We do not claim, however, to provide a comprehensive review of the transformation debate within social sciences. We proceed as follows: We outline a few crucial aspects of key contributions on social-ecological transformation, starting with some statements from the official political domain. 1 These include the ongoing expansion of the unsustainable production and consumption of commodities and the accelerated use of resources at a global scale, a focus on economic growth at almost any cost and fierce world market competition, the development model of resource extractivism in Latin America and elsewhere and ‘brown’ industrialization in China, as well as rather weak sustainability politics and tendencies towards authoritarian regimes in Europe and elsewhere.
liberal capitalism) in the nineteenth century, which at the same time causes the comprehensive collapse of civilization in the 1930s, highlights the complex and highly problematic structural dynamics often ignored in most publications on social-ecological transformation. We argue that Polanyi’s understanding of the historical great transformation towards a ‘market society’ (i.e. In this paper, we aim to address and assess the scholarly and political-strategic debate on social-ecological transformation from a Polanyian perspective (Polanyi, 1922/2016, 1944/2001, 1947). The deepening of the ecological crisis during the last 25 years, the complexity and far-reaching consequences of the resulting problems, as well as the urgent need to act, are now broadly acknowledged in the transformation debate (Haberl, Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, Martinez‐Alier, & Winiwarter, 2011 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018 Leach et al., 2012 Rockström et al., 2009 Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015). However, the context has changed dramatically from the beginning of the era of sustainability concerns. It seems that discussions about transformation have a similar function as those around sustainable development had in the 1990s, putting the ecological crisis into a larger context, uniting different fields of thinking and action against business-as-usual strategies and providing a positive but benign message. However, even if there are sometimes references to Karl Polanyi, there is little engagement with his work and more recent contributions that follow him. We distinguish between three types of transformation: incremental adaptation of the current institutional systems, institutional change in favour of a new ‘green’ phase of capitalism, and a post-capitalist great transformation that implies a profound structural change of the mode of production and living.Īcknowledging the failures of incremental policies related to sustainable development and ecological modernization, the terms ‘transformation’, ‘social-ecological transformation’ or ‘great transformation’ have gained importance over the last few years.
This article claims that the current debate on social-ecological transformation can be enriched by a Polanyian understanding but also based on regulation theory. Thus, a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to contribute to a spatially and socially highly uneven green capitalism. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header ‘sustainability transformations’ or even ‘Great Transformation’. The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects.
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