Commentary
Piling progress after progress: reflecting with Savranksy and Escobar on an ambitious manifesto for a better world
On June 4, the Global Justice Project (GJP) presented “a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability”.
The report is a welcomed initiative, as it contributes to opening up the public imagination of what sustainable, just and desired societies could look like. Responding to Robert Watson’s retrospective wish to ‘add more social scientists’, we bring in Escobar and Savransky to offer critical reflections on the bold proposal and to speculate on life after universal aspirations.
A short commentary by the Chair in Sustainable Transitions and Wellbeing on the recently published Global Justice Report 2026 - by Rosa Hofgärtner & Kimberley Vandenhole
In the Guardian, environmental journalist Jonathan Watts explains that the report “fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s.” One of the architects of that system and former IPCC chair, Robert Watson, once told Watts “that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists”.
So, we have good reasons to think that Robert Watson would be enchanted to learn about the SWIFFT collective and its multifarious work. In our Sustainable Transformations & Wellbeing (STW) chair, the ambition lies with bringing other perspectives and other ways of doing, thinking, and relating into the climate change debate.
Too often, bringing in the social sciences is used to mean studying (and fostering) the social acceptability of new technologies or measuring the mental health impacts of climate change on individuals – think about the increasing amount of reported climate anxiety among youngsters. Despite the potential relevance of these kinds of research, their contributions to opening up alternative possibilities or visions for just and sustainable societies tend to remain limited. In the next section we explore why.
Underlying assumptions
To get a glimpse of a part of an answer, one could look into the assumptions and desires underlying these studies. For example, when social scientists are brought in to study the social acceptability of new technologies, it often results (whether deliberately or not) in filtering out from the debate questions of power, injustices, and what ‘progress’ entails. The underlying assumption tends to be that the solution to climate change is to be found in technological innovation, and that it is all a question of persuading people to accept and adopt these innovations.
As another example, while measuring individual mental health impacts could be a necessary step in (rightly so) attracting attention to the perhaps less obvious or ‘material’ impacts of climate change, proposed ‘solutions’ tend to reinforce notions of individual responsibility and perpetuate systemic causes to climate change. Many responses, for example, are oriented towards taking away (climate) anxiety or the pain of loss and building individual ‘resilience’ so that people can go back to ‘performing well’ business as usual.
What could become possible if we try to move beyond a reductionist understanding of what the social sciences could bring?
Beyond universalism and after progress
Holding the Global Justice Report against this light, we are ‘bringing in’ Savransky (2022) and Escobar (2021) to critically reflect upon the ambitious proposal presented as pathways to a better world. As we mentioned, the reportundoubtedly advances alternative imaginations to the still dominant ecomodernist vision in which the pursuit of paid labor, economic growth, and technology-driven innovation are center staged. The manifesto already gives the notion of progress a different meaning.
Ambitiously, the report offers suggestions for “a global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of well-being for all”. Yet, we wonder whether global progress with specific aspirations that are one and the same for all societies around the world is what might be needed.
Progress presupposes improvement, but this carries a hierarchical dimension: who gets to determine what is ‘better’? This is why Savranksy (2022, p. 371) problematizes such “global, boundless and upwards trajector(ies) towards a future that, guided by a set of universal principles, will be ‘better’ than the present”. According to Savransky, this is still part of the “modern story of progress as a mode of valuation” (2022, p. 367) and therefore risks reinforcing imperial and colonial patterns that are at the root of the current multifaceted crises, which the GJP so admirably aims to address.
Similarly, Escobar (2021, p. 4) argues that “we can no longer solve modern problems solely or perhaps even primarily with the same categories that created them”. Drawing on mainly Latin American experiences, Escobar (2021, p. 9) contends that “(e)ach social group and locality will have to come up with its unique set of recommunalizing strategies, attuned to place, landscape, and diversity.” Rather than replacing one global model for another, rather than piling progress after progress, Escobar considers fostering local autonomy and self-determination a more suitable response to the current global crises, as it allows for heterogenous re-worlding practices.
What if the stake is about learning to live after universals aspirations? Could we turn global solutions for civilizational progress into something else?
Pluriverse
This surely requires new stories and political imaginations that go beyond the ideas presented in the Global Justice Report. The notion of the pluriverse offers an interesting starting point for this speculation. The pluriverse, which is inspired by the Zapatistas, represents a world in which many worlds fit (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018). Instead of forcing everyone into the same framework of progress, the pluriverse envisions a decentralized world where many ways of being, knowing and doing can coexist. In that regard, the pluriverse offers a powerful alternative to the continuous push to globalize and homogenize (and thus colonize) the notion of a common good (and thus a common ‘better’).
Fortunately, the Global Justice Platform shares that it “does not seek to close the debate” and that it sees the report as a basis to “debate, contest, and decide the course of the coming decades”. We brought in two social scientists, Savranksy and Escobar, to open up this debate. Instead of thinking about justice globally, what would happen if we opened space to rethink justice pluriversally, building a world where many dreams and conceptions of a good life fit?
References:
De la Cadena, M., & Blaser, M. (Eds.). (2018). A world of many worlds. Duke University Press.
Escobar, A. (2021). Reframing civilization (s): From critique to transitions. Globalizations, 1-18.
Savransky, M. (2022). Ecological uncivilisation: Precarious world-making after progress. The Sociological Review, 70(2), 367-384.
Authors
Rosa Hofgärtner, PhD Researcher in the Chair in Sustainable Transformations and Wellbeing
Kimberley Vandenhole, Principal Investigator in the Chair in Sustainable Transformations and Wellbeing