From control to care: Trans-hegemonic approaches to just-sustainability transformations

Abstract

Sustainability transformations are the subject of increasing academic and policy attention, but definitions and practice remain contested. This paper provides a comparative analysis of four meta-reviews of sustainability transformation theorisation to identify new insights on transformative change. The overarching analysis compares four interpretive framings of sustainability transformation theory, in terms of their features and mutual critiques, evolution of the field involving a broadening of disciplines and perspectives toward greater attention to critical and relational social sciences, overlaps and continuing tensions. This article proposes a new interpretive clustering, that foregrounds relational, more-than-human, feminist political ecology, Indigenous and decolonial theorisation in sustainability discourse, and calls for their exploration in future research and action. This is in support of unlearning and unmaking invisible common sense formations that are the underlying common causes (although differentiated in manifestations) of unsustainabilities and which prevent transformative change from occurring. The article goes on to identify principles, practices and capacities for action, especially transdisciplinary action research, offered as non-exhaustive, polythetic dimensions of trans-hegemonic sustainability transformations. The paper concludes with an exploration of justice in relation to sustainability transformations, involving the advancement of shifts from control-based imaginaries to pluriversal, care-based futures.