The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The 2023 SDG Summit, which will take place in September during the United Nations (UN) General As... more The 2023 SDG Summit, which will take place in September during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly high-level week, aims to review the state of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. As 2023 marks the mid-point to 2030, this meeting aims to respond to the impact of multiple and interlocking crises facing the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is only one of these critical crises. The pandemic meant an enormous backlash for the implementation of most SDGs, as discussed in the UN Secretary-General's mid-term progress report "Toward a Rescue Plan for People and Planet." Therefore, it is at once an important background to the Summit and one that highlights the common overarching structural issues that underlie SDG implementation, as the pandemic not only posed a global health crisis but also led to lasting changes in policy areas concerning the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, such as health, mobility, trade, industry, finance, and sustainability. This paper engages with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the practices of the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) and the short-term policy narratives around the SDGs. Its goal is to document some of the changes the pandemic triggered in practices of sustainability governance, based on the findings of a 4-year project that draws on qualitative analysis of participatory observations at the HLPF meetings, document analysis, and in-depth interviews.
The protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottomup response t... more The protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottomup response to the plans of the government and Istanbul municipality to build a shopping mall on a small yet symbolic park in the cultural heart of the city. Taking the name of this point of origin, Gezi Park protests have quickly turned into a countrywide resistance movement against the hyper-developmentalist environmental and urban policies of the government, and the authoritarian tendencies of PM (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan. The movement unified opposition from all sides of the political spectrum, and transformed not only environmental discourses and policymaking but also the language in Turkish politics. Using Laclauian discourse theory and 25 semi-structured interviews with protesters and opinion leaders, this article documents how environmental policy has become the focus of popular dissent and analyses the signifiers around which the resistance has emerged. The hegemonic struggles between the government and the protestors and the lasting effects of the protests are critically discussed, to scrutinise the increasingly focal place of environmental discourses in the global conjuncture.
Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges co... more Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate change; biodiversity loss; water, energy and food insecurity; poverty and widening social inequality). However, the extent to which research and policy efforts are succeeding in steering human societies towards more sustainable and just futures is unclear. Attention is increasingly turning towards better understanding how to navigate processes of social and institutional transformation to bring about more desirable trajectories of change in various sectors of human society. A major knowledge gap concerns understanding how transformations towards sustainability are conceptualised, understood and analysed. Limited existing scholarship on this topic is fragmented, sometimes overly deterministic, and weak in its capacity to critically analyse transformation processes which are inherently political and contested. This paper aims to advance understanding of transformations towards sustainability, recognising it as both a normative and an analytical concept. We firstly review existing concepts of transformation in global environmental change literature, and the role of governance in relation to it. We then propose a framework for understanding and critically analysing transformations towards sustainability based on the existing 'Earth System Governance' framework (Biermann et al., 2009). We then outline a research agenda, and argue that transdisciplinary research approaches and a key role for early career researchers are vital for pursuing this agenda. Finally, we argue that critical reflexivity among global environmental change scholars, both individually and collectively, will be important for developing innovative research on transformations towards sustainability to meaningfully contribute to policy and action over time. Earth System Governance Working Paper No. 34 | 5 Series Foreword This working paper was written as part of the Earth System Governance Global Research Alliance-www.earthsystemgovernance.org. Earth system governance is defined in this Project as the system of formal and informal rules, rule-making mechanisms and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to prevent, mitigate and adapt to environmental change and earth system transformation. The science plan of the Project focusses on five analytical problems: the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency of and beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes, of their accountability and legitimacy, and of modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. In addition, the Project emphasizes four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem: the role of power, of knowledge, of norms, and of scale. Finally, the Earth System Governance Project advances the integrated analysis of case study domains in which researchers combine analysis of the analytical problems and crosscutting themes. The main case study domains are at present the global water system, global food systems, the global climate system, and the global economic system. The Earth System Governance Project is designed as the nodal point within the global change research programmes to guide, organize and evaluate research on these questions. The Project is implemented through a Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres, a network of lead faculty members and research fellows, a global conference series, and various research projects undertaken at multiple levels (see www.earthsystemgovernance.org).
Contents: Preface 1. Introduction: Partnerships for Sustainable Development Philipp Pattberg, Fra... more Contents: Preface 1. Introduction: Partnerships for Sustainable Development Philipp Pattberg, Frank Biermann, Sander Chan and Aysem Mert PART I: EMERGENCE OF PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 2. The Politics of Partnerships for Sustainable Development Aysem Mert and Sander Chan 3. Explaining the Geographic, Thematic and Organizational Differentiation of Partnerships for Sustainable Development Sander Chan and Christina Muller PART II: INFLUENCE OF PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 4. The Overall Influence of Partnerships for Sustainable Development: More Smoke than Fire? Frank Biermann, Sander Chan, Aysem Mert and Philipp Pattberg 5. Partnerships for Sustainable Development in the Energy Sector: Explaining Variation in their Problem-Solving Effectiveness Kacper Szulecki, Philipp Pattberg and Frank Biermann PART III: PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT BEYOND THE OECD WORLD 6. Partnerships for Sustainable Development beyond the OECD World: Comparing China and India...
Partnerships for sustainable development are often hailed as a vital new element of the emerging ... more Partnerships for sustainable development are often hailed as a vital new element of the emerging system of global sustainability governance. In policy and academic debates alike, partnerships are promoted as a solution to deadlocked intergovernmental negotiations, to ineff ective treaties and overly bureaucratic international organizations, to powerbased state policies, corrupt elites and many other real or perceived current problems of the sustainability transition. Partnerships for sustainable development are now ubiquitous. They have been promoted in particular at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), where partnerships have emerged as a ‘type2 outcome’ of the summit, along with the traditional outcomes of the intergovernmental diplomatic process. As of August 2011, 348 partnerships for sustainable development have been registered with the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). In addition, many similar agreements are in plac...
Since its initial conceptualisation in the 1980s, sustainable development has been a dominant dis... more 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 compari [...]
Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant... more Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested, and the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of 'reality' is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences and brings together different disciplines from the so...
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The 2023 SDG Summit, which will take place in September during the United Nations (UN) General As... more The 2023 SDG Summit, which will take place in September during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly high-level week, aims to review the state of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. As 2023 marks the mid-point to 2030, this meeting aims to respond to the impact of multiple and interlocking crises facing the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is only one of these critical crises. The pandemic meant an enormous backlash for the implementation of most SDGs, as discussed in the UN Secretary-General's mid-term progress report "Toward a Rescue Plan for People and Planet." Therefore, it is at once an important background to the Summit and one that highlights the common overarching structural issues that underlie SDG implementation, as the pandemic not only posed a global health crisis but also led to lasting changes in policy areas concerning the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, such as health, mobility, trade, industry, finance, and sustainability. This paper engages with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the practices of the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) and the short-term policy narratives around the SDGs. Its goal is to document some of the changes the pandemic triggered in practices of sustainability governance, based on the findings of a 4-year project that draws on qualitative analysis of participatory observations at the HLPF meetings, document analysis, and in-depth interviews.
The protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottomup response t... more The protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottomup response to the plans of the government and Istanbul municipality to build a shopping mall on a small yet symbolic park in the cultural heart of the city. Taking the name of this point of origin, Gezi Park protests have quickly turned into a countrywide resistance movement against the hyper-developmentalist environmental and urban policies of the government, and the authoritarian tendencies of PM (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan. The movement unified opposition from all sides of the political spectrum, and transformed not only environmental discourses and policymaking but also the language in Turkish politics. Using Laclauian discourse theory and 25 semi-structured interviews with protesters and opinion leaders, this article documents how environmental policy has become the focus of popular dissent and analyses the signifiers around which the resistance has emerged. The hegemonic struggles between the government and the protestors and the lasting effects of the protests are critically discussed, to scrutinise the increasingly focal place of environmental discourses in the global conjuncture.
Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges co... more Over the last two decades researchers have come to understand much about the global challenges confronting human society (e.g. climate change; biodiversity loss; water, energy and food insecurity; poverty and widening social inequality). However, the extent to which research and policy efforts are succeeding in steering human societies towards more sustainable and just futures is unclear. Attention is increasingly turning towards better understanding how to navigate processes of social and institutional transformation to bring about more desirable trajectories of change in various sectors of human society. A major knowledge gap concerns understanding how transformations towards sustainability are conceptualised, understood and analysed. Limited existing scholarship on this topic is fragmented, sometimes overly deterministic, and weak in its capacity to critically analyse transformation processes which are inherently political and contested. This paper aims to advance understanding of transformations towards sustainability, recognising it as both a normative and an analytical concept. We firstly review existing concepts of transformation in global environmental change literature, and the role of governance in relation to it. We then propose a framework for understanding and critically analysing transformations towards sustainability based on the existing 'Earth System Governance' framework (Biermann et al., 2009). We then outline a research agenda, and argue that transdisciplinary research approaches and a key role for early career researchers are vital for pursuing this agenda. Finally, we argue that critical reflexivity among global environmental change scholars, both individually and collectively, will be important for developing innovative research on transformations towards sustainability to meaningfully contribute to policy and action over time. Earth System Governance Working Paper No. 34 | 5 Series Foreword This working paper was written as part of the Earth System Governance Global Research Alliance-www.earthsystemgovernance.org. Earth system governance is defined in this Project as the system of formal and informal rules, rule-making mechanisms and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to prevent, mitigate and adapt to environmental change and earth system transformation. The science plan of the Project focusses on five analytical problems: the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency of and beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes, of their accountability and legitimacy, and of modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. In addition, the Project emphasizes four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem: the role of power, of knowledge, of norms, and of scale. Finally, the Earth System Governance Project advances the integrated analysis of case study domains in which researchers combine analysis of the analytical problems and crosscutting themes. The main case study domains are at present the global water system, global food systems, the global climate system, and the global economic system. The Earth System Governance Project is designed as the nodal point within the global change research programmes to guide, organize and evaluate research on these questions. The Project is implemented through a Global Alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres, a network of lead faculty members and research fellows, a global conference series, and various research projects undertaken at multiple levels (see www.earthsystemgovernance.org).
Contents: Preface 1. Introduction: Partnerships for Sustainable Development Philipp Pattberg, Fra... more Contents: Preface 1. Introduction: Partnerships for Sustainable Development Philipp Pattberg, Frank Biermann, Sander Chan and Aysem Mert PART I: EMERGENCE OF PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 2. The Politics of Partnerships for Sustainable Development Aysem Mert and Sander Chan 3. Explaining the Geographic, Thematic and Organizational Differentiation of Partnerships for Sustainable Development Sander Chan and Christina Muller PART II: INFLUENCE OF PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 4. The Overall Influence of Partnerships for Sustainable Development: More Smoke than Fire? Frank Biermann, Sander Chan, Aysem Mert and Philipp Pattberg 5. Partnerships for Sustainable Development in the Energy Sector: Explaining Variation in their Problem-Solving Effectiveness Kacper Szulecki, Philipp Pattberg and Frank Biermann PART III: PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT BEYOND THE OECD WORLD 6. Partnerships for Sustainable Development beyond the OECD World: Comparing China and India...
Partnerships for sustainable development are often hailed as a vital new element of the emerging ... more Partnerships for sustainable development are often hailed as a vital new element of the emerging system of global sustainability governance. In policy and academic debates alike, partnerships are promoted as a solution to deadlocked intergovernmental negotiations, to ineff ective treaties and overly bureaucratic international organizations, to powerbased state policies, corrupt elites and many other real or perceived current problems of the sustainability transition. Partnerships for sustainable development are now ubiquitous. They have been promoted in particular at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), where partnerships have emerged as a ‘type2 outcome’ of the summit, along with the traditional outcomes of the intergovernmental diplomatic process. As of August 2011, 348 partnerships for sustainable development have been registered with the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). In addition, many similar agreements are in plac...
Since its initial conceptualisation in the 1980s, sustainable development has been a dominant dis... more 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 compari [...]
Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant... more Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested, and the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of 'reality' is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences and brings together different disciplines from the so...
Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has... more Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested. Since these political events lack an ‘ultimate source of evidence’ (Rorty 1999: 151), the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of ‘reality’ is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. [...] Cooperation always requires understanding and appreciating each other’s realities. In the context of international relations, this also entails a certain degree of agreement upon facts. In order to achieve global cooperation on any given subject, the parties must first agree on the definition and problematization of the solution to the issue at hand. Making sense of common problems requires a shared view not only on arguments and interests, but also on shared forms of narration. Even though this agreement is not a complete consensus, a policy area with a relatively concordant, intersubjectively constructed number of facts is needed to begin cooperation. Such concordance is possible when registers are shared, similar to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common world’: A shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings that provide a relatively permanent context for our activities. Understanding politics as a practice of collective storytelling, in which the role of fiction and narrative is a constitutive element instead of being ‘mere rhetoric’, is still under-theorized. From a narrative point of view, the boundaries between reality and fiction are always blurry. Thus, an important but largely ignored part of this common world is shared imageries, which are expressed or represented in stories, myths, legends, and literatures. Complex realities need complex ways of representation. A theoretical engagement with the importance of meaning-giving practices as constitutive elements of politics should not halt at the analysis and the critique of simplifying and simplified versions of the ‘real’. The equally important question is: How and from which sources do we develop alternative and inclusive modes of narration? Against this background, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this publication brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written, and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. For the sake of coherence, the texts are ordered in terms of the medium they analyze and the audiences they address.
"The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg is remembered mainly for the pr... more "The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg is remembered mainly for the promotion of a novel form of global governance: the so-called 'partnerships for sustainable development'. This book provides a first authoritative assessment of partnerships for sustainable development, ten years after the Johannesburg Summit. The extensive research builds on an exclusive Global Sustainability Partnerships Database and a series of in-depth qualitative case studies. Key questions studied in this book include the overall effectiveness and influence of partnerships, their geographical, functional and organizational scope, and their legitimacy. This unique book systematically investigates the questions of emergence, influence and legitimacy, which will prove invaluable for scholars and students interested in global environmental governance and sustainability, public-private partnerships, sustainability at the UN level and environmental governance beyond international agreements and policies."
Sustainability partnerships were the Type-II outcomes of the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, which prom... more Sustainability partnerships were the Type-II outcomes of the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, which promised increased effectiveness in and wider participation to global environmental governance. They have quickly become the main form of collaboration between UN and non-state actors. This groundbreaking book uses the results of quantitative and qualitative research to analyse sustainability partnerships and their role in environmental governance. It focuses on the origins of and the rationale behind the concept of 'public-private partnership'. With a combination of post-structuralist discourse theory and interpretative methods such as historical discourse analysis and ecocriticism not previously used in studies on partnership, Aysem Mert, examines three discourses that have rooted into the logic of partnerships: privatisation of governance, sustainable development, and democratic participation. Ultimately, Mert argues that these discourses help understand the potential as well as structural limitations of sustainability partnerships. This revolutionary book will be useful to researchers of environmental governance, transnational and global studies looking for an empirical and analytical interpretation of the topic. Political theorists and philosophers as well as discourse analysts will also find the theoretical and methodological perspectives to be of interest.
In the aftermath of the failure that was the twentieth session of the Conference of the Parties (... more In the aftermath of the failure that was the twentieth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 20) in Lima, Peru, how are we to imagine (let alone actually construct) a more effective as well as more democratic climate regime? There is little indication that the next COP in Paris will be any different; dissensus, con-testation, and inertia characterize the global climate regime despite increasing popular interest and grassroots activism on climate policies. The authors of Democratizing Global Climate Governance seem fully aware of the need for inclusion and deliberation on policies of global warming. Not only do they provide a timely intervention to debates in IR relating to authoritarian and/or ecologically hostile responses to climate change, but they also provide compelling evidence that a UNFCCC reformed with deliberative ideals could be an efficacious starting point to address the climate crisis. The book's core purpose is to investigate how deliberative democratic gov-ernance can respond to the various challenges that humanity faces as the climate crisis deepens. To do this, the authors analyze the main premises and conditions of deliberation, particularly authenticity and reflexivity (as proposed by a long line of scholars working on deliberative models of democracy) and propose their inclusion in climate governance. This empirical work focuses mainly on the existing international regime on climate change and its various loci, thereby going beyond the UNFCCC. Governance networks, public–private partnerships, climate activism, and popular initiatives are studied systematically from a deliberative governance perspective. Stevenson and Dryzek begin by problematizing claims that democracy is either not feasible or not desirable in global (climate) governance. First they discredit what they call " the authoritarian temptation " (p. 5–6): the suggestion that climate change is a super-wicked problem and therefore democracy must be put on hold for a while. They point to the necessity of democracy for effective problem-solving and the implausibility of global authoritarianism. They note that authoritarianism often results in less environmental protection and that reflective public opinion favors a stronger climate regime. Second, the authors question the arguments of mainstream governance and IR that object to democracy in the international system. While prominent democratic theorists and IR scholars argue that " democracy is something that can be an aspiration for the
Shadow places haunt the modern western world which repetitively tries to solve the ecological cri... more Shadow places haunt the modern western world which repetitively tries to solve the ecological crises by further commodifying and technologizing them. This is what Plumwood calls ‘dematerialization’; “the process of becoming more and more out of touch with the material conditions (including ecological conditions) that support or enable our lives.” This is why the Shadow Places Network website describes them as “the underside of the capitalist fantasy.” Shadow places point to how unconvincing the proposed solutions are to the ecological crises we live in. Exploring fantasies of nature would help us understand this inertia. The desire to not know is the desire to not look at something deeply traumatic, troubling, unchangeable for the individual subjects. The way to gain agency is to understand their (our) unarticulated desires and fears. Not knowing becomes impossible when the fantasy that supports this position is revealed. This is why Braidotti (2018) notes that fantasies are fundamental to experiences both ‘affirmative/positive’ and ‘reactive/negative’, and can support an ethics of joy, an ontological form of pacifism towards human and non-humans that is required for ecological justice and a posthuman ethics. Different fantasies of various ‘naturecultures’ moreover can imagine different futures, effectively changing ontological stances, epistemological preferences, political imaginaries and social practices.
This special issue considers the past, present and future of poststructuralist discourse theory a... more This special issue considers the past, present and future of poststructuralist discourse theory as a conceptual framework and interdisciplinary research practice. Dealing with a variety of topics including fantasy, ideology studies, the relation between the discursive and the material, and populism, the issue is aimed at scholars from a wide range of fields, including political studies, discourse studies, media and communication studies, critical management studies, and policy studies. Following the English translation of a text by Ernesto Laclau hitherto only published in French-Politics as Construction of the Unthinkable-the ten subsequent polemic-programmatic articles reflect on ways forward for DT. The authors, originating from different disciplines, critically and constructively engage with DT, reflecting on its strengths but also its limitations, and proposing paths for future theoretical development as well as for rigorous and innovative research practice.
This special issue considers the past, present and future of poststructuralist discourse theory a... more This special issue considers the past, present and future of poststructuralist discourse theory as a conceptual framework and interdisciplinary research practice. Dealing with a variety of topics including fantasy, ideology studies, the relation between the discursive and the material, and populism, the issue is aimed at scholars from a wide range of fields, including political studies, discourse studies, media and communication studies, critical management studies, and policy studies. Following the English translation of a text by Ernesto Laclau hitherto only published in French-Politics as Construction of the Unthinkable-the ten subsequent polemic-programmatic articles reflect on ways forward for DT. The authors, originating from different disciplines, critically and constructively engage with DT, reflecting on its strengths but also its limitations, and proposing paths for future theoretical development as well as for rigorous and innovative research practice.
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Papers by Ayşem Mert
[...] Cooperation always requires understanding and appreciating each other’s realities. In the context of international relations, this also entails a certain degree of agreement upon facts. In order to achieve
global cooperation on any given subject, the parties must first agree on the definition and problematization of the solution to the issue at hand. Making sense of common problems requires a shared view not only on arguments and interests, but also on shared forms of narration. Even though this agreement is not a complete consensus, a policy area with a relatively concordant, intersubjectively constructed number of facts is needed to begin cooperation. Such concordance is possible when registers are shared, similar to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common world’: A
shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings that provide a relatively permanent context for our activities. Understanding politics as a practice of collective storytelling, in which the role of fiction and narrative is a constitutive element instead of being ‘mere rhetoric’, is still under-theorized. From a narrative point of view, the
boundaries between reality and fiction are always blurry. Thus, an important but largely ignored part of this common world is shared imageries, which are expressed or represented in stories, myths, legends, and literatures.
Complex realities need complex ways of representation. A theoretical engagement with the importance of meaning-giving practices as constitutive elements of politics should not halt at the analysis and the critique of simplifying and simplified versions of the ‘real’. The equally important question is: How and from which sources do we develop alternative and inclusive modes of narration? Against this background, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the
social sciences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this publication brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written,
and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. For the sake of coherence, the texts are ordered in terms of the medium they analyze and the audiences they address.
Shadow places point to how unconvincing the proposed solutions are to the ecological crises we live in. Exploring fantasies of nature would help us understand this inertia. The desire to not know is the desire to not look at something deeply traumatic, troubling, unchangeable for the individual subjects. The way to gain agency is to understand their (our) unarticulated desires and fears. Not knowing becomes impossible when the fantasy that supports this position is revealed. This is why Braidotti (2018) notes that fantasies are fundamental to experiences both
‘affirmative/positive’ and ‘reactive/negative’, and can support an ethics of joy, an ontological form of pacifism towards human and non-humans that is required for ecological justice and a posthuman ethics. Different fantasies of various ‘naturecultures’ moreover can imagine different futures, effectively changing ontological stances, epistemological preferences, political imaginaries and social practices.