Just sustainability. Rhizomatic social innovations, transformative knowledge, and prefigurative practices for a just transition

Progetto di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale

Principal Investigator: Salvo Torre (Università degli studi di Catania)

In the face of a global crisis, with its intricate blending of environmental and social problems, JUSTAINABILITY looks at social innovations generated in frontline communities affected by heavy environmental burdens. The project will analyze the experiences nurtured by those communities in terms of social mobilization, co-production of knowledge, and experimentation of alternatives. Ultimately, the project aims to change the concept of sustainability to more deeply including issues of socio-environmental justice. We plan to accomplish this objective by working on two main societal changes: first, to implement ways through which knowledge and experiences produced in the campaigns for environmental justice can be transferred and communicated to achieve fair sustainable policies; and, second, to test how grassroots solutions to socio-environmental problems work and how they can be scaled up or applied to different contexts. Building upon the PI’s theory of the Wasteocene, the project focuses on a key socio-environmental sustainability challenge, that of contamination/waste. While waste has always been part of human civilization, with the so-called “Great Acceleration” the production of waste has escalated to become a major sustainability challenge. Waste devours space in the form of landfills; it pervades ecosystems and bodies through contamination; and it transforms people, places, and even the geology and climate of the planet in the Anthropocene. The waste/contamination nexus is also a crucial ground for researching sustainability because it questions the familiar discourse on the invisibility of the ecological crisis. Waste/contamination nexus is often extremely visible to those who are affected by it, though its effects on ecosystems, bodies, and public health are not equally transparent and obvious, posing difficult issues regarding the construction of scientific knowledge and the distribution of environmental harms. Therefore a focus on contamination/waste is a perfect case to demonstrate our argument in support of just sustainability. With COP21 Paris Agreement's highly challenging target to limit climate change, disruptive fossil fuel investments become the world’s hotspots of dramatic clashes between local communities and the states (what Naomi Klein calls ‘Blockadia’). The environmental impacts of such extractivist investments cannot be decoupled from the social impacts - while energy is a necessary part of our societies, every environment is a socio-nature construct altered fundamentally by the extractivist logic. Technical solutions do not address the social inequalities embodied in the making of wastelands and wasted people, and they do not challenge the contradictory connection between the obsession with economic growth and consumerism and the production of waste. Hence we need a theory of contamination/waste that incorporates the activists’ knowledge and practices on this matter as will be exemplified by our case studies.

Unità di Ricerca

• Università degli Studi di Catania: Salvo Torre (Principal Investigator)
• CNR-ISMED Napoli: Bruno Venditto
• Università della Calabria: Annamaria Vitale