a radical framework of assessment for legitimacy

Partnerships for sustainable development have become the official UN instruments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Among those working on water and sanitation, many focus on technology transfer projects. Transferred technologies are seen as tools not only to combat water scarcity or poor sanitary conditions, but also to alleviate poverty, ensure gender equality, improve health and environment. Yet, technological improvements cannot fulfill all these functions on their own. Thus, technologies that provide quick and easy access to water are not necessarily the most suitable ones for sustainable development of receiving communities. Indeed, a number of such projects fail at getting community support or ensuring their use of the water provided. In these cases, improvements in water access remain insubstantial, intentions of poverty alleviation are frustrated, and the technology ultimately faces rejection. To avoid such results, assessment of water partnerships and technologies should not be solely based on efficiency calculations but also take social implications into consideration. To do this, we suggest a technology assessment framework based on the social critiques of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Ivan Illich. While STS provides numerous conceptual tools to reconsider technology in general, Illich's concept of institutional spectrum is instrumental to examine the societal impact of particular technologies. Building on these two sources, our framework examines various contrasting characteristics that influence a technology’s social acceptability and desirability, especially from the perspective of the receiving communities. Hence, this framework creates a scale to assess whether a technology preserves the autonomy, flexibility and self-reliance of a community or has predominantly manipulative and monopolistic tendencies that induce dependence. This framework is then applied to the technologies transferred by water partnerships registered with the UN Commission on Sustainable Development

The making of sustainable development discourse : a hegemonic struggle between environmentalism and developmentalism

Since its initial conceptualisation in the 1980s, sustainable development has been a dominant discourse in global environmental governance. For industrialised countries it suggested a discursive merger of continued economic growth and environmental conservation. For the so-called ‘developing’ countries, it meant environmentally less detrimental economic activities coupled with increased development aid. At all levels, sustainable development discourse turned into institutions: not only in the UN system but also as NGOs, business councils, and ministries. This paper analyses sustainable development discourse from a global and historical perspective, by coupling text and narration analysis with discourse theory. UN texts, historical narrations (political, literary and scientific), political movements and institutions are examined. The hegemonic struggles to fix the meanings of 'development', 'progress', and 'sustainability' are revealed such that new strategies can be produced for global environmental governance. Among the themes of this Conference, it addresses 'how the sustainable development discourse effects environmental governance'. The paper examines the main ideological roots of sustainable development, developmentalism and environmentalism , placing them to their historical contexts. Firstly, the historical continuity between colonialism and developmentalism reveals how the semantic constellation around development changed, while the ideas about the concept remained intact. Secondly, the origins of sustainability generated increasingly more radical versions of environmentalism throughout 1970s. In the light of these findings, the hybrid concept of sustainable development is studied, linking these historical narrations with the Brundtland Report. This text analysis shows how the report successfully ended the hegemonic struggle by merging sustainability with development. The final section focuses on the influence of sustainable development discourse in environmental policies and institutions today: A comparison of the texts resulting from three environmental summits (Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, and Johannesburg 2002) and the more recent changes in governance ( carbonification , securitisation and the Green New Deal ) are juxtaposed to this background

On Being the Right Size : Scale, Democracy and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene challenges contemporary democratic imaginaries. It marks the scale of contemporary ecological crises as planetary, while there is no political system at the corresponding scale of governance to address them. In the absence of a global democratic imaginary, the severity of environmental problems triggers technocratic and eco-fascistic tendencies. Furthermore, contemporary governance structures have emerged in the steady conditions of the Holocene, where decision-making could take longer. It is not certain whether democratic practices and institutions will be a part of the Anthropocene governance, and if so, which ones. This chapter argues for “a literacy of scales” that would allow for us to rethink nation-state level imaginaries before we assume they can be scaled up. Starting with early conceptions of size and scale in biology, we investigate democratic scale in the context of the Anthropocene: If we can imagine a democracy in the Anthropocene that is divorced from these preconceived notions, what would it look like? What kind of citizens and agents would emerge and interact with the governance architecture, and at what scale? In other words: If the Anthropocene indicates a new scale, what kind of a democratic imaginary is possible or could address its tensions? The debates over a new geological epoch marked by the human influence on the planet have challenged contemporary imaginaries of democracy. The Anthropocene represents a mismatch: the scale of ecological crises today is increasingly recognized as planetary whereas there is no stable political system in place to address these challenges at the corresponding scale of governance. Neither is there consensus regarding the desirability of a planetary-scale governance architecture. This mismatch, the severity of environmental problems and the lack of political arrangements to address them, trigger technocratic and eco-fascistic tendencies, particularly in the absence of a democratic imaginary to address socio-political necessities in the face of impending catastrophes. In this chapter, we problematize these tendencies. Underlying these arguments are issues of size and speed, both of which can be reconsidered for a new era

The political nature of fantasy and political fantasies of nature

Within post-structuralist discourse theory, there has been an ongoing interest in fantasy and the fantasmatic logic. We propose a new way forward and suggest a focus on fantasies of ‘nature’ and what is deemed ‘natural’. Fantasies are structurally entwined with language, desire, and political ontologies. Discourses of nature hold a privileged position in this entwinement. We use the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how symbolic engagement with the world is supported by fantasmatic mechanisms. We argue that political fantasies express political subjects and objects via the imaginary mechanisms of splitting and projection. In an era of ecological crises and global pandemics, we find that fantasies that create a split between nature and society are a central part of the transformation of political imaginaries and discourses. Studying fantasies of various “naturecultures” and the politics of nature is thus an important new direction for discourse theory to explore anti-essentialist ontologies

Introduction-The Qurative Turn in Global Politics

There is no longer any serious contender to quration as central approach to social science. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to recount the developments of the qurative turn and what they mean for our understanding of global politics.</p

The Realism of Our Time? Futures, Fictions, and the Mid-Century Bang

The Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century (HGP22 is a unique project that diffuses the dichotomy between the factual and the fictional. In a future antérieur style, each contributor to this volume has used their creativity to ask tricky, sad, hopeful, cynical questions: Where is IR, in times of war, climate and ecological catastrophe, and deepening social and political conflicts? Looking at our discipline, a number of anachronistic, but also futurist features seem remarkable: the broken, but re-establishing trust in global cooperation, the trust in post-human techno-fixes that enhance, or sometimes even replace human cooperation thanks to benevolent algorithms, the hope for radical, more-than-human encounters.</p