Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Sustainable development,
politics and governance
Aims
This chapter explores the connections between environmental sustainability, human
agency and political participation. Some key theories, concepts and examples of
practical action will illustrate both the political importance and political implications
of sustainable development. Issues relating to ecological citizenship, the culture of
democracy, good governance and the workplace will be examined. More broadly,
the relationship between personal and societal welfare and environmental sustain-
ability will form an underlying theme of the discussions. Recognizing the increasing
importance of cities and migration, the chapter concludes with a discussion on 'the
Right to the City' and the need to combat continuing phenomena of gender inequality
and violence.
Human agency and perspective transformation
Sociologists tend to think of human agency - that is, the capacity of individuals to
act independently and make their own free choices - in terms of external circumstances
and structures. Giddens (1986) sees human beings as subject to forces beyond their
control or understanding, and able to actively work and reflect on them. In doing
this, people change the world and, in the process, themselves. Institutions, social
rules and cultural contexts influence the fabric of human social life, community,
conduct and agency. People's lives are structured by ideas, values, social habits and
routines, and discourses and technologies they experience, apply and alter. Hutchby
(2001) writes of social technologies and physical artefacts producing
affordances
,
allowing certain behaviours and actions to flourish in preference to others. Just think
what the smart phone enables people to do and how that has changed the way
people relate to each other and the wider environment. By contrast, psychologists
tend to think of human agency in terms of internal drivers or personality traits. For
sociologists Emirbayer and Miche agency can be defined as
the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environ-
ments - the temporal-relational contexts of action - which, through the interplay
of habit, imagination, and judgement, both reproduces and transforms those
structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical
situations.
(1998: 70)
