Giuseppe Feola gives Keynote talk at International Science Council

28 May 2020. Giuseppe Feola gave a keynote talk at the International Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability virtual Workshop today.

Giuseppe’s talk titled ‘The politics of (un)making sustainability transformation beyond capitalism‘, used the case of Territorio Campesino Agroalimentario in Colombia to present current developments in the theorization of the unmaking of capitalism in grassroots agri-food initiatives.

Abstract

Theorizations of sustainability transformation have foregrounded processes of creation (making) of novel socioecological arrangements, but have obscured processes of deliberate deconstruction (unmaking) of existing, unsustainable ones. Yet, with ever more compelling evidence of the un-sustainability of capitalist ‘development’, as well as of the lock-in of this economic paradigm, it is problematic to assume transformation can happen by mere addition of supposed ‘solutions’, be they technological, social, or cultural. In fact, we need to better understand whether and how the subtraction of problematic existing institutions, forms of knowledge, practices, imaginaries, and power and human-non-human relations matter in sustainability transformation in the first place. The aim of this paper is to advance theorizations of sustainability transformation by specifically disentangling processes of construction (making) and deconstruction (unmaking). To do so, the paper uses the case of a concrete, ongoing sustainability transformation, Territorio Campesino Agroalimentario: a peasant movement in Colombia that is engaged in the construction of a socio-economic model based on relational ontologies and principles of autonomy, dignity and sufficiency. The paper identifies processes of unmaking of capitalism in Territorio Campesino Agroalimentario, discusses their diversity beyond siloed paradigms or disciplines, and shows how they interplay concretely with the making of post-capitalist realities. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that political strategies for unmaking capitalism and making alternatives in sustainability transformation differ, but can be entangled in productive ways.