Poli Sci

Indicator-based projects have become central to community development initiatives. The quantitative basis of such projects means that achieving 'sustainability' can be reduced to a technical task -that of gathering data and ticking boxes. The size, scope, and sheer number of indicators mean that indicator sets are often unwieldy and resist effective implementation. This techno-scientific emphasis can mask possibilities for taking into account the structures of power and cultural-political assumptions that frame the use of indicators. Too often, locally available resources and conditions that might support sustainable practices or challenge the existing unsustainable practices are subsumed by 'hard facts'. The necessity of citizen participation and active involvement do not necessarily figure in projects driven by quantitatively determined indicators. We elaborate an alternative, two-level process of community engagement that is explored in one case study example. At the first level, it involves community members as active participants. At the second level, it builds upon this process to more deeply involve people in learning about and negotiating over what constitutes knowledge about how best to practice sustainable community development.

Over recent decades, theories of ‘green’ citizenship have been developed around observations that long-prevalent dualistic understandings of society, as completely subjecting nature, are being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society, as participating in nature. As an exercise in normative theory-building, green citizenship theory is anchored by five key critiques: 1) The need to challenge nature/culture dualism; 2) to dissolve the divide between the public and private spheres; 3) to eschew social contractualism; 4) to undermine territorialism; and, 5) to ground justice in Ecological Space (ES) or some other socio-ecologically derived normative claim. This article offers a sympathetic provocation to normative theories of green citizenship. Adopting an alternative critical-realist perspective, I first describe how critiques 1 to 4 have been partially and problematically achieved, while unsustainable development continues apace. Describing the types of social and political participation, contents of the rights an duties and institutional arrangements of ‘stakeholder’ citizenship in the context of the ambiguously ‘greening’ global competition state, I then argue that the achievement of holism, privatising of political obligations, social non-contractualism and non-territorialism alters the discursive framework that encompasses debates over justice. This makes the task of grounding justice in ES or some other socio-ecologically derived normative claim in some senses difficult. In particular, injustice in contemporary conditions is a diffuse whole-of-society problem, the by-product of unsustainable development that lacks an identifiable class of perpetrators. Moreover, differences between conservative and progressive ideological positions are amplified. I conclude by briefly examining how some citizens are using the types, contents and arrangements of stakeholder citizenship to ground discourses of justice in ES.

This article seeks to understand the 'critical capacities' of actors involved in public disputes by focussing on one such case in Melbourne, Australia. The dispute centred on a non-government school's proposal to develop classrooms in a heritage listed building on public land sublet from a charitable foundation. Following local council's rejection of the original proposal, the school successfully appealed to the Victorian Planning Minister. After introducing a critical pragmatic analytic framework, five accounts of the dispute given by key actors are examined, uncovering similarities in the arguments used by each. Then, in the same accounts, analysis identifies differences in how the pro-and antidevelopment groups justified their own and denounced their opponents' positions. Both groups recognized formal rules as the best means for preserving equal citizens' access to public space, yet the pro-development group justified their argument by reference to local community benefit, in contrast with the anti-development group, who adopted an abstract argument concerning the privatization of public space. Understood as mobilizing different 'models of justice', the groups are regarded as appealing to a 'real' order, an implicit politicised hierarchy that situates winners in relation to losers. In effect, the prodevelopment group justified its position by representing it as congruent with, rather than disrupting the real order of things; the 'reality of the situation'. In conclusion, I discuss the usefulness of the critical pragmatic analytic framework for understanding governmental power relations and assemblages as actors demonstrate their critical capacities in contexts where erstwhile formal equality obscures the presence of hierarchical order.

Insofar as sociology is the discipline associated with inquiry into social relations and conditions -seeking to understand the 'logic' of society based on interpretive generalisations drawn from empirical observations -it is explicitly a product and, therefore, a project of 'modernisation'. That is, sociology arose as a way to understand society in tandem with the historical processes that arose in Western Europe and spread east and south into Asia and Africa and on to the Americas and Oceania from around the seventeenth century onwards . Modernisation as such implies a transformation of social conditions, away from the primacy of agricultural production located in the countryside and villages, often centred on a large place of worship such as a cathedral or temple or centre of power such as a castle or fort, and towards the primacy of non-agricultural production concentrated in relatively large towns and cities, often centred on markets for goods and services or sites for distributing these, such as a factory or stock exchange. Modernisation also implies a transformation of social relations, away from the primacy of inter-personal bonds of kinship or fealty and linked to historical interdependencies that draw upon a cosmological, that is, more or less religious, order that stretches back over time and establishes hierarchical relations between humans and between humans and the natural environment ). Modernisation ushers in a shift towards the prevalence of relatively abstract social relations based around mediating 'tokens' such as paper money or legal rules .

From the 1990s, researchers noticed that a certain ‘greening’ of citizenship was taking place: long-prevalent dualistic understandings of society as rightfully engaged in a collective effort to completely dominate or subdue nature were gradually being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society as a participant in nature. However, by the 2000s, it has become clear that the normalizing of holism has created new opportunities for politically progressive movements oriented to achieving social justice, just as it has fostered opportunities for reactionary movements to define justice in terms of preserving existing structures of privilege.

In the 1970s, deep ecologists developed a radical normative argument for ‘ecological consciousness’ to challenge environmental and human exploitation. Such consciousness would replace the Enlightenment dualist ‘illusion’ with a post-Enlightenment holism that ‘fully integrated’ humanity within the ecosphere. By the 2000s, deep ecology had fallen out of favour with many green scholars. And, in 2014, it was described as a ‘spent force’. However, this decline has coincided with calls by influential advocates of ‘corporate social and environmental responsibility’ (CSER) and ‘green growth’ (GG) that urge market actors to ensure voluntarily that social and environmental ‘problems are addressed holistically’. Given that CSER and GG have also been associated with rent seeking, privatisation and reducing incomes of the poor, could it be that the deep ecologists’ once radical ideas today serve to legitimate forms of exploitation that they once decried? A critical realist perspective can problematise deep ecology’s highly normative response to exploitation and alienation. By settling ontological questions in favour of holism and promoting moral voluntarism, deep ecology failed to address how actors with different interests might adopt green ideas. This blind spot can be cured by focussing instead on the active deployment of ethics, morality, values, beliefs, ideas, and knowledges by political actors in historically specific contexts. Both critical normative and critical realist modes of engaging with environmental values are important; however, at a time when holism and voluntarism are gaining influence, critical realism offers helpful insight into the uses and abuses of such values.

It has long been argued that, at least in the postindustrial West, the prevailing mode of habitation depends upon and perpetuates social and environmental exploitation because it is grounded by a dualistic cultural ideology. The argument is that reconfiguring habitation along holistic lines, constructing a new prevailing cultural ideology that frames society as a participant within the ecosphere, would reduce or abolish social and environmental exploitation. This paper builds on my earlier work to argue that support for a holistic mode of habitation will not necessarily achieve such aims. Based on observation of actions undertaken by urban social and environmental justice campaigners in US cities, I find that major actors within the political economic system actually justify their market practice in terms of a holistic ideology. In particular, state and market resistance to social and environmental justice activism relies upon holistic arguments that industrial and post-industrial processes are derived from natural ecospheric processes. As this mode of ‘neoliberal’ (i.e. market prioritizing) habitation has all too readily assimilated once radical arguments for holism, it may be time for green political theory to revisit some of the emancipatory possibilities of ‘soft’ dualism, in order to support and empower those experiencing the negative consequences of social reproduction.

The outcomes of urban redevelopment projects are never predictable, nor do they conform perfectly to any single ideological expression of contemporary development approaches, whether that of rational master planning for the public interest, a market-driven neoliberal approach in the name of the competitive world class city or some other vision of utopia. We argue here that a critical pragmatic analytical lens can be applied usefully to improve our understanding of the justifications, qualifications and compromises that contribute to shaping such projects in their contexts. The critical pragmatic approach, deriving from the work of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and others, is offered here with illustrative applications to the case of a major redevelopment project in Vancouver, Canada. The approach is situated within planning theory related to governmentality, communicative action theory and American pragmatic philosophy. We establish the utility of studying disputes in the public sphere surrounding development projects, in terms of the objects and actors involved in particular contexts (as opposed to a pure discourse approach) and in terms of the nature and trajectory of compromises attempted and attained in the process (as opposed to consensus-seeking or governmentality approaches).