Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s approach to analysing and contributing to transformations to sustainability in different contexts across the globe. The Sustainable Development Goals are introduced as a “universal agenda”, but questions are raised about their meaning in different localities, each with their own environmental conditions and priorities, cultures and socio-political histories. What can we learn from experiences across these different contexts, and the different disciplines through which they are understood? The chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book and provides a roadmap to its use (for different readers). It lays out the forthcoming chapters, which introduce the Pathways re-framing sustainability challenges, theoretical and methodological anchors and learning.</p

Transformations: Theory, research and action

This chapter describes a reflexive approach to action research, recognising that individual/team contexts, structures and circumstances shape the way that transdisciplinary research is carried out. It builds upon earlier work and the previous two chapters to provide a detailed theoretical background to the concepts that are central to the book – the notion of transformations to sustainability (including structural, systemic and enabling approaches), transdisciplinary research, action research and coproduction; and concepts that are central to the STEPS Centre’s ‘pathways’ approach, including systems, framings and pathways. It draws on some of the documentation developed through the course of the project to explore the different relationships between the objectives, theories of transformation and action research approaches adopted by each of the hubs.</p

The ‘Pathways’ transformative knowledge network

This chapter describes the ‘Pathways’ transformative knowledge network (from which the authors are drawn), one of three funded under the International Social Science Council’s (now the International Council for Science) ‘Transformations to Sustainability’ programme. It discusses the origin of the network and the various stages in the design and implementation of the project by the different hubs in the UK, Argentina, Kenya, China, Mexico and India. It introduces the motivations for the action research (such as learning about transformative research across contexts) including the efforts that were made to foster cross-learning, including single-loop, double-loop and triple-loop learning. The chapter also introduces the theoretical anchors adopted by the project (systems, framings, pathways) and the idea of transformation laboratories (T-Labs), which are discussed again in more detail in Chapter 4.</p

The Global Redistribution of Innovation: Lessons from China and India

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Assessing risks and benefits: Bt maize in Kenya

This article examines current and future stemborer control options in Kenya, in particular the use of transgenic maize carrying genes from the insecticidal bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis

Broadening out and opening up technology assessment: new approaches to enhance international development, co-ordination and democratisation (translation into Mandarin)

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The Appropriate Technology Movement in South America

Born in the 1960s, appropriate technology (AT) began as a reaction against wholly blueprint developments involving large-scale Western technologies, whose industrial contexts were ill-suited to the poor (Carr, 1985). The basic idea of AT was to try to help people develop out of the situations they were in by providing technologies appropriate to those situations, conservative in their use of materials and resources, but which afforded some improvement in the users’ economic and social circumstances. What started with just a few centres of experimentation in AT during the 1960s grew during the 1970s until it became a global grassroots innovation movement in the 1980s, with an estimated thousand institutions worldwide (Whitecombe and Carr, 1982)

People's Science Movements

The contributions of People’s Science Movements (PSMs) in India for the creation of ‘alternative’ technologies and forms of organization are best known through the work of Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP), a state-wide active PSM group (to be introduced later), but are much broader. Academic writings focus on the state-wide introduction of decentralized people’s planning, diffusion of fuel-efficient smokeless cook stoves and hot cases for food storage, mass installation of biogas, promotion of micro-hydro systems and electronic chokes, and the establishment of Kudumbashree (women’s self-help groups) and labour collectives in the southern Indian state of Kerala (Chathukulam and John, 2002; Chattopadhyay and Franke, 2006; Franke and Chasin, 1997; Parayil, 1992; Prasad, 2001; Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy, 1994)

The Social Technology Network

In July 2004, a heterogeneous group of institutions, led by the Bank of Brazil Foundation and including several national ministries such as the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Social Development, together with semi-public companies such as Petrobras, met numerous representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), social movements and universities to discuss policies for social and technological development. This meeting led to the creation of the Social Technology Network (STN; Rede de Tecnologia Social [RTS] in Portuguese), a hybrid experiment to promote grassroots innovation in Brazil and seeking to combine the participation and empowerment of civil society actors in technological development with the design of large-scale public policies for social development and poverty reduction

Conclusions

We opened this book with the POC21 eco-hackers at their innovation camp on the outskirts of Paris in August 2015. POC21 was a practical counter-initiative to the high-level climate talks at COP21 (21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change). As COP21 finally reached an agreement affirming social constraint in anthropogenic climate change, this deal will have profound implications for social, economic and technological transformations. In this context, the ingenuity and empowerment of civil society activities such as POC21 become even more relevant (Stirling, 2015); especially since government and business commitments to emissions reductions, while welcome and significant, appear insufficient in themselves. POC21 activists recognize this and speak of building a movement for open source, low-carbon, zero-waste living