that thinks critically and reflectively about how we can re-construct socially just transitions in a period marked by deep economic and ecological crises. But what makes this book distinctive is both its professional commitment to intellectual inquiry and the authors’ own personal commitment to experimenting and living with (more) just transitions in the Lynedoch EcoVillage. An inspiring thought-provoking read about how alternatives could be reconstructed. ’

Professor Simon Marvin, Co-Director, Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures, University of Salford ‘For anyone interested in the necessary transition that awaits us all, this book is testimony to a thoughtful marriage of theory and practice. ’

PART I Complexity, Sustainability and Transition

Chapter One Complexity and Sustainability1 Dedicated to the late Paul Cilliers, in deepest appreciation Introduction By the end of this book, there should be little doubt that imagining and implementing more sustainable futures is the greatest challenge that our generation faces. To do this we not only need new ways of thinking, but we need to understand the history of patterns of thinking that fail to appreciate the evolutionary significance of our incontrovertible dependence on other living species and nature in general. Evolutionary thinking pervades the discussions in this book. We simply cannot fathom how it will be possible to contemplate building a global transdisciplinary commitment to sustainability without an appreciative understanding of the dynamics of evolution at the micro- and macro-scales of life. At the same time we question whether reductionism will assist with the building of this transdisciplinary commitment because we may well need to think of the passage from beginnings to ends in terms of complex patterns, not building blocks. This may, for example, entail a rethink not of evolution per se, but rather of what drives the evolutionary process and, by the same token, the quest for more sustainable futures.

Imagining modern society Finding a new collaboration between the sciences and humanities which is appropriate to our specific context must entail both coming to terms with our past and synthesising something new. We argue, however, that this will not be achieved via the now faded promise of Newtonian science, which has not only collapsed as an all-embracing scientific paradigm appropriate for analysing all reality, but that the universal developmental modernity that this kind of science underpinned has been a cataclysmic disappointment. Instead, the challenge today is not the unleashing and application of modernist science, but rather its containment for the sake of a sustainable and more equitable and just future.

Instead of the First World model of industrial modernity as the primary driver of growth, the contemporary challenge is equity (specifically, poverty eradication) via the search for more sustainable livelihoods in which industrialisation and urbanisation are constrained by limits to the carrying capacity of the natural systems within which these human systems are embedded (see Chapter 2). 1 This chapter is based on an opening address prepared for the workshop on the Origins of Humanity and the Diffusion of Human Populations in Africa, 17–19 September, Lanzerac Estate, Stellenbosch, convened by the Human Sciences Research Council. A version of this paper was published in: E. Pieterse & F. Meintjies (eds) (2004) Voices of Transition: The Politics, Poetics and Practices of Development. Johannesburg: Heinemann.

Instead of the Eurocentric cultural synthesis of English classical literature and Newtonian science which a previous generation longed for (Snow 1993), we propose that a theory of complex adaptive systems helps to create the basis for the kind of sustainability science that can cope with uncertainty without obliterating hope. In short, to break out of a ‘Western perspective’ on potential transitions to more sustainable futures will mean embracing bodies of knowledge which recognise what Margulis and Sagan call the ‘incontrovertible partnership’ (Margulis & Sagan 1997) between human and natural systems, and which also recognise the enormous diversity of contexts that will shape the way the future is imagined. On reductionism, and horror As African social scientists, we often contemplate a journey which many African social scientists have travelled since the mid-twentieth century. We have witnessed the breakdown of many of the major twentieth-century social projects that in one way or another were premised on the modernist promise of the ‘good society’ . It was this promise that constituted the basis for hope by many who founded these social projects. This included the Western European social democracies, the Soviet-style socialist societies, the national democracies in post-colonial Africa and Asia, and the various revolutionary options such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Algeria and Vietnam. Out of the collapse of Soviet socialism and many left-wing experiments has arisen an aggressive neoliberalism with a breathtakingly ambitious twenty-first century global agenda to bring politics to an end via a complete consensus on the virtues of the market.

Although Soviet socialism was the formal enemy of the neoliberals, their real enemy was the social democratic aspirations of the post-World War II generation with, of course, John Maynard Keynes, who attempted to reconcile capitalism and social justice. Many social scientists have tried to dig deep into the basic structure of social theory to find explanations for both the rise and fall of the twentieth-century social projects and the Godzillan spectre of globalised neoliberalism that was so hegemonic from the late 1980s through to the financial crash of 2008. Both in many ways depended on the possibility of certainty derived from an understanding of what were deemed to be the basic laws of social progress. For twentieth-century social projects, it was Marxian class analysis, or nationalist anti-colonialism, or the rationally planned social market of Keynesian economics. But also present throughout the twentieth century (with deep roots in the nineteenth century) was the certainty of the market mechanism inspired by economic liberals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. What many social scientists wanted to know is whether the epistemology of the social sciences contributed in any way to the different ideologies that helped legitimise the mass mobilisation of great hopes, but also the perpetration of great horrors. These horrors apply not only to the obvious such as colonialism, dekulakisation, genocide, apartheid, and the numerous overt and covert military attacks on developing countries by the USA since World War II, but also to poverty, racism, ethnic cleansing and gender oppression. The origin of this inward search was, of course, an examination of

Complexity and Sustainability fascism, starting with the work of the Frankfurt School. Fascism was an unsurprising starting point because it represented the ultimate certainty, rooted as it was in a brutally reductionist social theory that reconciled atavistic impulses and modernity. But this just provided the basis for a generalised critique of reductionism where it appeared in social theory. Over time, this critique came to be applied to a wide range of social projects no matter what their ideological orientation. This method eventually came to underpin the deep scepticism that existed in many branches of the social sciences by the late 1990s and which ran contrary to the rigid certainties of the neoliberal discourse, articulated most forcefully in Fukuyama’s triumphant book, The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama 1992).

A reductionist analysis is basically an explanation of a complex reality which depends on the reducibility of the multiplicity of components of this reality to a few basic elements which are deemed a priori to hold greater explanatory weight than any others in the system. This becomes a powerful tool for predicting the future. Following the work of Foucault (Foucault 1998), this analytical logic makes it possible to claim with great certainty what is knowable about the present which, in turn, makes possible predictions about the future which can be equally validated by high levels of certainty. By applying the Newtonian scientific method to the social sciences, it was thus possible to claim to know the basic laws of motion in society, and therefore also claim to be able to predict the future. This, in turn, made it possible for those with power to legitimise their actions: by claiming to know the objective reality they were able to justify actions based on the supposed predictive capacity of social theory. When these actions were deemed to be constructive and good, no one seemed to mind. But when the opposite applied, the ability to resort to ‘objective truth’ was used to justify the horrors as well. Hence, many post-modern social theorists wish to obliterate the possibility of repeating these horrors by negating the possibility of the existence of objective truth. They may be going too far, but the motive is understandable.

For African intellectuals, this journey towards uncertainty was particularly brutal. Decolonisation was celebrated with great dreams, but the disappointments have been bloody and the price paid in mass misery and suffering has been so awesome that many intellectuals have fled the continent in despair. It is not surprising that the most passionate and compelling critiques of certainty have emanated from these intellectuals. Whether it is Ben Okri in literature (Okri 1995; Okri 1996; Okri 1999) or Achille Mbembe in the social sciences (Mbembe 2002; Mbembe 2004), their fear of certainty is tangible in every word — just raw bloody nerves between them and their experience of reality. For them, there is a direct and short march between reductionism and authoritarianism. Equally, therefore, is their desire to increase the distance between what constitutes knowing and the use of power. Given the increasing centralisation of power in contemporary South Africa and what Mbembe calls the ‘necropolitics’ of Africa, this is a desire which has its merits. Edgar Morin, a renowned French social theorist who has pondered these questions for decades, does not go this far. He represents a tradition which wants a better understanding of reality than reductionism has to offer, but he stops short of extreme deconstructionism:

Intelligence that is fragmented, compartmentalised, mechanistic, disjunctive, and reductionistic breaks the complexity of the world into disjointed pieces, splits up problems, separates that which is linked together, and renders unidimensional the multidimensional. It is an intelligence that is at once myopic, colour blind, and without perspective; more often than not it ends up blind. It nips in the bud all opportunities for comprehension and reflection, eliminating at the same time all chances for corrective judgement or a long-term view. Thus, the more problems become multidimensional, the less chance there is to grasp their multidimensionality. The more things reach crisis proportions, the less chance there is to grasp the crisis. The more problems become planetary, the more unthinkable they become. Incapable of seeing the planetary context in all its complexity, blind intelligence fosters unconsciousness and irresponsibility. (Morin 1999: Ch. 7) For Morin, the problem with reductionism is not certainty, but its failure to generate a reliable enough understanding of reality as the basis for imagining transitions to more sustainable futures. By contrast, many African intellectuals are so terrified of any intent to change things for the better because of the horrors these intentions have generated in the past, any claim to understand reality in order to change it is automatically regarded with intense suspicion. Strangely, therefore, this fear of change can unintentionally reinforce the status quo by raising doubts about any claim to be able to know or create a better future.

The journey beyond certainty has not resulted in a new consensus which could become the basis for a new mobilisation and new hope. For some, this is a good thing — we are not so sure. For Manuel Castells, the towering contemporary philosopher whose three-volume work on the state of the world after the Information Revolution defined the analytical perspective of a generation, argues that at best we will enter the twenty-first century in a state of ‘informed bewilderment’ (Castells 1997). Much of social theory goes further: it has degenerated either into deconstructionist postmodernism, or a cynical belief in a very crude form of economic liberalism which has forgotten about the ethical foundations emphasised by the classical liberals. For the neoliberals, virtue flows from the maximisation of advantage in the market. Postmodernism has, of course, prompted a reaction, captured most aptly by Raymond Tallis (Tallis 1997) in his book appropriately entitled Enemies of Hope, which is a diatribe against the ‘semantic turn’ in the social sciences and a call for a return to methodological individualism and Cartesian rationality. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, has been the target of sustained attacks by Marxists and social democrats for some time for similar reasons, namely the claim by neoliberals that — in the words of Margaret Thatcher — ‘t here is no alternative’ .

Remarkably many contemporary social scientists have a limited appreciation of the impact of complexity theory in the natural sciences. Castells, for example, argues that the global economy and society have been reorganised as a grand set of networks, but he does not refer once to the huge body of theory about networks in the natural sciences. This, in our view, seriously hampers the search for a way out, which avoids hopelessness

Complexity and Sustainability without returning to the false promise of certainty. Indeed, there are profound ethical implications for the notion that the quest for certainty is the greatest threat to democracy. We need to go further than many social theorists have gone — be yond the traditional boundaries set by the social sciences. This means taking a lead from contemporary theorists such as the French socio-philosopher Edgar Morin (Morin 1992), Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef (Max-Neef 2005), the Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva (Shiva 2005), the work emanating from the Institute for Social Ecology in Vienna (Fischer-Kowalski 1998; Fischer-Kowalski 1999; Fischer-Kowalski & Haberl 2007), the work of the Chilean neuro-scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Maturana & Varela 1987), the critical complexity of Paul Cilliers (Cilliers 1998) and even the expanding scholarship associated with the prodigious work of Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann 1996).

Revisiting the scientific revolution The most distinctive feature of the European Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of the subsequent eighteenth-century Enlightenment, was the split, within what up until then was generally called Philosophy, between theories of nature and theories of society. Building on the intellectual and cultural ramifications of the fifteenth-century Renaissance and sixteenth-century Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and eventually the Enlightenment established the foundations for what has generally come to be called the culture of modernity. Some key principles have emerged as central tenets of the culture of modernity, specifically a belief in progress, the power of reason, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of empiricism, the unlimited universalism of scientific knowledge, and the virtues of secularism. Central to classical modernism was the great legacy of Galileo (1564–1642) — th e notion that valid knowledge can be quantified and therefore measured. The revolutionary Enlightenment intellectuals (with origins in Galileo’s battle against the Catholic Church in defence of Copernicus) were struggling against a universalising cosmological order which was legitimised and institutionalised by the Church. Starting with Descartes (1596–1650) and ending with Habermas (1929–) today, they needed to assert that the mere act of thinking constituted an act of rebellion and therefore of self-identity — th e famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ . This liberatory aspiration, centred in the endogenous rights that stem from being human, was captured in the African context by Kwame Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom (1961) and Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like (1972).

It was, however, Sir Isaac Newton who stitched together the various elements of the secular scientific understanding of natural phenomena. His basic and most profound claim was that it is possible to understand a given complex physical phenomenon by discovering — an d then reducing its content to — th e phenomenon’s quantifiable component parts. A valid scientific explanation, in other words, was one that established the parts, distinguished them from one another, and then explained the whole in terms of these identifiable and quantifiable components. From a huge number of cases which confirmed the basic method, he was able to finally claim that all physical reality could, in the final instance, be reducible to three factors, namely gravity, molecules and time. Like the weights, hands and cogs of a clock, all three, for Newton, were constants. And because these were the only constants, everything else was explicable in terms of some manifestation of these three factors. Modern science came of age. This grand act of reduction unleashed a phenomenal energy because it made possible a wide range of scientific endeavours which were able to assume that the basic assumptions of the paradigm were valid. In Kuhnian terms, as long as these assumptions remained ‘generally accepted’ , scientific inquiry could proceed to focus on method and substance without too much concern about the validity of these underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions (Kuhn 1962). The results are well known and need no repeating here other than to say that this made modernity — an d its associated revolutions, transformations and progressions — po ssible. These results include, of course, the entire body of political and ethical theory that underpins our collective commitments to human rights, democratic governance, rule of law and self-determination. It is these remarkable achievements that have made it so difficult to reflect on the consequences of the dark side of modernity.

Once the break from the iron fist of the Church and the definition of the scientific method had been established in the natural sciences, there was a certain inevitability that the most influential social theories would emulate this basic approach. Although there were competing scientific traditions that were open to other ways of knowing (for example, Goethe and phenomenology), the social sciences emulated the dominant tradition in the natural sciences via metaphor. The classic metaphorical transplant from Newtonian physics to social reality was achieved by Adam Smith: gravity became the market, molecules became individuals, and the constancy (and reversibility) of time became value. But the same applied to the ideological polar opposite, namely Karl Marx: class struggle instead of gravity, capital and labour in place of molecules, and the dialectic replacing time. And similar reductions applied for others: Geist through history for Hegel; the ‘Leviathan’ as the antidote for the Hobbesian notion that life in its natural state was ‘nasty, short and brutish’; citizens and the social contract for Locke; bureaucratisation for Weber; monarchy and liberty for the anti-feudal revolutionaries, and so on. Finding a pattern of thinking about social reality which was similar to the pattern set by the natural sciences gradually became the primary intellectual ambition of social scientists because it was assumed that just as nature operated in accordance with a defined set of basic laws, so too could society be seen to operate in accordance with a defined set of basic laws. Without this ambition there would be no social science. What was common to both the natural and social sciences was the assumption that physical or social reality could be comprehended only via the application of the (trained) rational mind, that language was constructed to reflect this reality, and that once the basic laws of a given phenomenon were discovered, all else could be explained. Although modern science cannot be reduced to scientific method, it is possible to argue that the evolution of these scientific methods determined the boundaries of what came to be regarded as scientifically knowable. Of course it was accepted that knowledge

Complexity and Sustainability existed outside these boundaries, but this knowledge did not conform to the (largely quantitative) strictures of the scientific method.

The problem was that Newton’s constants did not stay constant. Social science was betrayed by its role model. Thanks to quantum physics dating back to Einstein’s time (but with earlier antecedents), Newton’s basic building blocks turned out to be rather malleable and indeterminate. There was the famous experiment in which two electrons with opposite spins (positive and negative) were taken from the same atom, separated in space, and the spin on one reversed. When the spin on the other automatically and simultaneously reversed itself, scientists were faced with a profound mystery because the possibility of cause and effect mediated by time had disappeared. For Einstein, this was a logical impossibility and he insisted the explanation would be found in time. Einstein’s faith in physics has been carried into the contemporary era by world-renowned ecologist, E.O. Wilson, whose critique of the split between the social and natural sciences ends by arguing that ultimately all natural and social phenomena are ‘ultimately reducible’ to the ‘laws of physics’ (Wilson 1998: 266). Wilson’s text is the most sophisticated contemporary defence of reductionism as the basis for what he calls ‘consilience’ — a unifi ed theory of nature and society as the basis for a sustainable future. Others followed physicists such as Neils Bohr and David Bohm out of a reductionist world and came to accept inter-dependency as an inherent property of matter (for an overview of this period in intellectual history see Peat 2002). From this has flowed an extraordinary literature with key terms becoming increasingly popular today, such as non-linear dynamics, chaos, complexity, systems thinking, strange attractors, implicate order, quantum thinking and the butterfly effect. In essence, quantum physics gave to the world an image of reality that was about relationships rather than building blocks, and qualitative explanations of phenomena in terms of the interactions between the component parts rather than linear causal relations between a few primary parts and the rest (determinism). The entry of this literature into the humanities has been largely via management theory because it has been recognised for decades that reductionism is not at all useful when it comes to analysing the internal dynamics of human organisations. Quantum physics provided the metaphors for an anti-reductionist theory of organisational behaviour. It remains to be debated whether this metaphorical foundation for an entire field of study can continue to be viable. But this is a matter for a different discussion.

The living cell holds clues to so many contemporary dilemmas because it sits at a kind of epistemological intersection point. It holds the key to an understanding of evolution, and via bio-mimicry it may also hold the key to a sustainable future (Benyus 1997). But how it is conceptualised also has much to add to our search for transdisciplinary ways of thinking about transitions to more sustainable futures. For a long time after the discovery and elaboration of DNA in the 1950s, molecular biology was caught in a reductionist vice grip. The awesome explanatory power of DNA seemed to obliterate the need to even ask questions that a DNA-centred approach was not geared to answer, for example, about the role of enzymes and metabolic regulation. However, this too has begun to change. The renowned Warwick University mathematician, Professor Ian

Stewart, wrote a book with the telling title, Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World (Stewart 1998). What then is this ‘other secret’? His response to the DNA-centred approach is as follows: As a consequence [of this approach], we are in danger of losing sight of an important fact: There is more to life than genes. That is, life operates within the rich texture of the physical universe and its deep laws, patterns, forms, structures, processes, and systems... Genes nudge the physical universe in specific directions, to choose this chemical, this pattern, this process, rather than that one, but the mathematical laws of physics and chemistry control the growing organism’s response to its genetic instructions.

The mathematical control of the growing organism is the other secret — th e second secret, if you will — of life. Without it, we will never solve the deeper mysteries of the living world — fo r life is a partnership between genes and mathematics, and we must take proper account of the role of both partners. (Stewart 1998) For many, the notion that a hard square science like mathematics is reconcilable with the soft gooey things that biologists deal with seems bizarre. However, Stewart is quick to point out: If we are going to understand the second secret, we must begin by recognizing that biology is not the only science that has undergone a revolution... Physics and mathematics have also changed beyond recognition, becoming more powerful, more general, more flexible, and a lot closer to the intricacies of life. These advances offer radical new opportunities for uniting the biological and mathematical worldviews, at a time when there is a renewed and urgent need for just such a unification. (Stewart 1998; emphasis added) Stewart devotes the rest of his impressive book to a detailed analysis of the operation of the ‘second secret’ via the application of complexity theory, and succeeds in providing a mathematical description of the physical and chemical context of cellular processes. It is significant, however, that one of the world’s leading scientific initiatives aimed at replacing a DNA-centred with a cell-centred approach is based here at the University of Stellenbosch. Under the leadership of Professor Jannie Hofmeyr in the Biochemistry Department, the so-called Triple-J Group for Molecular Cell Physiology is engaged in a project which aims to build an ‘integrative theory of how the molecular economy in living cells is organised, controlled and regulated’ . By breaking from DNA reductionism, this group aims to construct an explanation of cellular behaviour which is rooted in complexity. As Professor Steven Oliver of Manchester University argued in a review of their work in Nature, if they succeed this ‘could mean that biologists in the twenty-first century need a rethink of their view of cellular economy that is every bit as radical as that initiated for political economy by John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons in the nineteenth century. ’ (Oliver 2002) In short, like physics in the 1930s, genomic science as the premier science of the early twenty-first century may be facing its moment of truth: either remain wedded to

Complexity and Sustainability reductionism and blindly pursue the false promises of genetic determinism, or open up to a complex systems approach which not only makes the whole cell the focus of research, but connects this knowledge of the secret to all life to both evolution (as the history of life) and sustainability (as memory of a future for life). How the Kuhnian revolution in biology pans out will have a direct impact on how we understand ecosystems and life, and therefore how we negotiate the transitions to more sustainable futures across different contexts (for a review of these paradigmatic shifts in biology, see Capra 2002; Keller 2000).

Learning from complexity theory We have tracked the story of reductionism as it has played itself out in the natural and social sciences and suggested that the alternative lies in an appreciation of complexity. We have not, until now, made explicit the theoretical dimensions of complexity thinking. We argue that it provides social science with a way forward that avoids the extremes of hopelessness and certainty, and brings the natural sciences closer to what Ian Stewart so delicately described as ‘the intricacies of life’ . But these are not separate movements — they depend on and feed off each other. As social scientists are realising that future social transformations will be determined and constrained by sustainability challenges, they are learning about the dynamics of natural systems (including evolution) from their colleagues in the natural sciences. As they do, they are discovering a new language for comprehending social reality which may revitalise their disciplines (as has already begun). Equally, as the impact of unsustainable practices starts to affect the bulk of humanity as negatively as it does the poorest two billion, the work of social scientists becomes key to the survival of all species, because it is the social scientists who have accumulated knowledge about cultural change, social transformation, collective behaviour, organisational change, conflict and socio-psychological responses. However, the chances of these mutual syntheses occurring in an ethical way are substantially reduced if this transdisciplinary endeavour is not rooted in an appreciation of the deep connections between the human species and natural systems (Costanza 2009; Costanza 2003).

Evolutionary thinking creates a profound sense of the long-term histories of complex systems, how they adapt and how fragile they are (Margulis & Sagan 1997). An understanding of evolution gives humanity its memory of potential futures and shapes the way we manage ourselves into the future (Costanza 2003). Complexity theory is not a single body of thought which stems from a clearly identifiable central source. Morin refers to two twentieth-century ‘scientific revolutions’ that laid the foundations of complexity science. The first is the Second Law of Thermodynamics that successfully challenged the absence of time in Newtonian science. Over time, as entropy increases, energy is dissipated which means the ‘arrow of time’ is irreversible. This — in t he language of social scientists — is effectively about recognising that context (that is, the operation of a law within specific conditions) is not extraneous, but intrinsic to the operation of a system. From this flows the logic of the quantum world and the emergence of a new form of scientific explanation in terms of irreducible relations between the component parts of a system, as an alternative to reductionism (that is, explaining the whole in terms of the properties of a few selected components). The second revolution was the regathering of disciplines to understand the dynamics of the Earth and eco-systems when it became increasingly apparent from the 1970s onwards that unsustainable resource use, driven by reductionist disciplinary science, was threatening human and other life (Morin 2005).