DamianWhite PDF

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/21982998/WORKINGFOLDER/BELL-VOL1-OPM/9781108429320C15.3D 223 [223–242] 17.4.
2020 11:23PM
15 Post Carbon Transition Futuring:

For a Reconstructive Turn
in the Environmental Social
Sciences?
Damian White and Timmons Roberts
Introduction
To what extent should the environmental social sciences be as engaged in
speculative thinking about desirable sustainable futures? Should we remain primar-
ily focused on empirically understanding, explaining and critiquing the key
dynamics driving fossil capitalism or should there also be more spaces for rigorous
projective, prescriptive and normative discussions that map and debate possible
pathways to alternative post-carbon futures? This are questions that have long
generated a certain amount of tension in environmental sociology but also in many
other related subfields of the environmental social sciences, such as environmental
geography, political ecology and ecological anthropology. Scholars trained in either
quantitative or qualitative methodologies of the empirical social sciences are taught
to carefully police the slippage between “is” and “ought” and more recently to guard
against “speaking for others” when conducting their explanatory work. Over the last
four decades, neoliberal culture has enforced the view that those who challenge
dominant market logics are “out to lunch or out to kill” (Jacoby 1999: xi).
Postcolonial and indigenous scholars have reminded us that the history of
Eurocentric utopias has also been closely tied to colonial erasures. Most environ-
mental social scientists of a critical disposition are aware that if all our disciplines
can do is to explain and deconstruct the mechanisms driving environmental crisis
without broaching the question “what is to be done?” the crisis will continue
unabated. To think beyond climate denialism, climate fatalism and sheer despair in
these times requires an expansive political imagination informed by propositional
thinking. How, then, should we “future”?
This chapter suggests that whilst many mainstream and critical traditions have
pushed discussions of futures to the sidelines, futures have long played a generative
role in the development of sociology and the broader environmental social sciences.
These have ranged from fin de siècle utopianism to Cold War futurology, from black
feminist science fiction to discussions of “cosmopolitics.” We then go on to argue
that emerging discussions around post-carbon transitions/transformations are now
223
C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/21982998/WORKINGFOLDER/BELL-VOL1-OPM/9781108429320C15.3D 224 [223–242] 17.4.2020 11:23PM
224 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology
further forcing a much needed reconstructive turn in the environmental social

sciences. In laying out eight transition discourses, we will suggest in this chapter
that such transition discussions are diverse, and deeply political. We can identify
quite different (productivist and degrowth) traditions emerging in ecosocialist dis-
cussions, from accounts of transitions framed around green capitalist and ecomodern
futures to feminist and decolonial perspectives. This is a field of inquiry where
dilemmas abound and easy answers are not to be found. However, these discussions
are also drawing new theoretical traditions and issues into view and forcing urgent
reflection on the possible pathways that might exist for just post-carbon transitions.
This chapter proceeds in the following fashion. We first review the “history of
futuring” and its relation to sociology and political ecology. We then turn to what we
see is the rise of the concept of societal transitions or transformations, which have
driven a new wave of envisioning of post-carbon futures. This focus on post-carbon
possibilities has forced a more propositional approach in our thinking, which we
believe is useful. In the remains of this chapter, we sketch eight positions which we
believe capture some of the most important empirical, theoretical and normative
matters at stake. These include the dominant Nature Capitalist and “breakthrough”
ecomodernist tracks and a number of red/green approaches, from the degrowth and
queer, anticolonial approaches to a Green New Deal. We believe this represents
a significant new direction that environmental social sciences need to not only
describe, but also lead. Our goal is to provide some orientation to a vast landscape
that has not been well mapped, and to identify useful elements of each.
Utopia, Ecology and Society

The question of whether “futures” constitutes a legitimate areas of inquiry
within the critical social sciences has generated some rather conflicted attitudes over
the last century or so. As the social sciences evolved from the imperial centers of
power and knowledge production in Germany, France, Britain and the United States
(and beyond), they often looked to utopian currents in literature, political theory,
architecture, design and culture to gain a normative focus. It was a figure no less than
H. G. Wells (novelist, futurist and serious contender for the first chair in Sociology at
the London School of Economics), who argued in 1906 that “the creation of
Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of
sociology” (Levitas: 2013,p.xi). Without embarrassment the environmental geogra-
pher, anarchist and utopian thinker Peter Kropotkin (1898) happily combined rigor-
ous critiques of capitalism, centralization and the state with the claim that a world of
fields, factories and workshops, globally confederated communes and free cities
offered an alternative path through modernity to centralized capitalist industrialism.
Kropotkin had a significant impact on Patrick Geddes’ advocacy of ecologically and
socially sensitive forms of civic planning and Ebenezer Howard’s championing of
the Garden City (1898). Across the Atlantic W. E. B. DuBois may well be best
known today for his foundational contributions to urban sociology but he also wrote
science fiction stories. In The Comet (1905) DuBois draws from traditions of black
Post Carbon Transition Futuring 225
abolitionist futuring to provide a dystopian speculation of a multi-racial couple

negotiating life after catastrophe has struck New York City. In his later work, he
looked to the Rochdale socialist co-operatives as providing economic strategies for
African American economic development (Gordon Nembhard, 2014). Early currents
of feminism were steeped in utopian and dystopian speculations moving between
sociological investigation and speculative fiction. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Herland (1915) describes a group of sociologists discovering a feminist utopia,
which could arguably be viewed as marking one of the first recognizable ecofeminist
texts.
Indeed, from Elise Reclus to Emma Goldman, William Morris to Lewis Mumford,
few critical social scientists put pen to paper for much of the late nineteenth to mid-
twentieth century without having reconstructive elements in their work. Futures
were taken seriously by mass publics and intellectuals alike. They emerged in
many different forms: from novels to designed blueprints to explorations of alter-
native states of being. They were anchored in different kinds of epistemological
claims: from an assertion that a vision of the future is actually a project of the order of
the cosmos/nature/ecology/the telos to a mere invitation to discussion. Such future
visions were often produced in often rancorous dialogue with vast social movements,
artists and designers, architects, urban planners, workers and assorted other trouble-
makers, patriots, revolutionaries, politicians, crackpots and social reformers. They
were attempts to give expression to latent potentialities that were perceived to exist
in muted form in the here and now. And perhaps most importantly, these different
future visions (whatever their substantive merits) fed passionate political disputes
about the alternative modernities that could be brought into being.
The proposition that futuring should play a large role in the social sciences has also
been met with significant criticism and even hostility. Marx and Engels may well
have had moments in their work deeply informed by utopian longings for post-
capitalist possibilities. The 1844 Manuscripts, for example, drip with suggestive
allusions referring to ways in which both work and leisure and the broader relations
between society and nature, the human and the nonhuman might be re-organized in
a socialist future. But neither Marx nor Engels had much time for the Arcadian
nostalgia of utopian socialism. They explicitly railed against the view that future
socialist societies might be prefigured by the building of egalitarian alternatives to
capitalism in the present. In Capital (1867) Marx famously declared he had little
interest “writing recipes . . . for the cookshops of the future.”
Max Weber’s writings may well have articulated a chilling view of the future of
bureaucracy and the spread of instrumental rationality, yet his own methodological
writings strongly counselled against social scientists blurring the distinction between
“is” and “ought.” Following Weber, it has been commonly asserted by scientific
sociologists of a positivist nature that while the social sciences should inform policy,
they should have no business engaging with longer term normative, propositional or
speculative inquiry.
From a rather different vantage point, post-colonial, decolonial and indigenous
scholars have highlighted the extent to which utopian thinking and practice – for all
its universal claims – has often been premised on Eurocentric foundations. European
settlers who came to the Americans and Australasia were often inspired by utopian
projects and proposals which then quickly fed into and legitimized settler colonial
doctrines of terra nullius/empty space with disastrous consequences for indigenous
people (Hardy, 2012). Rosanne Dunbar Ortiz (2014) has observed Romantic tradi-
tions of wilderness thinking in the United States have rendered invisible the history
of the labor of indigenous people on the land. As Sylvia Wynter has noted “white
utopia” has often functioned as “black inferno” (Wynter, 2003). At the same time, it
has to be recognized that diverse socialist, feminist, black nationalist and prophetic
traditions of utopianism and futuring have centrally informed many moments of the
black freedom struggle in the United States. From African American and Afro-
Brazilian attempts to establish intentional communities, mutual aid movements and
communal societies beyond slavery and white supremacist violence (Peace and
Peace 1963) to the “hidden histories” of African American experiments with eco-
nomic democracy and co-operative systems of ownership (see Gordon Nembhard,
2014; Akuno and Nangwaya 2017), utopias have functioned both to silence and
uplift subordinated peoples.
Cold War Futurology and Counter Culture Ecotopias

If the first great wave of early twentieth century speculative futuring in
social theory literally collapsed under the brutal disappointment of two World Wars,
the intersection of the Cold War and the counterculture in the 1960s saw a notable
revival of not only futuring but utopian thinking. Perhaps more than any other social
movement in the post-war era, it has been environmental movements that have
provided a home for future speculations.
The rise of futurology and future studies is one part of this story. Liberal and
conservative critics at mid-century may well have argued that any role for utopian
idealism died in the gas chambers of the Third Reich; the very tools of wartime
planning and logistics were adopted in the post-war era by diverse schools of urban
and social pundits and planners, corporate and military futurists, think tanks, con-
sulting groups, academics and, indeed, scientific modelers to develop professional
currents of futuring. Following the onset of the Cold War, the use of quantitative and
qualitative methods to rigorously study scenarios of possible long-term futures and
shorter term possibilities for military and nuclear exchanges emerged as a field of
considerable interest for the US military. The Rand Corporation and the Hudson
Institute, both independent US think tanks closely allied with the US military
establishment, played a critical role, as did Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock
(1970) and others. The development of future studies generated different approaches
to forecasting, ranging from the Delphic Method (essentially a technique which
involved asking anonymous experts a range of key questions about possible futures
and aggregating the results), to trend analysis through the use of computer simula-
tions (see Sardar, 2013). Future studies and its tools may well have had their roots in
Cold War military concerns, nevertheless some of the quantitative and qualitative
techniques developed from this period converged with developments in systems
theory, computer modelling and the growing use of supercomputers to facilitate

forecasting in many areas of the environmental sciences – from climatic change and
population growth to biodiversity and pollution studies. The Club of Rome’s land-
mark 1972 report The Limits to Growth clearly stands as one seminal early moment
here and offered a remarkably consistent vision of an environmental future that
would require living within limits through the embrace of a steady state economy.
If the Limits to Growth report can be seen as offering one landmark “scientific”
moment of environmental futuring running through the 1970s, the counter-culture
and its intersections with limits to growth ecology, Malthusian demography, design,
technology and social protest can be identified as offering a further set of techno-
centric and ecocentric visions of environmental futures. Visions of a technocentric
environmental future are at the center of Steward Brand’s Coevolution Quarterly and
Whole Earth Catalogue, that offered multiple tools for building a new civilization,
Amory Lovin’s championing of “soft energy paths” to ecological futures and
Buckminster Fuller’s more architectural and engineering-led proposals for sustain-
able communities to be built under the protection of geodesic domes. The emergence
of diverse ecocentric utopian visions of possible sustainable futures, rather more
inspired by older traditions of environmentalism and romanticism as voiced by
figures such as John Muir and Henry Thoreau and the rise of deep ecology provide
a further thread to countercultural ecologies. Much of this literature draws inspira-
tion about the contours of possible futures from the growing interest in indigenous
knowledges, the appropriate technology movement and the alternative food and
bioregional movements. Perhaps the most fully realized attempt to draw many of
these threads together can be found in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975).
From the political Left, a range of rather more explicitly politically focused
visions of sustainable futures emerge from incipient currents of social, socialist,
political and feminist ecologies across the 1960s and 1970s. Herbert Marcuse’s
attempt to reclaim utopia for critical theory in One Dimensional Man (1964), and
Andre Gorz’s Ecology as Politics (1977) effort to excavate the ecosocialist potential
of automation and post-work stand out as key figures who are now being reclaimed
by those seeking to recharge a contemporary ecosocialist futuring. Murray
Bookchin’s Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and Towards an Ecological Society
(1980) arguably provide the most fully realized institutional attempt to bring
together the insights of Kropotkin, Howard and Geddes, with critical theory and
ecology into a ecotopian political program. Bookchin’s Left-libertarian vision of
a socio-ecological future combines post-scarcity visions of “liberatory technolo-
gies,” communalized workplaces, new cultural commitments to leisure and pleasure,
and new attempts to bring the garden into the city. Bookchin’s assertion that
environmental futures must be defined by radically democratic and participatory
futures underpinned by a confederated form of municipalism has continued to
influence debates around municipal futures and rebel cities to this day (see Harvey,
2000).
It is the intersectional spaces of feminist theory and feminist science fiction;
environmental justice studies and post-colonial science fiction, that has arguably
offered some of the most transgressive and boundary pushing ontological
interrogations of how difference, alterity and understandings of bodies, subjectivity,

built forms and power could be fundamentally altered in societies transformed by
environmental crisis. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Marge
Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series
(1987–1989) offered profound sociological and philosophical interrogations of how
ecological crisis might force deep reconfiguring of race and gender relations, class
and status hierarchies, modes of sexual reproduction, sexual preferences and human
and nonhuman relations. The impact of such writings have been most strikingly felt
in the work of Donna Haraway (see Haraway, 2013), but they continue to reverberate
across discussions in contemporary afro-futurism, queer ecology and beyond (see
Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Nishime and Hester Williams 2018; Yusoff,
2018).
From Ecotopia to Heterotopia? Pluralism, Proceduralism

and Radical Democracy
The political impact of many of the 1960s and 1970s counter-cultural
ecotopias started to fade from view across the environmental social sciences in the
late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. We might trace three broad forces
that reshaped the possibilities of having conversations about environmental
futures. (i) First, the rise of neo-liberalism through the Thatcher and Reagan
“revolutions” in the 1980s coupled with the collapse of the USSR and its satellite
regimes clearly generated a powerful set of ideological and social forces to
promote the view that “there is no alternative” to free market capitalism. As
such, within mainstream culture and beyond, free market utopianism became the
only acceptable way to frame political discourse. (ii) The very notion that the
critical social sciences should engage in propositional, prescriptive or future-
orientated thinking was further unsettled by declining faith in high modernism
and was decentered in the academy by the post-structuralist and post-colonial turn
in critical theory. As speaking for “we” became ever more complicated, as grand
modernist visions for social and ecological transformation appeared either fore-
closed or one more embarrassing example of the self-aggrandizing imagination of
Western male intellectuals, older ecotopian visions, with their creaky naturalisms
and organicisms, their optimistic humanisms and their schemes to “remake rea-
lity” seemed to suffer guilt by association. (iii) A third intellectual and political
moment, developing from currents of cyborg, queer and black feminisms, science
and technology studies, relational Marxisms and other stands of continental
philosophy focused on the ontological instabilities of the society–nature dualism,
socio-natural mixings and the sense that we seem to be increasingly living in
worlds marked by diverse crosses of human and nonhuman agencies in worlds
where hard and fast divisions between “the social” and “the natural” no longer
make sense.
How have the environmental social sciences reacted to these challenges? If we
focus here on environmental sociology and environmental geography, it could be
argued that there have been some striking divergences in how different sections of
the environmental social sciences have engaged with the crisis of futuring.
The rise of the subfield of environmental sociology in North America out of the
limits to growth debates of the 1970s has, generally speaking, been marked by a deep
resistance to neo-liberal, green capitalist/ecomodernist also and poststructuralist/
post-colonial currents. There has also been a somewhat ambivalent attitude to
futuring running through the sub-discipline. The more quantitative end of environ-
mental sociology in the United States – whether exploring public opinion, ecologi-
cally unequal exchange, population-resource dynamics, the metabolic rift or
mapping environmental/climate justice issues – has generally focused on historical,
sociological, explanatory and empirical questions that are thrown up by environ-
mental movements and the study of socio-environmental phenomena rather than
engaging in speculations on the deeper future. It could also be argued that while
environmental sociology in the United States has developed a set of powerful
explanatory concepts that could help us understand the drivers of environmental
degradation, environmental displacement and the limitations of green capitalist/
ecomodern solutions to these problems, there has been much less fresh and innova-
tive thinking around the question of what the forms and contours of a sustainable
future might be. Indeed, it could be noted that the futures that tend to be presented as
offering a viable counter-point to green capitalism are still deeply in debt to quite
dated homeostatic, Eurocentric and dualistic ecologies that shaped the US environ-
mental movement from the 1920s to the 1970s. More often than not, the implicit
future horizons that continues to inform many interventions in the field are still
reliant on a synthesis of the insights of: (i) limits to growth and steady state ecology
reworked now in terms of planetary boundaries discussions; (ii) Malthusian demo-
graphy; (iii) the romantic traditions of North American environmentalism, wild-
erness and “pure Nature” against (perfidious) social constructionism; (iv) some
general sympathies for rural populism often running alongside further commitments
to ; (v) liberal, socialist, feminist, anti-racist and/or Marxist reworking of the insights
of social or deep ecology.
In contrast, it is striking how currents of political ecology and environmental
geography – more closely aligned now with environmental justice studies – have
increasingly sought to think beyond Wilderness Romanticism and the Malthusian
legacies of the 1970s. Following the turn in post-Marxism towards discussions of
radical democracy and the deliberative turn in critical theory toward deliberative
democracy, it has been some kind of vision of ecological democracy that has
emerged out of these discussions. For example, multiple currents of neo-Marxist
political ecology over the last two decades have argued that that the fundamental
project for a radical or revolutionary environmentalism should be less focused on
the imposition of external limits and more focused on the demand for the “demo-
cratic production of nature” which could allow socio-ecological constraints and
enablements to be debated and democratically decided. This frame, influenced by
the writings of Neil Smith (see Smith, 1998; Braun and Castree, 1998), starts from
the proposition that all environmental questions are always political and entangled
in broader power relations about the making, enframing, production or co-
production of social natures, technologies, spaces and places. The concept of the
democratic production of nature suggests we need to understand and politicize the
capitalist material and semiotic production of social natures if we are to think
about how we could alter this project so as to make just and democratic socio-
natures beyond capitalism (see Braun and Castree 1998). Attention should be
given then to the voices that are excluded from the dominant Malthusian, neo-
liberal or Northern environmental framings of socio-environmental problems.
Attention also needs to be given to the ways in which diverse popular social
movements – such as environmental justice movements in the global North and
what Martinez-Alier has identified as “the environmentalisms of the poor” (2003)
in the global South – and their disruptive knowledges and practices could become
democratizing forces which open up possibilities for alterative productions of
nature.
A slightly different emphasis to the study of social natures has emerged out of
the field of post-humanist or new materialist political ecologies. Following the
spirit of feminist science fiction that we mentioned earlier, many “cosmopolitical”
authors have variously drawn from the philosophical interventions of Isabelle
Stengers, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, indigenous ontolo-
gies with developments in animal studies to further explore the proposition that
we live in messy hybrid worlds marked by “a commotion of many beings” (see
Whatmore, 2002.) The human subject is best understood as neither exceptional or
bounded but relationally constituted and embedded in all kinds of heterogeneous
biochemical, social and technological flows. Cosmopolitics political ecologies are
particularly interested, then, in exploring the porous nature of the human, the
ways in which the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, lively technolo-
gies and lively natures are deeply political and continually marked by complex
boundary crossings and border policing. The key political maneuver of such
approaches has been to argue for a vision of sustainable futures as requiring
some account of multi-species democracy. A political ecology needs to bring in
more voices, or perhaps more accurately, to make visible that there are more
beings and more attachments that need to be objects of concern in thinking about
sustainable, post-carbon futures than a purely humanist political ecology
recognizes.
The virtues of the democratic production of nature and discussions of cosmo-
politics is that they take the complicated intertwined nature of our more-than-
human socio-ecological and socio-technical worlds seriously. These are
approaches which usefully push back against naturalistic determinisms and tech-
nophobic environmental romanticisms, regressive catastrophism and white colo-
nial humanisms. They are literatures which highlight how realities are co-
produced by many agents and the potential continually exists other ways of co-
producing more emancipatory hybrid worlds to come. However, the preference in
this literature for procedural rather than propositional modes of inquiry and
a tendency to avoid extended discussion of the programmatic content or institu-
tional articulation of cosmopolitics/the democratic production of nature has sig-
nificantly limited the impact of these interventions. It is in this respect that
discussions centering around post-carbon transitions/transformation might serve as

useful focusing points for moving discussions forward.
Discourses of Transition
Over the last decade post carbon futures have been increasingly been dis-
cussed through the language of socio-technical transitions or transformations. In some
respects, discussions of transition are restaging conversations that have run across the
environmental social sciences for four decades and more. This focus has forced the
environmental social sciences to adopt greater openness to propositional discourses. In
the remainder of this chapter, we introduce a range of transition discourses that we will
suggest are now vying to shape the contours of environmental futures to come. What
follows are sketches of eight positions which we will argue capture some of the most
important empirical, theoretical and normative matters at stake. It should be empha-
sized that each position sketched here is a distilled “ideal type” as Max Weber would
have it, a pure case which is presented in its purity so that we can highlight and
accentuate some of the key suppositions underlying a particular transition argument.
Reality of course is more complicated and messy, with plenty of room for fuzzy
boundaries and overlaps between these positions. We consider this typology and these
characterizations preliminary. Again, the goal is to provide some orientation to a vast
landscape that has not been well mapped, and to identify useful elements of each
position.
Typologizing Transition Discourses
Type One: Natural Capitalism, Eco-Entrepreneurship

and Transition through Greening the Market
By far the most influential and most powerful transition discourse on the planet is the
view that the post-carbon futures will occur through the greening of the market, the
construction of Natural Capitalism, and the unleashing of green entrepreneurial
energies. Green market thinking has its roots in the international Business Council
on Sustainable Development which from the mid-1980s onwards, and particularly
under the leadership of Maurice Strong and Gro Brundtland, began to have an
increasingly influential role in shaping global environmental politics at the United
Nations and in national arenas. The utopia of green capitalism has become further
embedded of late through the UNEP Green Economy Initiative (2011), the “green
growth” reports of the OECD (2011) and the writings and advocacy of Al Gore, Paul
Hawken, Hunter Lovins and Amory Lovins, amongst many others.
Green market thinking understands the global environmental crisis largely in
terms of market failure, notably the inability of neo-classical economics to price
“externalities” such as pollution adequately and its failure to value natural systems
like clear air and water. The utopian ambitions of green capitalism are to resolve this
contradiction by putting a price on those aspects of “natural capital” which remain

unpriced and therefore viewed as free goods (such as clean air, clean water, a stable
climate, biodiversity, flood protection, the ozone layer, etc). Green technologies,
climate smart innovations and post-carbon energy systems are seen as the solutions,
but it is argued that price signals running alongside smart regulation operate as the
most powerful and the most efficient system on the planet to speedily drive invest-
ment to low carbon technologies and to facilitate broader green investments. It is this
range of measures that allow for us to conceptualize a sustainable transition that
facilitates the continuation of capitalism through green growth, efficient resource use
and strategies that speed the shift, including from manufacturing to services.
In terms of manifestations, it can be observed that advocates of green market
transitions can come in a range of different forms. This discourse can vary from
green neo-liberal utopias that sees market mechanisms (in the forms of cap and trade
systems, debt for nature swaps, carbon pricing etc.) as the only method through
which environmental policy should be approached, to more centrist Natural
Capitalist ecotopian visions that mix advocacy of green markets with social impact
investment and visions championing the disruptive power of visionary eco-
entrepreneurs. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins (see Hawken,
Lovins and Lovins 1999), for example, have long argued that it is visionary green
CEOs green entrepreneurship running alongside the cultivation and generalization of
good green corporate practice; the spread of the service economy, sensible regulation
and ethical investment that will unleash the energies of “sustainable commerce,”
civil society and the green profit motive to produce a green industrial revolution that
will generate low carbon outcomes. If the greening of markets is a transition position
that is largely associated with the political Right and Center, it also has to be noted
that some green social democratic and even market socialisms are often open to some
pragmatic use of market mechanisms to achieve low carbon outcomes.
Type Two: Technological Breakthrough, Ecomodernisms

and Neo-Schumpterian Transitions
Ecomodernist, neo-Schumpterian proponents of energy breakthroughs tend to define
the problem of transition less in terms of market failure (though this is acknowledged
as important) and rather more in terms of a failure of the formal innovation system to
invest in research and development that can underpin low carbon futures (see
Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007; Asafu-Adjaye, 2015.) First, they understand
our environmental crisis primarily as an energy and innovation crisis. They argue
the energy crisis (which involves the need to decarbonize whilst also eradicating
energy poverty in the global South and maintaining high energy societies North and
South) is not going to be resolved with existing renewable energy technologies or
market fixes alone. In particular, they argued there is a chronic lack of up-front state
investment in post-carbon energy technologies to sustain a high energy/low carbon
planet. Ecomodern advocates of technological breakthrough place a central empha-
sis on the importance of innovation, new technologies and “modernization” as means
through which sustainable transitions can occur. Ecomodernists associated with the
Breakthrough Institute (see Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007) have additionally

argued that it is innovation plus modernization writ large that in the long run will
drive low carbon outcomes. Modernization here is understood as a teleological
process emanating out of the capitalist core generating industrial/post industrializa-
tion, urbanization, the spread of post-material values, industrial agricultural and
urban/rural transition. Breakthrough ecomodernists have argued that the globaliza-
tion of modernization processes has already lead to environmentally virtuous out-
comes such as the decoupling of development and emissions, a population transition
to slow growth or stabilization, the benefits of urban densification, and rural depopu-
lation, which opens up the possibility of rewilding rural worlds (see, e.g.,
Ecomodernist Manifesto 2015). From this perspective one of the primary obstacles
to acknowledging the gains of modernization has come from the anti-modern
dogmatisms of the environmental movement itself. It has been outdated commit-
ments to ecoromanticism, small is beautiful ideologies, knee jerk anti-nuclear and
technophobic positions and indeed a sectarian refusal of much of the environmental
Left to think in post-partisan ways about politics that has proved more destructive to
good environmental outcomes than any fossil fuel lobby, they argue.
Type Three: Cultivating Socio-Technical System

Innovation – the Multi-Level Perspective
Many advocates of socio-technical transition theory and the multi-level perspective
agree that green market incentives and public/private investment in low carbon
research and development are important in moving advanced economies towards
sustainable transitions. However, socio-technical transitions theory suggests that
Breakthrough and Natural Capitalist approaches to transition can suffer from an
oversimplified “silver bullet” vision of technological change which does not grapple
with the nature of socio-technical systems as complex, non-linear systems marked by
high levels of uncertainty and complexity. Advocates of the multi-level perspective –
such as Frank Geels, Jon Schot and their colleagues – have argued that historical
studies of the innovation process reveals that the innovation cycle – from research
and development to the production of innovative technologies – can take many
decades. Innovation is always characterized by struggles between different actors.
The research and development cycle is by definition uncertain in its outcome,
marked by hype cycles, disappointments and even complete failure. Development
and adoption of innovations occur in small niches and societies, and a few “go big”
into larger social systems which they transform. What is needed then are under-
standings of innovation that can allow us to think about the mechanisms that
facilitate whole system change in socio-technical systems.
The multi-level approach to transitions takes as a starting point the proposition
that all technologies exist in a set of broader socio-technical relations which include
“user practices, regulation, industrial networks, infrastructure, and symbolic mean-
ing” (Geels, 2002: 1257). Transitions are best seen as “outcomes of alignments
between developments at multiple levels” (Geels and Schot, 2007: 399). An indivi-
dual technology quickly develops interdependent relations. Geels (2012) offer the
example of transportation. Ecomodern/Breakthrough and Natural Capitalist

approaches to decarbonizing transport tend to focus on the need to develop singular
technologies – for example: green cars/ fuel cells/hybrids/electric vehicles and on the
further need to get the price right for these strategies. But what often goes missing
from these approaches is that a green transportation system requires much more than
singular breakthrough transport technologies or correct prices (Geels 2012). Low
carbon mobility futures require multi-level thinking about how we can develop
multi-modal infrastructures that can facilitate innovations at many moments in the
system. As such, electric vehicles will need new fuel and charging infrastructure,
new business models, new information technology systems to function in optimal
ways. But to get to radical cuts in carbon emissions requires much more than just
building electric vehicles. Rather, it will require an ability to think system wide about
the many forms of sustainable mobilities that can be developed: from opportunities
to experiment with car sharing and carpooling systems to developing modes of
planning and service innovation that expand and integrated opportunities for walk-
ing, train, tram and bicycle use, intermodal and multi-model transit; smart traffic
management systems; telecommuting, urban design, and so on. So, thinking about
transitions always involves thinking about socio-technical relationships and it
involves multi-level thinking to achieve transformations in whole systems and
radical innovation. How does change occur? According to the multi-level perspec-
tive, great attention needs to be given in transition discussions to modes of transition
management and transition governance, which can connect different levels of social
and technical forms of innovation together, as well as mechanisms that can encou-
rage social learning and iterative ongoing invention. Here institutional arrangements
that facilitate corporatist and deliberative dialogue around post carbon transitions
between multiple state, private and civil society actors are seen as optimal for
guiding low carbon outcomes.
Type Four: Social Practice, Design for Transition and Plenitude

Since the 1960s, visions of a cultural, communitarian and bottom-up path to socio-
ecological transformation have inspired diverse thinkers to claim that everyday life
and the informal spaces of innovation are often an equally important site for
experiments, inventions and transformations as the formal innovation systems
focused on by ecomodernists. Champions of professional–amateur cultures, frugal
innovation, DIY culture, jugaad and so on have argued that innovation is con-
tinually produced by lay people and communities solving their own problems or
lay–expert alliances as much as it emerges through expert innovation centers. It
has been further argued that the inability of modernist approaches to understand
and value lay expertise is a significant factor accounting for the failure of many
high modernism schemes in engineering, urban planning, architecture and agro-
food production. If post-carbon transitions learn nothing from these failures, we
will simply end up with a new array of expensive technocratic ecomodern “white
elephant” megaprojects and half-baked technocratic fixes to nuclearize everything
that just fails to deliver. A focus on “green innovation” can offer insights, but such
approaches can become ineffective if attention is not given to lay innovation and
the broader ways in which social practices, habits and cultural expectations
(shaped by ideas of convenience, need, desire, comfort and so on) are also key
drivers of carbon-, energy- and resource-intensive behavior. Transition thinking
has to be able to offer something more than a completely de-contextualized vision
of transition as a globalized high modernist energy infrastructure for a high energy
planet. It needs to ask more penetrating questions such as “Energy for what?” and
“To sustain whose vision of the good life?” Broader issues need to be examined if
transition attempts are to avoid rebound effects and self-defeating strategies. These
include the forces sustaining consumer culture, the design of urban form, and the
design of systems and services that facilitate current modes of carbon intensive
lifestyles. Within the field of transition studies, social practice theory, behavioral
economics, actor network theory, transition design, cultural sociology as well as
interpretive and feminist traditions have increasingly sought to map, investigate
and sometimes instigate these developments.
Fields of transition inquiry focused on everyday life seek to understand and
cultivate social innovation in a range of different spaces. Such work can range
from research exploring the modest nudging and norming that could facilitate
more sustainable lifestyles or forms of green consumption (see Shove and Spurling
et al 2013). Yet, such literature can also look to more substantial social experiments
at the street/community/locality or city level that seek to generate a public directly
engaged in and shaping the possible forms of low carbon futures. Examples of this
might include attempts to build low carbon solidarities and opportunities for collec-
tive, pleasurable downscaling, through: community gardening and different forms of
community provisioning, care and mutual aid; attempts to build cultures of commu-
nity recycling, maintenance and repair; low economic trading schemes, community
supported agriculture, car-pooling; climate conscious public art or low carbon
streets, restaurants and festivals (Schor 2010). Many of these kinds of ventures
coincide with the agenda of the Transition Town and Transition Design movements
(see Kossoff, Tonkinwise, Irwin. 2015). Beyond this, we can see growing intersec-
tions occur between social design, service design and activities in everyday life.
Juliet Schor has argued in Plenitude (2010) that purposeful attempts to aggregate up
subcultures of self-provisioning and downshifting, DIY cultures and various
attempts to build low carbon communitarian ventures could open up very different
pathways for low carbon living for the future. Slow food, sustainable pleasure and
leisure, sustained by institutional supports like a universal basic income, she argues,
might allow us to power down, decelerate, shift our life/work balance and ultimately
live better.
Type Five: Degrowth and Digital Proudhonism: Peer to Peer,

Distributed Futures and Solidarity Economies
Radical critics sympathetic to decentralized and communitarian paths to transition
have argued that if attention is not given to the structural impediments placed on
lifestyle and behavior change by the growth imperative of capitalism, then calls for
plenitude and transition towns will fail and end up collapsing back into a green
liberal lifestyle politics. There is some evidence that capitalist economies have been
able to achieve relative decoupling of economic growth from resource use (e.g.,
Steinberger and Roberts 2010), there is little evidence that absolute decoupling of
growth from resource use (let alone drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions)
are possible in a global capitalist growth-orientated economy.
Proponents of a new commons (P2P Foundation, 2015) or diverse economies
(Gibson-Graham, 2006) argue that post-carbon futures that maximize freedom, and
autonomy are only going to emerge if we can politically expand and defend post-
capitalist spaces for civil and socio-ecological invention. These spaces, however, need
to operate beyond the state and market spheres. The question of public and collective
ownership is critical here. A great deal of transition work in this area has focused on
ways in which utilities might be brought under municipal ownership, how local food
growing might be extended through land trusts, how new forms of public financing
might emerge through community banking or how a range of further peer to peer
services could be provided by socializing the sharing economy via establishing worker
owned platform co-operatives (Scholz, 2016). In many contexts, this search for a more
radical bottom-up vision of transition is occupied by degrowth movements and visions.
Key degrowth thinkers such as Serge Latouche (2012) and Giorgos Kallis (2018) have
argued such modes of anti-capitalist innovation need to focus their critiques on the
growth logic of the existing system. As such, this will involve discarding older
modernist Promethean ideologies, myths of green growth and a shift to an economic
system that ensures that “altruism” takes “precedence over egoism, cooperation over
unbridled competition” (Latouche, 2012:75). Latouche argues social life needs to be
prioritized over unlimited consumption, and that “sharing wealth and access to the
natural resources between North and South as well as within each society” must take
place. Bookchin’s defense of participatory municipal democracy and ‘liberatory Eco
technologies” – mentioned earlier – stands as an important complementary attempt
here to think about the political /institutional forms that could be used to support
decentralized transitions from below (see Bookchin, 2015). Whilst focused more on
the search for sustainable abundance than degrowth per se, radical municipalism
movements today – from Mojave to Barcelona – have drawn inspiration from
Bookchin’s view that attempt to build confederal alliances of popular assemblies,
municipal movements and struggles to create citizen-controlled renewable energy,
food provisioning and solidarity economies, offers the most coherent basis of resis-
tance to fossil capitalism and the fossil fueled state.
Type Six: Red Green Productivism, Left Climate Hawks and the Red
Green State
We use the term Red Green Productivism to refer to a cluster of currents – from Left
Green Keynesians and green social democrats to Left “Climate Hawks,” “solar
communists” and advocates of fully automated luxury socialism. These are funda-
mentally skeptical of the view that deep carbonization will be brought about by the
market, innovation or decentralized bottom-up ventures alone (see Schwartzman,
2012; Aronoff, 2018; Huber, 2018, Bastian, 2019). Red Green productivists are
committed to the general proposition that sustainable low carbon prosperity is going
to require a drastic cutting of greenhouse gas emissions and degrowth of certain
kinds of wasteful and destructive economic activity, consumption and energy use
(particularly military and consumer spending). As such, they share some of the
critique of capitalist growth outlined by degrowthers and the search for different
kinds of pleasure, leisure and work/life balance outside the capitalist treadmill of
production/consumption. However, they also stress that localist Left transition posi-
tions mostly underestimate the political, socio-technical and scalar complexities of
what is involved in achieving just structural transformation of complex economies to
zero carbon. The range of industries and processes that need to be decarbonized and
the need for new forms of public ownership, bold regulation and new industries to
drive just transitions, they argue, require much more.
From this perspective, just transitions are going to involve massive deployment
and ongoing public investments in diverse clean energy sources, the building of
continental scale smart grids and large “seasonal scale energy storage” systems to
decarbonize the economy. But increasingly it is argued by red green productivists
that this investment for decarbonization has to occur now at a speed and scale across
many more sectors across the economy – from concrete and steel production to the
agro-food sector and transportation – than has ever been grappled with by commu-
nitarian and localist approaches. Revitalized urban, rural and regional planning will
be critical to move urban densification forward, ruggedize coast cities, build afford-
able sustainable public housing and sustainable transportation systems, and speed
the development of just climate-adaptive agriculture and agro-food systems that can
feed 9 billion people. Increasingly, many (though not all) red green productivists ally
with Climate Hawks in arguing that Nuclear power, carbon capture and storage as
well as the contributions that automation and AI might make to rapid decarboniza-
tion all need to be on the table. In short, something like a Green New Deal and World
War II-level mobilization approximates the scale of the task ahead, much more than
narratives framed around degrowth, sufficiency and localist, small-scale solutions.
Moving a just transition forward with appropriate speed and scale will require
revitalized public institutions from the local to cities, regional and national level,
that can confront and overcome fossil capitalism and the forms of ruling class interests
that will resist this project. Christian Parenti (2012), for example, has argued the state
will have to play a central role in decarbonization because it is the only quasi-
democratic institution that has the power to shut down the largest and most powerful
set of industries on the planet – the fossil fuel industries – and help construct a new eco-
industrial settlement. It is state agencies operating at local, city and federal/national
levels that has the administrative reach and the existing infrastructure in place to move
swiftly to develop eco-industrial policies, public financing and new forms of public
ownership that can quickly shift investment, procurement and research and develop-
ment, build circular economies to facilitate sustainable production and consumption,
and regulate the worst polluters out of existence. It is a climate-smart, democratized
green welfare state that could build the kinds of green public goods, redistributive
politics and forms of universal basic income or green job guarantees that can underpin
a zero carbon politics that decisively shift power and possibility to the multi-racial
working class. Rather than devoting time and energy to well-meaning but often
ineffectual communitarian ventures, red green productivists increasingly argue that
just transitions are going to require the emergence of political movements that under-
stand the urgency of deploying concentrated public power and democratic public
agency to build the just transition. What is required then are forms of political
organizing, movement building, ideological and policy work that can generate popular
hegemonic coalitions around populist demands, like the Green New Deal, that force
public institutions to enact just transitions.
Type Seven: Feminist, Queer and Intersectional Transitions

Emerging currents of intersectional feminist transition thinking – building on dec-
ades of work by eco-feminists, queer theory and feminist political ecology – raise
issues of power relations felt through gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and other
modes of domination, discrimination and silencing (see Mortimer-Sandilands &
Erickson 2010; Wilson 2018). These currents argue that attempts to build post-
carbon futures must approach these issues if they are to avoid reinscribing multiple
modes of oppression in post-carbon futures. A Green New Deal that funds a massive
renewables roll out will have to confront extractive regions, labor markets and
supply chains already segmented by gender, race and class (Burke and Stephens,
2018). The benefits and costs of the transition will be starkly unequally distributed. If
a green jobs platform ends up providing only non-union employment opportunities
that underpay women and minorities, or outsource hazardous and dangerous stages
of supply, manufacturing, disposal and recycling to frontline and fenceline commu-
nities will result in unjust transitions. Green jobs programs that are only attentive to
opportunities for low carbon employment in traditional “hard-hat” sectors are likely
to miss the low carbon potential of expanding pink collar care work (Battistoni
2017). Bottom-up forms of transition design, plenitude and social practice
approaches that do not fully theorize the gendered division of labor and the extent
to which existing economies depend on vast amounts of unpaid labor of childcare
and eldercare will only ever attract the time rich and commitment light. Both
degrowth and red green productivist strategies devoid of intersectional gender and
race analysis could simply generate more toil for women and people of color. In the
global South, emerging discussions around gender conscious transitions have
observed that a failure to understand the ways in which resilience to climate change
is profoundly shaped by the interactions between gender, race, class and caste will
leave significant communities underserved and vulnerable (see Wilson, 2018;
Nishime and Hester Williams 2018).
Type Eight: Environmental Justice, Postcolonial and Decolonial

Transitions
Environmental justice movements, World Ecology and post/decolonial scholars in the
North and South have long argued that one of the central problems with many
transition discussions emanating from the affluent world is that they are still largely
embedded in ways of knowing which purposely obscure the power relations at play in
transition. For example, the starting points for analysis in Natural Capitalist or
ecomodern transition thinking on “market failure” or “the innovation crisis in energy”
sidesteps analysis of how these systems have been intimately entangled with systems
of colonialism and imperialism, slavery, genocide and plunder for five hundred years
(see Escobar, 2018; Nishime and Hester Williams 2018; Yusoff, 2018). As such,
attempts to theorize transition in terms of US energy choices for decarbonization
that have nothing to say about the exploitative geographies of resource and energy
extraction between minority/majority worlds, the uneven terms of global trade or the
use that militarism plays in sustaining carbon and energy intensive lifestyles amongst
the top 10 percent of the global population must be recognized as deficient and
ideological. What follows from this then? First, no progress on just transitions will
be made unless there is acknowledgement of the ecological and carbon debt owed by
the affluent majority world to the majority world. Second, there must be full recogni-
tion that many Eco technologies underpinning proposals for a Green New Deal raise
significant issues around resource extraction (particularly for rare earths and Coltan),
land use impacts (for solar and wind) and disposal and could contribute to the ongoing
displacement of environmental pollutants from North to South (see Mulvaney, 2019).
As such the environmental impacts of affluent nations must be internalized rather than
displaced, and many argue this will now require that the affluent world rapidly shrinks
or degrows its vast overextended ecological footprint to allow for sustainable growth
of the “survival emissions” of the global South. Third, transition strategies must not
only stop the use of the global South as “sink” and “tap” for the global North, but
provide reparations to allow communities in the global South to mitigate and adapt to
climate change and build systems that can offer sustainable prosperity for the majority
world. Fourth, the settler colonial frames of modernization theory, what Arturo
Escobar (2018) calls the “one world World” project that that underpins ecomodern
transition thinking must be challenged, and a world where many worlds fit (which
Escobar has called a pluriverse) must be honored and acknowledged. For Escobar,
what this means is that we need transition thinking, transition design and transition
practice that can decenter Northern transition discourse (whilst engaging with its
strengths). Transition debates must be opened up to the insights of subordinated
subaltern knowledges (particularly indigenous and peasant knowledges). Transition
futures cannot simply seek to globalize Euro-American futures, rather futuring for the
Pluraliverse will requiring thinking with Afro-futurists, Chicano and Latinx futures,
sino-futures, queer futures, indigenous futures and many more futures to make other
worlds possible.
Sustainable Transitions, Just Transitions, Queer Ecologies,

Diverse Futures
In this chapter we have sought to argue that environmental sociology, poli-
tical ecology and the related environmental social sciences cannot simply linger in the
space of despair, cling to counter-cultural ecotopias that have long lost their political
and cultural relevance or engage in evasive and ultimately safe modes of procedural-
ism that never actually propose anything concrete. Our climate emergency has
revealed, as Tony Fry argues, that one particular future – “is coming at us” – with
alarming speed and we must do all that we can to redirect our practices as fast as
possible to bring about survivable post-carbon futures (see Fry, 2009). This chapter has
also demonstrated that the matter of transition is increasingly organizing how we think
about sustainable futures. We have gone on to map a series of eight different accounts
of how post-transitions are being conceptualized in the emerging literature on transi-
tions. It is tempting to read these different traditions as fundamentally antagonistic, and
clearly, there are some fundamental tension underlying each approach. From advocacy
of the merits of green growth to advocates of degrowth, champions of modernization
to advocates of decolonial approaches, gender-blind accounts of transition to
approaches that place class/race and gender at the center of their analysis, there is no
question that transitions debates are fraught and contested. At the same time, it is
important to remember that we have presented ideal type accounts of transition. None
of the transition positions we have outlined have a monopoly on wisdom. In the real
world, post-carbon transitions are going to be messy and complex, iterative and
incomplete. It is here, though, where the exciting political, socio-technical work of
creative borrowing and synthesis can start to bring the search for just transitions alive
(See White, Rudy and Gareau, 2016; White 2019a; 2019b).
References
Akuno, K. and Nangwaya, A. 2017. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy
and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, MS: Daraja Press.
Aronoff, K. 2018. “With a Green New Deal here is what the world could look like for the new
generation.” The Intercept December 5, https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/green-
new-deal-proposal-impacts/
Battistoni, A. 2017. “Green-Pink Collar Labour: Revaluing Social Reproduction for Just
Transitions.” Jacobin, August 15. www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/living-not-just-
surviving/.
Bookchin, M. 2015. The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct
Democracy. London: Verso Books.
Braun, B., and Castree, N. (eds.) 1998. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London
& New York: Routledge.
Burke, M. J. and J. C. Stephens 2018. “Political Power and Renewable Energy Futures:
A Critical Review.” Energy Research & Social Science 35, 78–93.
Ecomodernist Manifesto. 2015. An ecomodernist manifesto. www.ecomodernism.org.
Escobar, A. 2018. Design for the Pluriverse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fry, T. 2009. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice London: Bloomsbury.
Geels, F. 2002. “Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a
multi-level perspective and a case-study.” Research Policy 31 (8–9), 1257–1274.
Geels, F. & Schot, J., 2007. “Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways.” Research
Policy 36(3), 399–417
Geels, F. and Kemp, R., 2012. The multi-level perspective as a new perspective for studying
socio-technical transitions in Geels, F.W., Kemp, R., Dudley, G. and Lyons, G.
(eds.), Automobility in Transition? A Socio-Technical Analysis of Sustainable
Transport. London: Routledge, pp. 49–79.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Gordon Nembhard, J. 2014. Collective Courage: A History of African American Co-operative
Thought and Practice. University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2013. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So
Far.” Ada, no. 3. https://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/
Hardy, Karl. 2012. “Unsettling Hope: Settler-Colonialism and Utopianism.” Spaces of
Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2nd series, no. 1, 123–136.
Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh:University of Edinburgh.
Hawkens, P., Lovins, A., and Lovins, H., 1999. Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial
Revolution, London: Earthscan.
Huber, M. 2018. “5 Principles of Socialist Climate Politics” The Trouble, 16 August.
Jacoby. R. 1999. The End of Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Kallis, Giorgos. Degrowth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kossoff, G, Tonkinwise,C. and Irwin, T. 2015. “Transition Design Provocation.” Design
Philosophy Papers 13 (1), 3–11.
Latouche, S. 2012. “Can the Left Escape Economism?” Capitalism Nature Socialism 23 (1),
74–78.
Levitas, R. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2003. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological
Conflicts and Valuation. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Erickson, B. 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature,
Politics, Sesire. Bloomington IN: Indiana
University Press.
Mulvaney, D. 2019. Solar Power: Sustainability, Innovation, and Environmental Justice. San
Francisco, CA: University of California Press.
Nishime, L. and Hester Williams, K. 2018. Racial Ecologies. St. Louis: University of
Washington Press.
Nordhaus, T. and Shellenberger, M. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism
to the Politics of Possibility. New York: Houghton Press
Ortiz, Rosanne Dunbar. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
New York: Beacon.
Parenti, Christian. 2012. “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis.” Dissent 60 (5),
51–57.
Pease, W. H., and Pease J. 1963 Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America.
Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Peer to Peer Foundation 2015. Commons Transition: Policy Proposals for an Open Knowledge
Commons Society. Available at: http://commonstransition.org/wp-content/uploads/
2015/03/Commons-Transition_-Policy-Proposals-for-a-P2P-Foundation.pdf
Sardar, Z. 2013. Future. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Schor, J. 2010. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin.
Schwartzman, D. 2012 “A Critique of Degrowth and its Politics.” Capitalism Nature
Socialism, 23 (1), 119–125
Scholz, T. 2016. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy.

New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Shove, E. and Spurling, N. (eds.) 2013. Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate
Change, London: Routledge.
Smith, N., 1998. “Nature at the Millennium: Production and Re-Enchantment”, in Braun, B.
and Castree, N. (eds.), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, London &
New York: Routledge.
Steinberger, J. K., and Timmons Roberts, J. 2010 “From constraint to sufficiency: The
decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975–2005.” Ecological
Economics 70: 2, 425–433.
Whatmore, S. 2002. Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage Publications
White, D. F., Rudy, A. P., and Gareau, B. J. (2016). Environments, Natures, and Social
Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity. London: Palgrave.
White, D. F. 2019a. “Ecological Democracy, Just Transitions and a Political Ecology of
Design.” Environmental Values Spring 2019 (1), 1–32.
White, D. F. 2019b “Just Transitions and design for transitions: Ecosocialist Design Furturing
for a Green New Deal.” Capitalism, Nature Socialism forthcoming.
Wilson, S. 2018. Energy imaginaries: Feminist and decolonial futures in Brent Ryan Bellamy
and Jeff Diamanti, Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Chicago and Edmonton,
IL: MCMPrime Press.
Wynter, S. 2003 “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the
Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New
Centennial Review, 3 (3), 14–24.
Yussoff, K. 2018 A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minnesota, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.

DamianWhite PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

DamianWhite PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/21982998/WORKINGFOLDER/BELL-VOL1-OPM/9781108429320C15.3D 223 [223–242] 17.4.

15 Post Carbon Transition Futuring:

224 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

further forcing a much needed reconstructive turn in the environmental social

Utopia, Ecology and Society

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 225

abolitionist futuring to provide a dystopian speculation of a multi-racial couple

226 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Cold War Futurology and Counter Culture Ecotopias

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 227

theory, computer modelling and the growing use of supercomputers to facilitate

228 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

interrogations of how difference, alterity and understandings of bodies, subjectivity,

From Ecotopia to Heterotopia? Pluralism, Proceduralism

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 229

230 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 231

discussions centering around post-carbon transitions/transformation might serve as

Typologizing Transition Discourses

Type One: Natural Capitalism, Eco-Entrepreneurship

232 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

contradiction by putting a price on those aspects of “natural capital” which remain

Type Two: Technological Breakthrough, Ecomodernisms

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 233

Breakthrough Institute (see Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007) have additionally

Type Three: Cultivating Socio-Technical System

234 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

example of transportation. Ecomodern/Breakthrough and Natural Capitalist

Type Four: Social Practice, Design for Transition and Plenitude

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 235

Type Five: Degrowth and Digital Proudhonism: Peer to Peer,

236 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 237

238 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Type Seven: Feminist, Queer and Intersectional Transitions

Type Eight: Environmental Justice, Postcolonial and Decolonial

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 239

Sustainable Transitions, Just Transitions, Queer Ecologies,

240 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Post Carbon Transition Futuring 241

242 the cambridge handbook of environmental sociology

Scholz, T. 2016. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy.

You might also like