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The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged some of the central assumptions of research on transformations to sustainability, even while increasing the need for actionable knowledge about social transformations. The pandemic has also changed the parameters for transdisciplinary and internationally collaborative research. Twelve international, transdisciplinary projects in the Transformations to Sustainability programme share insights on how COVID-19 has impacted on their work. 2020 was continuously surprising and often overwhelming. When the twelve T2S projects convened virtually at the beginning of June 2020, apprehension was palpable and virtual meeting skills shaky. Six months later, in mid-December, the project members were overwhelmingly positive about how well they had adapted to such an unprecedented and still uncertain situation. The vast majority of 50 project representatives at the meeting were at least reasonably satisfied with or even proud of what they had achieved in 2020, under difficult circumstances. At the meeting the project members were asked to reflect on both the main challenges and the positive impacts of the Covid-19 epidemic on their work, how they had adapted to the situation and what they saw as the emerging needs and opportunities for research on transformations to sustainability.

Researchers are humans too

T2S project members highlighted some of the universal work-related challenges during the pandemic – the pressures of working from home while looking after young children, or conversely the sheer inability to work from home due to lack of infrastructure, both of which significantly affected productivity (and personal wellbeing). On the positive side, colleagues and funders showed empathy, understanding and patience, while the teams pulled together and demonstrated flexibility, resilience and commitment to the projects.

Co-production can only go so far in a virtual world

Fieldwork and data collection posed the major practical challenge for most projects. Unable to travel and meet in person with research participants, the projects adapted by moving interview and other data collection methods online, which to a certain extent was rather successful. Certain stakeholder communities remained very receptive to digital contact and communication with them was perhaps even easier than before. For example, one project reported having better access to women via online means. However, many T2S projects are working with the world’s marginalized communities, which are not accessible by digital means and with whom personal contact is essential; their contribution to and engagement in the projects has suffered. In this sense the T2S programme provides more evidence of how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the social inequalities that the projects aimed to alleviate. Even projects working with well-connected partners in the Global North have found it challenging to build new relationships and trust with research participants by virtual means. Co-production, so vital in research for transformations, is clearly limited in a virtual world.

The pandemic has given a boost to methodological creativity, innovation and inclusiveness

For many project members, the constraints imposed by the pandemic were the spur to become creative in adapting or radically changing methodologies for data collection and stakeholder engagement, to learn new skills in the use of digital tools and to pause to reflect on how to do things differently in the new context. People’s readiness to meet virtually increased, and virtual meetings became more efficient. There was a sense that virtual meetings democratized the research and learning process, as many meetings and conferences went online and there were fewer barriers to participation. Some felt that communication, interaction and cross-fertilization within the projects improved because of the frequency of virtual meetings. Some also used the time not collecting data in the field to reflect more deeply on what could be learned from existing data. In contrast, others noted the pressure to participate in ever more virtual meetings, which, apart from creating fatigue, eats into time that could be used for analysis, writing and publishing. One person suggested that there be fewer meetings, but more sharing.

Fundamental challenges for social transformations research

The pandemic has made transdisciplinary work with disempowered communities more difficult. It has also exposed and called into question some of the assumptions of research on transformations to sustainability. What does transformation mean in the context of the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? The pandemic has lit up with a flash the complexity of the drivers of unsustainability and the uncertainties of the present and the future. Is the pandemic heralding a positive global transformation or is it a temporary disturbance that will generate vigorous and competitive efforts to rebound? Is it an unprecedented opportunity to mobilize a newly sensitized global community around transformations to sustainability or does it demonstrate that powerful, undesired transformations are well underway and not at all within our control? As one project member wrote, ‘The desire to return to ‘normal’ is a powerful discourse (as much as the idea that we will not return to ‘normal’). This is a challenge for transformation-oriented research.’ Reflecting these uncertainties and ambivalences, many projects sensed a shift in the priorities of their research participants and stakeholders, and doubts about their continuing ability or willingness to engage in a differently focused project. Some projects have shifted their focus to take advantage of new learning opportunities brought by COVID, while others caution against losing sight of important research questions unrelated to COVID. The new situation is bringing some of the researchers to reflect on the role of the scientist in such a context, and the impact they can hope to achieve.

What do the projects need now?

On a practical level, what the projects need to be able to achieve their main objectives is time, and preferably supplementary funding, particularly for the post-doctoral researchers employed on the projects; while the projects have been granted no-cost extensions, it may not be possible for the funders to extend the contracts of the post-docs, leaving both the project and the early career researchers vulnerable at a difficult time. Some feared that the delays in data collection and analysis done by post-docs may now result in unfinished projects, if the post-docs need to leave for economic reasons. Apart from that, the projects called unanimously for more cross-project sharing and discussion on:

Collecting data and working with stakeholders, especially vulnerable communities, in the context of COVID-19
Understandings or models of transformation and sustainability and how to measure them, particularly in the context of COVID-19
Understandings of other concepts such as ‘development’, ‘Global South’, etc.

The main suggestions as to how to accomplish the desired exchange were through:

Shared document for methods, practices, what worked, etc.
Repository of literature on digital research and engagement methods and tools
A joint publication on experiences with digital interviews/research methods
Providing research data to open data repositories

Anticipating the challenges

The challenges the project members see ahead are multiple. They include the changing priorities of the communities they want to work with and the looming impossibility of working with remote or vulnerable communities in the future. How can such communities be empowered to engage in research in such circumstances? What ethical questions arise, in view of the imbalance of resources available to researchers in the Global North and research participants in the Global South? The needs and challenges were also seen as opportunities: to better understand the relationship between COVID-19, transformation and sustainability and to envision what ‘post-COVID’ might look like; to harness and advance digital technologies for engaged, co-produced research for transformations; to address the vulnerabilities mirrored and reinforced by COVID. Adding to other calls for transdisciplinary research funding to be longer term and more flexible than for more conventional research, the project members recommended, somewhat unsurprisingly, that funders make funding available for follow-up research. Above all, what is needed from project members and programme coordinators as the projects head into their final 18 months is patience, empathy and good communication.

Is your scientific information newsworthy?

There are 6 principles to determine whether the scientific information is newsworthy or not for wider public:

Impact: No. of people it is impacting
Novelty: Something that is never heard/seen before
Prominence: Related to a famous personality/institution./people
Controversy: Disagreements between two school of thoughts/ideas
Proximity: Related to a situation, place or person that audience is familiar with
Topicality: Something which is in people’s mind during a given period of time.

Fulfilling these criteria is a first filter that will give you a hint that information is worth packing in an interesting form to deliver it to wider audience.

How to package your scientific information?

Now, there are three key points to take into account while packaging your scientific information in an interesting manner for wider audience:

Humanise the science: Make it a human story. Talk about person, people or a community and how can they be affected by this information.
Relate it to a trending topic: Try to relate your information (and package it as one of the possible solution) to any answered question of dominant topic in mainstream media.
Relate it to people’s most pressing need: Identify key things that people care about and show the editors in 1-2 sentences how your research finding is interesting, important and urgent and addresses their pressing need.

Keeping these points in mind will give a structured approach and confidence to early career researchers to start communicating their research findings to wider audience and make it useful for the society.

By Sarah Nash and Caroline Zickgraf via the MISTY project blog.

Beating the anti-immigrant drum does nothing to help climate action.

Grace, a refugee from South Sudan (Wikimedia Commons).

Exaggerated predictions for future flows of people have long formed the core of the anti-immigration playbook. When you add the impacts of climate change to the equation, the numbers skyrocket.

Experts agree there is a relationship between climate change and human mobility. As early as 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s principal scientific body on climate change, deemed mass migration a key risk associated with rising global temperatures. Since then, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of diverse data and complex knowledge on how impacts of climate change, from sea-level rise to drought and desertification, can affect the ways people move. Yet, above all else, people want headline numbers. The future scale of displacement is seen to give weight to the issue.

Predictions of how many people will be displaced in the future by climate change are what continually gain traction in the media, and, therefore, grab public attention. Over the past three decades, several reports have offered up predictions for how many people will be forced to move, typically delivering a figure in the hundreds of millions. More often than not – and much to the chagrin of experts on the topic – the predictions are little more than guesstimates motivated by the goal of shocking people into climate action. Scientific rigour takes a back seat.

Those of us who have made careers in the academic nuance of climate change and human mobility tend to work hard not to auction our expertise to media outlets desperate to peddle people who move as a homogenous bloc to be feared. And yet our careers tend to be punctuated by the frustration foisted on us by these high profile reports – often from well-meaning environmentalists – being picked up by the press, and transformed into yet more scare stories about ‘immigrants’ to the West.

The latest, published in the Institute for Economics and Peace’s ‘Ecological Threat Register 2020’, claims that a staggering 1.2 billion people could and indeed will be displaced due to “ecological threats” by 2050. Major news outlets like t he Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, Reuters and CNN have all run stories on the 1.2 billion people to be displaced by the climate crisis, without ever stopping to question the number. In fact, the report’s conclusions have been uncritically reproduced practically across the board despite significant flaws.

Far from anything resembling credible science, the 1.2 billion figure is arrived at through manipulation and misrepresentation of data that might as well have been worked out on the back of an envelope. This discredits both the data that the report misuses and the work of reputable modellers who are developing robust, albeit less sensationalist, predictions.

Within the report a graph depicts the global displacement trajectory: a line climbs swiftly and steadily from some 20 million displaced in 2008 to 1.2 billion in 2050. This is no accident: the report blatantly misuses statistics on annual, new internal displacement from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) to paint an exaggeratedly alarming picture. If we look back at how recent years are presented in the graph, the trick is cumulative. IDMC estimates that 46 million people are currently displaced within their own country. The report places displacements in 2019 closer to the 400 million mark.

What the report has done is add together each year’s figures for annual new displacements, treating each year’s figures as a building block to be stacked upon the rest. This means that what we are seeing is not the number of people displaced from their homes in or by any given year, but a sum of annual new displacements since 2008. Moreover, it includes new displacements regardless of whether they were caused by natural disaster or by conflict, increasing the projection even more.

With contemporary data already skewed, the future prognosis cannot be anything but fiction.

A threat to Europe

Another central tenet of research on climate change and human mobility – that the majority of people forced to leave their homes stay in their home country – is also conveniently brushed aside. Although the authors only consider internal displacement statistics in their calculation, they emphasise the adverse effects that huge numbers of migrants and refugees will have on developed regions, in particular Europe. It is presented so as to spark fear of a dystopian world in which the Global North is overrun by people fleeing the Global South, bringing with them chaos, conflict, and destabilising (largely White) democracies.

The Institute for Economics and Peace claims that while Europe has higher capacity to cope with ecological threats, it will not be ‘immune’ from flows of refugees (an interesting choice of words in the midst of a global pandemic). It warns that 1.2 billion people on the move will “cause considerable unrest and shift political systems” in Europe, calling upon the so-called ‘European migrant crisis’ beginning in the second half of 2015 as a harbinger.

In an ironic twist, the report blames the arrival of 2 million Syrians and Iraqis for a rise in populism in Europe, fuelling “the rise of new political parties, increased hostilities to immigrants and heightened political instability”. This is a clear example of blaming the discriminated for their discrimination rather than broaching the uncomfortable reality of socially entrenched racism and xenophobia.

Often, we see populists and right-wing political parties espousing this constructed immigrant threat, blaming people from the Global South for stretched welfare states and health systems in the global North, presenting them as a danger to existing belief systems and values and as a potential source of terrorism and gender-based violence. This kind of xenophobic rhetoric is easy to spot. But sometimes a wolf is dressed in ‘liberal’ and ‘scientific’ clothing. Reports such as the Ecological Threat Register may take a subtler tone, but they are playing off of and feeding into these fears.

And that is the crux of such reports: it’s not the changes in climate and the floods, heatwaves, extreme weather events, droughts and forest fires that are to be feared. The object of fear is the ‘Other’, people forced to flee their homes as a result of these changes who travel to ‘our’ shores. Despite summer heatwaves in cities across Europe and associated mortality, wildfires in the United States that have reduced entire communities to ashes, and recurring floods affecting the same communities again and again, the Global North is more scared of boats of people traversing the Mediterranean Sea, of people clandestinely moving across its land borders, and scaling walls built to keep them out. In this worldview, the ecological threat isn’t ecological at all – it’s human.

Strengthening the fortress

Of course not every articulation of displacement in the context of climate change has a malicious background. Environmental activists and humanitarians, too, draw upon these predictions as leverage to agitate for more action to counter climate change: Swedish activist Greta Thunberg tweeted this report’s figures to urge us to #facetheclimateemergency. However, contrary to their well-meaning aims, there is no evidence that concerns for displaced people lead concerted climate action.

What such misleading predictions do achieve is the entrenchment of anti-immigrant sentiments that seep into policy frameworks and are subsequently difficult to change. We call for climate action, but get anti-immigrant action. For Europe, this is translating into the strengthening of the European Border Agency FRONTEX, financially propping up camps to house the displaced in border regions, tying development assistance to a willingness to block migration routes, and even information campaigns to dissuade people from pursuing a new life in Europe.

And this is why we are so concerned about this report, and the narrative that comes with it. It provides fuel to the anti-immigrant fire; fuel that has been given a veneer of scientific rigour and can be used to argue for ever more restrictive immigration policy. It centres a European gaze on displacement, reducing the tragedy of people being displaced to a dehumanised question of scale and using them as another rhetorical weapon in the climate debate. We are talking about people’s lives. And if this is not the starting point of every conversation on climate change and displacement, then we are doing something wrong.

By Sonja Fransen & Beatriz Cardoso Fernandes, UNU-MERIT, with Dominique Jolivet, University of Amsterdam (MISTY project). This article was shared as part of a United Nations University Migration Network series that explores the interrelations and acute challenges of migration, climate change, and COVID-19.

Can the global health pandemic provide a ‘window of opportunity’ to change the way we think about sustainability? A new study by researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY). project and UNU-MERIT finds that for almost a quarter of Amsterdam residents surveyed, the coronavirus has increased their interest in sustainability.

On 17 March 2020, the Mayor of Amsterdam announced new measures to contain the coronavirus, including the closure of schools, restaurants, and cultural venues. In July 2020, researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY) project sent an online survey to members of the Amsterdam City Research Panel asking them what impact the coronavirus crisis was having on their lives, set against the broader backdrop of sustainability (understood here in terms of social, economic, and environmental sustainability). Members of the Amsterdam City Research panel are ‘Amsterdammers’ who regularly participate in different online surveys about varying subjects related to the city. Our sample included 1,381 individuals, of whom 20% are migrants, 53% are Dutch-born with parents also born in the Netherlands, and 24% are Dutch-born with parents born abroad. The majority of the sample is highly educated, in a rather comfortable economic situation, and aged between 35 and 64 (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Profile for majority of survey respondents. Source: MISTY Project

We first asked how the COVID-19 crisis had impacted respondents’ health, income, and social lives. Four months after the initial outbreak, almost 60% were feeling the negative effects of the pandemic in at least one of these dimensions — more than 16% had experienced negative effects on their health and almost 21% on their household incomes. COVID-19 restrictions hit their social lives in particular — 43% declared a worsening of social contacts. This confirms recent studies on the impact of the various COVID-19 measures on subjective well-being and social isolation of individuals. International migrants and second-generation migrants were the most affected in Amsterdam (Figure 2). Apart from these negative effects, there were some positive impacts: 12% of respondents reported that social contact with neighbours had improved, while 8% said that they appreciated the natural environment in their neighbourhoods more during the COVID-19 crisis.

Figure 2: Number of respondents reporting negative impacts of COVID-19 pandemic. Source: MISTY Project

Can a global health crisis affect our attitudes towards sustainability?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for researchers to study how a global health crisis affects the way people think about sustainability issues. Academic literature shows that attitudes are not stable over time. They are dependent on one’s social environment — and a change in this environment can change the way individuals think about certain social issues. In fact, major ‘shocks’ can profoundly change individual attitudes.

In our study, almost 24% of Amsterdammers reported more interest in sustainability issues compared to the start of the pandemic. When asked why, many respondents said that the pandemic had been a ‘wake-up call’, prompting the realisation that we, as global citizens, should take better care of the environment and each other:

“The crisis makes obvious both some of the ways in which our way of life is not sustainable, and the capacity we have to adapt quickly to a new environment with increased constraints.” (Male, 31 years old, first-generation migrant)

“The coronavirus has exposed in a painful way that a limit has been reached with what the earth can handle from humanity.” (Male, 52 years old, second-generation migrant)

Some individuals also mentioned that simply spending more time at home gave them more time to think about ‘larger’ societal questions such as pollution, overconsumption, and social ties in their neighbourhoods and city. Contrary to our expectations, those who were more affected by the pandemic (socially or economically) were not more likely to become more concerned with sustainability issues. Instead, higher educated individuals and those with migration backgrounds reported increasing awareness of sustainability issues. Moreover, the neighbourhoods in which people resided played a big role as well. For example, individuals residing in the centre of Amsterdam expressed more concerns compared with those living in the suburbs. Further research on this topic will have to show why this is the case.

A turning point in our views on sustainability?

Apart from expressing their fears and concerns, many Amsterdam residents also articulated their hopes that this crisis would create a turning point in our thinking on sustainability at local, national, and global levels. Whether the global health pandemic will support lasting transformations to sustainability remains to be seen. Despite reporting increasing awareness of the importance of leading sustainable lives, few respondents (on average between 5-10%) reported changing their actual behaviour since March 2020 in terms of consumption, energy use, or recycling. This shows that changing attitudes do not necessarily translate into action.

This article was first posted here as part of a United Nations University Migration Network series that explores the interrelations and acute challenges of migration, climate change, and COVID-19. As a build-up to International Migrants Day on 18 December 2020, the series examines these connections at local and global levels, highlights impacts on migrants, and provides evidence-based insights for United Nations member states, governments, and policymakers.

Lalatendu Keshari Das, reflects on the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference, which took place virtually earlier this year.

The organisation of the 2020 POLLEN conference on Contested Natures: Power, Possibility and Prefiguration came at a time of increased uncertainties and vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only forced all of us to adapt to a ‘new normal’, but has also posed important questions for researchers like us, who engage in long-term field-work-based community studies. Within the framework of the conference, in addition to the two panel discussions presented by the Transformation as Praxis: Exploring Socially Just and Transdisciplinary Pathways to Sustainability in Marginalised Environments (TAPESTRY) project, what interested me were the subtle discussions on ethics in research, particularly at a time of restricted mobility and physical distancing.

At the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, the term ‘social distancing’ came to prominence, when governments worldwide, notwithstanding their ideological differences, imposed restrictions on travel and get-togethers under the pretext of halting the forward march of the virus. ‘Social distancing’ became a way to describe this situation. However, in a country like India with its history of caste, class and religion based segregations, the term social distancing has always been used for pushing the marginalised groups to the margins. This became doubly troublesome during the pandemic, as our research participants at the Versova Koliwada, an urban fishing village, in Mumbai were not only restricted from visiting their fishing sites, but also barred from going to urban centres in the city for work. At a time when the immediate needs of the communities were at stake, convincing them about the importance of long-term sustainability goals seemed like a joke, in the first instance.

But it was no comedy. With the prolongation of the lockdowns, it dawned upon both the fishing communities and the researchers alike that COVID-19 was only one uncertainty in a number of uncertainties faced by people on the social, political, economic and ecological margins. These are also the groups who have been pushed further to the margins, both politically and economically, by the real estate, infrastructure development and financial capital-induced expansion of the city. As recent studies have shown, the city of Mumbai is one of the coastal cities in the world that’s most vulnerable to sea level rise, tropical cyclones, and consequent floods (MFF 2008: 48). It also ranks second in the world in terms of population exposure to natural hazards with low adaptive capacity.

The fear of the pandemic is real and here to stay. At the same time, the marginalisation of women fishers from the fishing economy, the increased pollution of the creeks and destruction of mangroves in Mumbai, the emerging class divisions within the fishing community (with households in salaried employment sufficiently well cushioned to withstand uncertainties over the medium term) is posing challenges to the TAPESTRY team to canvass carefully with the community in question. This is because both the community and the researchers have become well aware that COVID-19 pandemic and its fallouts are only a symptom of a bigger malice: The situation in which our development models have time and again failed to acknowledge the syncretic nature of the production of knowledge. The pandemic gives an opportunity to rethink sustainability as a political process, and to bring both the local communities and experts from outside together to articulate development and sustainability as two strands of one braid.

Lalatendu Keshari Das is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, located in the Himalayan province of Uttarakhand, India. Lalatendu’s work articulates three debates- Marxist debate on capitalist development, political subjectivity, and ecology. Through this, Lalatendu tries to understand issues pertaining to social movements, agrarian change, fisheries, and social and environmental justice. He can be reached at lkdas@hs.iitr.ac.in.

Heading photo: urbzoo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Rucha Deshmukh and Dhaval Joshi share reflections on the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference, which took place virtually earlier this year.

India is poised for a second green revolution. In this context, it is important to revisit and reflect on India’s first Green Revolution, which began in the early 1970s. The popular narrative of ‘green revolution’ typically suggests that food security was enhanced, and that it led to improved incomes and better livelihoods for millions of farming households, at the same time as ushering in an era of ‘scientific’ agriculture in the country. With this backdrop, it was interesting to attend a session on Green Revolution Epic Narratives at the POLLEN Conference. The session explored how these narratives have been shaped and re-shaped, disseminated and constructed by various actors, but most importantly by the state across three countries — Brazil, China and India.

The Green Revolution changed the agricultural scene in India. The transition from traditional agriculture and irrigation systems to high-yielding seed varieties, use of fertilizers and pesticides, and increased water input led a shift towards ‘modern’ agriculture. But how was this transformation narrated? During the POLLEN conference we heard how this story was told through a series of stamps, which were presented by Dr. Poonam Pandey, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science. We learnt how the nation perceived the idea of food security and what measures were taken to fulfil the notion of a food-secure country in their imaginations.

What does the science of modern agriculture as imbued in the Green Revolution entail, and how is it communicated? There are various avenues for the state to further its agenda. Out of the many spaces, Dr. Pandey has documented how the Indian state used stamps to construct this narrative. We often miss out on the state machinery and its use of visual symbols to depict a story – in this case, through stamps. Stamps were commonly used by people from all regions and groups, providing a good opportunity for the state to disseminate the narrative. During the Green Revolution this was done through stamps depicting a fertilizer plant, tractor, irrigation mode (bullock-based groundwater irrigation) and the inauguration of the Damodar Dam, when the then Prime Minister Nehru proclaimed ‘dams as temples of modern India’. Collectively these stamps constructed the narrative that highlighted the shifts and priorities of Indian agricultural policy at the time.

The concept of Green Revolution is powerful and it remains strong in people’s memories. It is mainly remembered for the mixed impact it had on the people: on one hand it elevated the socio-economic condition of the farmers by exposing them to the opportunities to increase their production, and on the other hand, the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers and increased groundwater abstraction degraded the condition of soil and water. This environmental degradation was exacerbated by fertilizer, pesticide and energy subsidies, and a limited focus on water management, which has since led to problems of groundwater depletion and degradation of soil quality. It should not come as a surprise that not a single stamp depicts any of the groundwater sources that are today recognized as important factor that heralded the revolution. This shows the contested nature of Green Revolution: it promised food security at the same time as putting at risk the sustainability of the resources that formed its basis. Alternative farming and agricultural production methods such as organic farming and chemical-free natural farming, also known as Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), have emerged in response to these problems. They are demonstrating alternatives to the long-term problems associated with the approach of the Green Revolution.

Today a second green revolution is being promoted, based around the narrative that the first Green Revolution was aimed at production on mass scale, while the second green revolution is about production by the masses. However, the question of managing a common pool resource like groundwater, and the need to focus on soil health, are not considered in their totality in the discussions of a second green revolution. Epic narratives may not necessarily help us build epic solutions. Understanding who is constructing, dictating and furthering a narrative is critical if sustainable transformations are sought for the future.

This blogpost documents the thoughts and opinions of Rucha Deshmukh and Dhaval Joshi, who work as researchers with Advanced Center for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM), India. Presently, Rucha Deshmukh is pursuing her Masters in Water Science and Policy from Shiv Nadar University and Dhaval Joshi is pursuing his PhD in Human Geography at School of Geosciences from University of Edinburgh.

Ranit Chatterjee, Kyoto University, reflects on the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference, which took place virtually earlier this year.

Against the backdrop of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the title of the POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) 2020 conference – Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration – was both apt and forward-looking in addressing crucial issues to adapt to the post COVID-19 era.

I was part of two specific sessions led by the “Transformation as Praxis: Exploring Socially Just and Transdisciplinary Pathways to Sustainability in Marginal Environments” (TAPESTRY) project. While current global policies on climate change, sustainable development and disaster reduction are being driven mostly from “above”, what interested me to join these sessions was to hear about the narratives from “below” and to understand how to build synergies in global policies and local actions.

The session shared ideas of interweaving traditional knowledge and lived experience with scientific evidence. Dr Shilpi Srivastava presented the contested narratives about mangrove growth in Kutch, India, linking the emerging camel milk economy to transformative actions of pastoralists (Unt Maldharis) to overcome uncertainties in the face of climate change and disasters.

The Maldharis (Rabari, Sama and Jat) are nomadic tribes in Kutch herding camels, buffaloes and other livestock. The word Maldhari comes from combining the words maal (animal stock) and dhari (owner/keeper). The Unt (camel) Maldharis are marked by their socio-cultural connections with the camels. Among them, the Fakirani Jats live mostly along the coastal area of Kutch and herd the endangered Kharai breed of camels.

The Kharai breed of camels is possibly the only breed of camels that can swim and are dependent on the mangroves. The Kharai camels are an integral part of the Jats’ socio-cultural identity. Until recently, the camel milk was consumed within the herders’ families. However, facing uncertainties of extreme weather events and the need to keep up with the rising cost of living, the herders have started to sell the camel milk, and it is slowly making its way to market. This transformation will have telling effects on the ecosystem services, socio-cultural and economic condition of the Jat community and linked communities.

It was interesting to learn about the synergistic links between the mangroves, livestock and the Maldharis in Kutch, and to hear how camel milk has been transformed from a cultural asset to an economic asset to sustain livelihoods in Kutch. I was particularly interested to hear about the care economy and increased labour burden on the women due to climate change and the emergence of the milk economy. During the discussion an interesting perspective was shared on how diversification of livelihoods can generate new risks.

Attending this session was very useful for my research, which is on disaster recovery with a special focus on livelihood recovery. I could draw parallels on transforming cultural and social assets to aid economic recovery. Furthermore, the discussion on adaptation and maladaptation, and especially on how an adaptation activity in the short-term can transform into a maladaptive activity in the longer term was an important learning for deciding any such future interventions.

Ranit Chatterjee is a JST postdoctoral fellow at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan. Trained as an Architect he has a master’s degree in Disaster Management and PhD in Environmental Management. His work focuses mainly on disaster management while cutting across architecture and heritage, governance, private sector and ecosystem services. He has worked previously with the UN agencies, national and local, local communities, private businesses and NGOs in Asia. Ranit is a recipient of Monbukagakusho Scholarship of Japan government and an IRDR young scientist fellow. He is currently an Advisory Group Member representing the young scientist in the UNDRR’s Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism (SEM) and CEM member of IUCN’s Business and Biodiversity group. Ranit is an amateur photographer with a few publications in the National Geographic.

The United Nations is 75 years old on 24 October 2020. It’s an unfortunate year to be reaching this milestone. Apart from global pandemic turmoil, there are many critical challenges including mass extinctions of languages and species, rising inequality, and climate disruptions.

Arguably now more than ever, addressing these challenges is central to the UN’s work through initiatives like the Sustainable Development Goals. However, it is difficult to deny that the UN has also often played a role in worsening the same challenges, particularly by promoting development as modernization around the world.

Under modernization, people’s diverse ways of living and knowing may be classified as ‘traditional’. They are inferiorized using representations that impute to them traits such as ‘backwardness’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘savagery’, ‘irrationality’, ‘inefficiency’, and the ‘lack of capabilities’ to innovate. Through such negative labelling ‘inferiorized’ ways of living and knowing are disqualified from what counts as progress, leaving it to be colonized by modernity.

This coloniality promotes the modern world as superior to all alternatives. Modernity is seen as being made through the singular rationality associated with its own science, technology, industrialization, transportation and communication infrastructures, standardization, individualization, and bureaucratic governance.

This hasn’t always happened without a fight. ’Inferiorized non-modern’ peoples have often refused and resisted modernity, particularly under modern European colonialism. At the same time, many colonized people also made creative use of modernizing ideas such as property rights and nationalism. In general, different regions have tried to adapt and embed modernization into their own contexts, including as part of neoliberal globalization.

Modernity that has been realized as a result takes many different forms. Alternative modernities span capitalist, socialist and communist political-economic systems. Yet they all have one thing in common: overblown imaginations of control – by culture of nature, by governments of nations, by bureaucracy of organizations, by science of reason, by industry of production, by capital of (racialized) labour, by patriarchy of genders, and by metropole of colonies.

Unfortunately, imaginations of control have been integral to the UN’s promotion of modernization as development. Yet within such overarching imaginations, the UN’s democratic ethos of listening and learning have produced some very positive results.

So, on this 75^th UN day, we commend its many achievements. Against a backdrop of severe adversity, celebrating hard-won successes can be crucial in nurturing hope. As James Baldwin observed: “the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.”

If the world in which we live offers nothing to celebrate, then hopeful visions for the future can be rather difficult to imagine. In this extended blogpost, we try to celebrate the UN, but with our own wishful excursions, to nurture hopes for pluralist sustainable futures.

We are not historians of the UN. Much has been written about its achievements. So we will keep our celebrations brief, focusing on the field of sustainable development in which the UN has been a beacon of hope since the 1970s.

Recognizing “man-made harm” at the Stockholm Conference

In 1972, the year of the founding of the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN recognized widespread “evidence of man-made harm” at the Stockholm Conference. This included the “destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources” and “dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings.”

In this recognition of “man-made harm”, a mythical singular idea of “man” was held to be responsible. Human victims and survivors were made indistinguishable from – apparently as much to blame as – the forces of modernizing development themselves. These forces have included large-scale mining; industrialization of agriculture using toxic chemicals and water-guzzling crops; high-tech weapons for modern warfare within and between nation-states; and millions of climate-disrupting motorized vehicles that burn fossil fuels.

Assigning responsibility to a general and apparently homogenous “man” lets the key culprits off the hook: the particular political-economic forces and interests that promote modernizing development, at the expense of plural alternatives rooted in the diverse ecological and technical knowledge traditions of the world.

In addition, the 1972 Conference declaration held “under-development” to be the cause of “most of the environmental problems” in poorer countries. Only in industrialized countries was it acknowledged that “environmental problems are generally related to industrialization and technological development.”

Yet the same industrialized countries were called upon to help the developing ones to “close the gap”. This kind of linear thinking about closing the gap – or ‘catching up’ – has marred developmentalism since the 19^th Century, when many European colonizers initiated their missions to ‘civilize’ the colonized. The latter were ‘inferiorized’ but considered able to climb the ladder of civilization by becoming more modern.

Critically then, despite recognizing “man-made” problems associated with modernity, the UN promoted modernization as a singular direction along which to realize development. Only the modern world was imagined as enabling desirable futures for societies. This thrust was carried into later landmark interventions by the UN for promoting sustainable development.

Saving modernity through our common future?

Consider the pathbreaking 1987 report Our Common Future (OCF), which gave sustainable development its famous intergenerational definition, with which (to its credit) most readers will be familiar: “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” OCF made crucial contributions by linking human well-being to “non-economic variables” such as “clean air and water, and the protection of natural beauty.”

Like the Stockholm Conference, OCF highlighted the unsustainability of modernizing industrialization along the lines of so-called developed countries. Yet, once again, the UN proposed to continue with modernization, based on new developments in technology and science, including transport and communication infrastructures. These positive developments were assumed to have bestowed on modern humans the “power to reconcile human affairs with natural laws”.

For example, this power was observed to allow more efficient use of resources for modern energy generation (and energy efficiency of appliances) and of technological inputs in food production. The dominant understanding of sustainable development in OCF was that of more efficient modernization: “to produce more with less.”

Overall, OCF appears to be geared towards saving the modern world, by improving the efficiency of modernizing developments for “a new era of economic growth”. But what is ‘efficiency’? It is simply a proportion between apparently given variables. If “non-economic variables” are indeed crucial for human well-being, then why not look beyond the modern world for imaginations of well-being that are not tied to the quest for economic growth?

While directions of development based on diverse traditions of well-being were marginalised in OCF, the existence of alternatives to modernization was clearly acknowledged. Many of these alternatives were also observed to be under threat by continued modernization.

For instance, vulnerable communities of “indigenous or tribal peoples” were noted as “repositories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledge and experience that links humanity with its ancient origins.” Yet these vast accumulations were excluded from shaping directions of development that would offer alternatives to modernization.

People considered ‘indigenous’ were consulted through public hearings in the process of preparing the OCF. In these hearings, representatives of ‘indigenous’ people opposed their displacement from ancestral lands in the name of development. They observed their peoples’ lack of participation in constituting plural directions of development. For example, the president of the Native Council of Canada argued that the people he represented “are the first to detect when the forests are being threatened, … the first to feel the pollution of our waters … [but] are the last to be consulted about how, when, and where developments should take place”.

Governing hope with the Sustainable Development Goals?

Rolling forward three decades, it is a very positive feature of the 2015-30 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that this time around, representatives of ‘indigenous’ and marginalized communities – and of many other groups across different countries – were consulted. Indeed, the SDGs are arguably the most comprehensive achievements of the UN in this field.

Placards with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. — Posters of the Sustainable Development Goals in Delhi, India. Photo: STEPS

With 17 goals and 169 targets, the range of issues addressed by the SDGs is truly impressive. In the preamble to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN and its member countries appear “determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path.”

The UN does not state that the world invoked in this new initiative is modernity. However, it overlooks the fact that other worlds – for example, of nomadic pastoralists or forest-dwelling Amazonians – are not the ones urgently needing a shift to ‘a sustainable and resilient path’. None of these multiple possible other worlds are seen as helping, in their own right, to constitute new directions of sustainable development.

For instance, shamanic traditions are repudiated for their esoteric ways of knowing and systems of knowledge. But pragmatic capitalism nonetheless often quietly recognises the fruits of these knowledges when it seeks to patent and profit from insights about the health benefits of many natural materials. Only when clothed in the trappings of modernity – for instance as pharmaceuticals – are these ‘nonmodern’ knowledges anonymously upheld.

Despite the best of intentions, then, the UN’s SDGs seem implicitly attached to protecting existing modernity in the name of saving the world. Just like OCF, the existence of alternatives to industrial modernization is recognized in the SDGs. But under chosen metrics, they appear ‘inferior’ as compared to a new and ostensibly sustainable modernity.

Thus, modernization is still the direction for development that is promoted. This is evident in the definition of many goals and targets, but perhaps most explicitly in Goal 7 directed at universal access to “modern energy services”. Other goals and targets promote modern information and communication technologies as enabling ‘gender equality’, ‘quality education’, ‘resilient infrastructures’, ‘sustainable industrialization’, and the overall acceleration of ‘human progress’.

Even for the goal of ending hunger, modern infrastructure, research, extension, and gene banks are promoted to “enhance agricultural productive capacity”. Within the same goal, target 2.3 calls for doubling agricultural productivity of (women and ‘indigenous’) smallholders by 2030, thereby problematizing small-scale agriculture as insufficiently productive.

Similarly, the UN’s framework of indicators for the SDGs, which includes metrics such as number of children attending formal schools or literacy rates, often score ‘indigenous’ people as lagging behind a population’s average. This again problematizes ‘indigenous’ people as deficient.

Providing the framework for this discourse of deficiencies, the UN inadvertently plays a part in the assimilation of ‘indigenous’ peoples into modernity. A modernity that is now aiming for sustainability by 2030, through the SDGs. A new form of sustainable modernization is thus pushed to the forefront for saving the world.

Central to this singular world saving itself are cutting-edge technological developments and scientific research. Yet possible adverse effects of these techno-scientific innovations are downplayed. Uncertainties are suppressed. And alternatives based on knowledges and materials of diverse practitioners such as agroecological smallholders, forest-dwellers, shamans, and nomadic pastoralists are marginalised.

Embracing many worlds

Despite centuries of disqualification and destruction of (formerly) colonized peoples’ lifeways, the earth is still home to many other worlds that have resisted assimilation into modernity. These represent the earth’s pluriverse, which may be defined as ‘a world in which many worlds fit’, using the Zapatistas’ words.

Each of these worlds is constituted by its own ways of relating between different beings, human and nonhuman. Each world produces its own languages and techniques that mediate relations between humans and with nonhumans. Through these relations, diverse knowledges are produced and practices are performed to connect and communicate across categorical divides between nature and culture. Each world is thus composed by specific ways of knowing and living.

As noted above, the globalized modern world is underpinned by control and domination of humans and nonhumans it mythologizes as inferior. In contrast, other plural worlds may be underpinned by hospitality and kinship towards those considered different. They may also approach animals and plants as beings with agency very similar to humans.

For example, consider Viveiros de Castro’s account of other worlds in Amazonia that approach animals and humans as sharing the same culture, the same soul. Animals are persons who have their own ‘spirit’ masters with capacities analogous to human shamans. There is nothing culturally distinctive about humans as a species.

Due to their shared culture, humans and animals approach their surroundings in the same way. But the things that are seen differ between humans and animals. For example, “what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; … what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house.”

Worlds in the making

Diverse ways of living and knowing, such as in Amazonia, are constituted by the worlds they are embedded in. In turn, ways of knowing and living make their worlds of a pluriverse. The plural worlds are thus continually in the making.

This making of worlds is also contingent on the situations and contexts in which we as observers of worlds are embedded. Depending on how we approach reality, what perspectives we adopt and what tools we use, a different pluriverse will be traversed by us. And no matter how comprehensive are our techniques to map the Earth’s pluriverse, our efforts will always be incomplete and imbalanced.

Thus, whilst no complete charting of the pluriverse is ever possible in any single definitive sense, each of us can definitely embrace a pluriverse beyond modernity. This is not about excluding or eradicating every constituent strand of modernity itself. That would – ironically – perpetuate the same reflex of dominating control. In a pluriverse, these strands can admit uncertainty and cultivate humility – like others – to weave and entangle in a rhizomic multiplicity of ways.

So, a country – even the earth as a whole – can appear to be a single technologically interconnected world, encompassed by modernity. But both beyond and within it, there are always other worlds to be embraced, real and possible, historical and contemporary.

To sustain these worlds of an embraced pluriverse beyond modernity, multiple ways of knowing and living need to be supported. This support is not something to be engineered or furnished by ‘modern saviours’ – or for that matter, individualised heroic saviours of any kind. Hero stories can now be left behind.

Embracing a pluriverse is a rather more humble practice, situated in distributed and convivial struggles that strive for three interrelated collective purposes:

To nurture the diversity of ways of knowing and living that make many worlds thrive in different places – by unshackling modernity from a coloniality that ‘inferiorizes’, controls and destroys other worlds, using overbearing singular ideas of ‘rationality’ or ‘efficiency’ and using racial, casteist, gendered, ethnic, religious or other hierarchically ordering categories;
To respect each of these ways of knowing and living as requiring its own webs of relations between human and nonhuman beings, which stand on their own terms (rather than as lesser versions of something else) – for instance being conditioned more by care and hospitality than by control and domination;
To acknowledge all these ways of knowing and living as contributing their own possible directions for progress towards sustainability – rather than promoting sustainable development as ‘improvement’ or assimilation through modernization.

Where a pluriverse is embraced, hope is no longer colonized by modernity. Thus can modernity itself be liberated from its own self-destructive dissonance and denial of the domination it inflicts – and the ever more futile ambitions to control that it pursues.

The challenge then, is not to ‘save the world’ in any supposedly singular categorical way. A more flourishing way for life is to embrace a pluriverse, to celebrate and nurture and interconnect the multiplicity of worlds.

Despite the many flaws and compromises – and the oppressive weight of the global hegemony in which it struggles – it is a remarkable achievement of the UN, that it can help create space for this growing pluriverse, to which a truly transformative agenda for sustainability can lead.

Photo: TNS Sofres | cc-by 2.0

Viola Prifti, Postdoctoral Researcher at HTW Berlin (IPACST project) explores the transformative potential of smart farming practices and how open data can help overcome ownership barriers.

Transformation is at the heart of agriculture. Hunting, domestication of wild crops, the Green Revolution and most recently agriculture 4.0, are all phases of agricultural evolution.

Yet our food system remains fragile, and it is clear that achieving food security for all in line with the Agenda 2030 goals demands further transformation towards sustainable agriculture.

Smart farming, which uses data-driven methods to better manage agricultural production, can help meet this aim. Using big data paired with emerging artificial intelligence technologies such as remote sensing, automatic control and yield monitoring, smart farming technologies collect, analyse and use data to allow farmers to be more efficient, profitable and environmentally friendly.

This data-driven approach can also be used to monitor and track perishable goods, and has proved its worth in dealing with transit delays caused by COVID-19 counter-measures. Smart farming tools hold potential for farmers in the Global North and South alike, as shown by the iCow social media platform from Kenya, which connects farmers with stakeholders via SMS.

Data ownership

Smart farming is characterised by a complex data system: farmers generate a wealth of raw data through their resources and personal labour; agronomy companies extract additional value from processing this data; smart farming consultants, government agencies, retail agronomists and seed companies also act as data collectors.

Given the lack of specific legislation on who owns smart farming data, ownership is defined through contracts. But farmers often lack the negotiating power and skills to advance their own interests.

While raw data cannot be owned, once it has been processed or arranged as a database, it may be given copyright protection and thereby become a controlled asset. Intellectual property rights may also apply to data and related devices, and define ownership to a certain extent.

These and other types of intellectual property rights, such as patents and trade secrets, grant exclusive rights to the owners of data-related devices. So as they no longer own the data they have produced, farmers may miss out on opportunities to capitalise on the data they have generated, which is ultimately sold back to them.

As a result, farmers have little incentive to adopt smart farming practices. To ensure it is a sustainable solution that benefits farmers alongside those gathering and analysing their data, innovations in smart farming need to be more responsible and inclusive.

Towards open data

The EU’s proposal to modernise its Common Agricultural Policy – a system of agricultural subsidies and other programmes – calls for “open, collaborative systems”. Indeed, the complex digital ecosystem required for smart farming thrives on data exchange, openness and inclusivity rather than closed proprietary systems.

A shift from data ownership to open data is already evident in EU agricultural policy through a variety of projects that support collaborative networks to access data, such as the Fispace project, which enables internet-based solutions to collaborative agri-food business networks. A similar initiative in the private sector is the Yara International and IBM partnership to create the “Open Farm & Field Data Exchange” data-sharing platform.

Yet although open collaborative platforms hold great potential for sustainable business and profitability, alone they are not enough to promote the adoption of smart farming at scale or to guarantee the protection of public interests, such as food safety or biodiversity.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed the need to build resilient and sustainable agricultural systems, but the law is still lagging behind. While developing and adapting specific laws may require more time, there is an urgent need for guidance on open smart farming data to guarantee agri-innovation and sustainability.

Private initiatives such as OpenAG Data Alliance and AGGateaway are already developing common data protocols, but the focus seems to be on crops developed by the stakeholders involved, not necessarily on the 64 most important crops for human consumption.

The role of governments in enabling partnerships and incentivising smart farming for the public good is of utmost importance now. Guided by values such as common good, inclusivity and transparency, they can set the path for a more sustainable future.

The author acknowledges that four paragraphs of this post are based on a working paper on smart farming and data ownership written in collaboration with Dr. Argyro Karanasiou.

This blog was first posted on the Farming First blog. Farming First is a partner of the International Science Council.

Header photo: marada via Flickr.