Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focusses on the contribution of anthropology to contemporary interdisciplinary debates about sustainability. Practitioners of anthropology—academic and applied—are trained in allowing for multiple and critical perspectives on governance, policies, concepts  and everyday practices and they are adept in analysing a topic relationally with reference to both particular and structural factors. This makes anthropologists uniquely positioned to enter into dialogue with a diversity of ways of knowing and acting upon sustainability as both abstract discourse and concrete goals; as an agenda or a “project” (McMichael 2012), which is at once global in scope and local in its effects and materializations.

However, how, more concretely, do anthropologists analyze and contribute to the project of sustainability across diverse settings? How does a discipline marked by a distinct focus on humans in their concrete environments deal with the systemic qualities often implied in ideas about sustainability? How does anthropology’s propensity for studying things that do not add up to coherent and fixed wholes play into other disciplines’ approaches to sustainability that might rely on things like indicators, factors, assessment tools, numbers, etc.? How can anthropology maintain its critical stance towards managerial and technological fixes and processes of dispossession, while still contributing to a perceived global good and maintaining a productive dialogue with those in power?

With this Special Issue, we invite contributions that can help us explore questions such as these and thereby investigate the unique and constructive contribution of anthropology to understand how sustainability “lives” and “works” in a number of concrete contexts of any scale and type. Rather than approaching sustainability as a discrete thing or even a defined end goal, we seek articles that explore how sustainability is and can be employed as a means of foregrounding or downplaying particular relations between people, societies and environments. We specifically invite contributions that bring such relational insights to bear on work on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, green transition of societies and sustainable innovation processes.

Recent literature on the relationship between anthropology and sustainability has focused on a) anthropology’s ability to understand the concept in relation to concrete locations and practices, thus exploring how sustainability discourse is or is not compatible with everyday life in different communities with diverse needs and cultural frames of reference for quality of life (Maida 2007; Brightman and Lewis 2017), b) anthropology’s potential for dialogue with other disciplines in developing sustainability in science, policy-making, planning and rural and urban development relating to the environment (Murphy and McDonagh 2016; Dove and Kammen 2015) and c) critically assessing the discourse of sustainability itself (Brightman and Lewis 2017).

The proposed volume will build upon the above. However, our aim is also to combine these foci in an effort to generate a robust anthropological take on sustainability that brings together local level practicalities, technological innovation, national policy-making, planning and global aspirations. Indeed, one anthropological tenet would be to approach these levels not as sustainability in different sizes or spheres, but as part of what structures our being in the world. As such, this special issue will contribute to a much-needed qualification of sustainability as a “total social project: that does real and urgent work in the world, but which is not easily parceled out into distinct indicators, scalable units, ecosystems, life cycles or named universal goals.

Dr. Steffen Dalsgaard
Dr. Frida Hastrup
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• anthropology
• practice
• development
• interdisciplinarity