and non-negotiability of planetary boundaries at least help galvanize attention?
As has been emphasized, it is not as if existing efforts have hitherto been so
conspicuously successful.
The thrust of all the previously raised concerns is not to belittle the gravity or
urgency of the current nexus of imperatives around social justice and ecological
disruption. The crucial challenge is not whether to achieve the necessary radical
technological, political, economic and cultural changes, but how? Here, though,
particular care needs to be taken in the light of the preceding discussion, because
the shaping effects of incumbent power act on knowledge and discourse as well
as on more material structures. This means that neither words nor actions may
always be what they seem, sometimes even entailing their apparent opposites. It
also means that interventions expressly and sincerely motivated by progressive
interests (in the senses defined here by reference to power and democratic struggle)
may nonetheless sometimes end up being regressively counterproductive in their
effects. Analysis and action must get below expedient surfaces.
This is where there arises the importance of the distinction touched on in the
Introduction – between ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’. Transitions, it may be
recalled, are managed under orderly control, through incumbent structures
according to tightly disciplined technical knowledges and innovations, towards a
particular known (presumptively shared) end. This typically emphasizes integrated
multidisciplinary science directed at processes of instrumental management through
formal procedures in hierarchical organizations sponsored by the convening power
of government. Transformations, on the other hand, involve more diverse,
emergent and unruly political alignments, challenging incumbent structures, subject
to incommensurable, tacit and embodied social knowledges and innovations
pursuing contending (even unknown) ends. Here there is a much stronger role
for subaltern interests, social movements and civil society, conditioning in ambig -
uous and less visible ways the broader normative and cultural climates in which
more explicitly structured procedures are set.
Of course, the utility of this distinction is heuristic (provocative and catalytic),
rather than formal or definitive. The real value lies in considering implications on
a concrete case-by-case basis, by reference to real-world examples and settings.
Crucial devils will lie in details and positive or negative evaluations in the eyes of
beholders. And the point here is not to insist on particular definitions for specific
words. It is the implications of the ideas that matter. The contrast between transi -
tion and transformation is also not a dichotomy, because both real- world dynamics
and salient models will typically lie somewhere in between, and the two concepts
are not mutually exclusive – there are several ways in which each dynamic depends
on (and is partly constituted by) the other. The central point is rather that if the
distinction is not made (by whatever names), then governance knowledges and
discourses (as well as practices) in any given sector are vulnerable to systematic
subversion by incumbent interests to channel more around expediently controlled
transition than inconveniently emergent transformation.
62 Andy Stirling
As has been emphasized, it is not as if existing efforts have hitherto been so
conspicuously successful.
The thrust of all the previously raised concerns is not to belittle the gravity or
urgency of the current nexus of imperatives around social justice and ecological
disruption. The crucial challenge is not whether to achieve the necessary radical
technological, political, economic and cultural changes, but how? Here, though,
particular care needs to be taken in the light of the preceding discussion, because
the shaping effects of incumbent power act on knowledge and discourse as well
as on more material structures. This means that neither words nor actions may
always be what they seem, sometimes even entailing their apparent opposites. It
also means that interventions expressly and sincerely motivated by progressive
interests (in the senses defined here by reference to power and democratic struggle)
may nonetheless sometimes end up being regressively counterproductive in their
effects. Analysis and action must get below expedient surfaces.
This is where there arises the importance of the distinction touched on in the
Introduction – between ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’. Transitions, it may be
recalled, are managed under orderly control, through incumbent structures
according to tightly disciplined technical knowledges and innovations, towards a
particular known (presumptively shared) end. This typically emphasizes integrated
multidisciplinary science directed at processes of instrumental management through
formal procedures in hierarchical organizations sponsored by the convening power
of government. Transformations, on the other hand, involve more diverse,
emergent and unruly political alignments, challenging incumbent structures, subject
to incommensurable, tacit and embodied social knowledges and innovations
pursuing contending (even unknown) ends. Here there is a much stronger role
for subaltern interests, social movements and civil society, conditioning in ambig -
uous and less visible ways the broader normative and cultural climates in which
more explicitly structured procedures are set.
Of course, the utility of this distinction is heuristic (provocative and catalytic),
rather than formal or definitive. The real value lies in considering implications on
a concrete case-by-case basis, by reference to real-world examples and settings.
Crucial devils will lie in details and positive or negative evaluations in the eyes of
beholders. And the point here is not to insist on particular definitions for specific
words. It is the implications of the ideas that matter. The contrast between transi -
tion and transformation is also not a dichotomy, because both real- world dynamics
and salient models will typically lie somewhere in between, and the two concepts
are not mutually exclusive – there are several ways in which each dynamic depends
on (and is partly constituted by) the other. The central point is rather that if the
distinction is not made (by whatever names), then governance knowledges and
discourses (as well as practices) in any given sector are vulnerable to systematic
subversion by incumbent interests to channel more around expediently controlled
transition than inconveniently emergent transformation.
62 Andy Stirling