UNMAKING team presents at IST 2020

Laura van Oers, Guilherme Raj, and Giuseppe Feola presented at the 11th International Sustainability Transition Conference on 18-21 August.

Laura van Oers‘s presented the paper ‘Exnovation for sustainability transitions: broadening an emerging research field with insights from political economy’ in a session on destabilization and decline in sustainability transitions. This paper advances sustainability transition scholarship by developing a political economy perspective of the concept of exnovation. The added value of a political economy perspective of exnovation is shown through an illustration of the historical ban on battery cages in The Netherlands.

Guilherme Raj discussed his ongoing literature review on the role of power in grassroots innovations for sustainability transitions. This paper identifies (i) how power has been conceptualized and researched empirically in the field; (ii) what we know about power when grassroots innovations interact with other actors and institutions involved in sustainability transitions, as well as (iii) knowledge gaps and avenues for future research.

Giuseppe Feola discussed the politics of sustainability transitions in a panel session and, with former UNMAKING team member and co-author Olga Koretskaya, presented the paper ‘(Un)making sustainability transitions beyond capitalism’. This paper applies and further develops the notion of unmaking to the case study of 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.