The Age of Sustainability

With transitions to more sustainable ways of living already underway, this book examines how we understand the underlying dynamics of the transitions that are unfolding. Without this understanding, we enter the future in a state of informed bewilderment. Every day we are bombarded by reports about ecosystem breakdown, social conflict, economic stagnation and a crisis of identity. There is mounting evidence that deeper transitions are underway that suggest we may be entering another period of great transformation equal in significance to the agricultural revolution some 13,000 years ago or the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This book helps readers make sense of our global crisis and the dynamics of transition that could result in a shift from the industrial epoch that we live in now to a more sustainable and equitable age. The global renewable energy transition that is already underway holds the key to the wider just transition. However, the evolutionary potential of the present also manifests in the mushrooming of ecocultures, new urban visions, sustainability-oriented developmental states and new ways of learning and researching. Shedding light on the highly complex challenge of a sustainable and just transition, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned with establishing a more sustainable and equitable world. Ultimately, this is a book about hope but without easy answers.

Mark Swilling is Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where he is the Co-Director of the Stellenbosch Centre for Complex Systems in Transition.

PART I Points of Departure 1. Introduction - Change in the Age of Sustainability 2. Ukama: emerging metatheories for the twenty-first century PART II Rethinking Global Transitions 3. Understanding our finite world 4. Global crisis and transition: a long wave perspective 5. Futuring, experimentation and radical incrementalism 6. Evolutionary Potential of the Present: Why Ecocultures Matter PART III Making and Resisting Sustainability Transitions 7. Developmental states and sustainability transitions 8. Global energy transition, energy democracy and the commons 9. Resisting Transition: ElectroMasculinity and the rise of Authoritarianism PART IV Transdisciplinary Knowing 10. Towards an evolutionary pedagogy of the present 11. Concluding reflections of an enraged incrementalist