The Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Edited by Fausto O. Sarmiento and Larry M. Frolich

Abstract

The publisher’s policy likely determined the string of terms chosen as the book’s title instead of more clearly stating its subject matter, which is nothing less than a new conception of mountain area research. This conception is based on the Andes as a reference that shows the specificity of the relationship between global North and South. In defense of the title, one may argue that mountain regions are only a context for the concept of sustainability, but here it is the other way around: The impact of globalization, which is more visible in mountain regions than elsewhere, serves as the starting point for conceptualizing place, scale, and time. Divided into 26 chapters in 6 parts, and written by practitioners and academics, the book presupposes knowledge on sustainability. Instead of the boring 3 pillars discourse, sustainability is enriched with the discussion of scale (and its change over time) and the need for a transdisciplinary approach. The necessarily normative character of sustainability becomes visible in supporting the concerns of the global South, indigenous populations, and self-determination in the food cycle. Trade-offs are discussed, but mainly on the conceptual level, using the different aspects of scaling and framing. This is illustrated by binaries (one may also say dichotomies) concerning the actor relationships in a given social field. The binaries denote the extremes, but what really matters is the in-between: At what point are higher mortality rates ‘‘normal,’’ and at what point are they extinction, for example, of an animal or plant species? This creates the context for thinking in terms of the relationships among the stakeholders of a society. Transdisciplinarity is seen as a prerequisite for sustainability. Selecting contributions from the global North and South, the book meets the claim of bridging codified knowledge of the North and tacit knowledge of the Andes in the South. In the conceptual part I, Fausto Sarmiento (chapter 1) develops montology as critical geographical research. The concept introduces a bundle of new terminologies starting from the Andean research experience, including the interrelationships among the 3 subsystems of Andeanness (sociocultural), Andeanitude (mental imaginaries), and Andeanity (biophysical). Its value lies in the elaboration of a framework to place mountain issues with all their complexity on the international agenda. Esmeralda Guevara and Larry Frolich (chapter 2) develop a ‘‘geography of sustainability for a high-energy, urbanizing, digitalized human species’’ (p 31). This is done by means of a series of binaries (poor versus rich, North versus South, urban versus rural), not focusing on the rarely appearing extremes but on the in-between. This corresponds roughly to the various concepts of social compromises or the rapports sociaux in the French tradition of regulation studies. Bernard Debarbieux and J€ org Balsiger (chapter 3) place sustainability in a coordinate system of scale and frame. Both dimensions depend on the needs of the stakeholders involved. Scaling serves to define the level of observation or the relationship between micro and macro, which makes the problem or interest manageable to address. Framing depicts the importance of a problem, with which a consensus is to be created with society to help certain political–social concerns to achieve a breakthrough, for example, the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Both scale and frame depend on the constellations and assertiveness of the societal stakeholders. The authors emphasize that they are less and less territorially bound but belong to a multitude of transnational, overlapping networks. Helena NorbergHodge (chapter 6) discusses the constitutive role of national modes of regulation for global value chains. Societal rules of hegemonic states determine the global baselines of accumulation regimes via the global division of supply chains and the investment/disinvestment strategies of the economic actors involved. This chapter is the only one of its kind; one would have wished, additionally, for a theoretical contribution showing economic logics across timeand scale-dependent value systems. In part II (‘‘Disciplinary Development’’), Ricardo Rozzi (chapter 11) derives human cultural development from the interaction of biology and social practices, that is, materialistically, overcoming the usual generalizing ‘‘culture’’ as a black box. As ‘‘pristine nature’’ no longer exists, given early hunting–gathering societies and humans being integral to nature, one would need to go far back (to the biological separation of primates) to understand the cultural being of man. This reveals the relativity of the idea of protection: What state of the landscape does a society want to protect and on what ethical grounds? In part III (‘‘Resource Exploitation’’), Mario DonosoCorrea and Fausto Sarmiento describe urban planning in Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city at 2500 m above sea level (chapter 16). While European discourse emphasizes compacting and minimizing land consumption with ecologic–aesthetic arguments (while systematically ignoring social trade-offs), the authors highlight inner densification as one of the drivers of land speculation, increasing the cost of living for the urban poor, and ultimately driving their displacement from the city. This chapter illustrates what sustainability is about: It has to do with scales, or in other Mountain Research and Development (MRD) An international, peer-reviewed open access journal published by the International Mountain Society (IMS) www.mrd-journal.org MountainMedia