Transforming imaginations? Multiple dimensionalities and temporalities as vital complexities in transformations to sustainability

Abstract

Through interlinked theoretical and empirical analysis, this paper explores some important but neglected questions concerning efforts to achieve sustainability. To what extents do currently dominant forms of academic study and policy visions in this field, satisfactorily address the full political depth and scope of vital complexities in pathways for emerging social transformations? Are there dangers that common simplifications in mainstream ways of thinking about transformation, inadvertently help invisibly to reproduce entrenched patterns of privilege and power that drive focal problems of unsustainability? In particular, does a ‘monothetic’ focus on circumscribed sites or sectoral formations with notionally few clear-cut dimensions of distinction before and after, risk missing more multiple and messy ‘polythetic’ dimensionalities in which power and privilege can hide? What are the implications of common assumptions that pathways for change proceed ‘monotonically’ – neatly and cumulatively in a particular direction, if real world transformations actually unfold according to more plural, undulating and unruly ‘non-monotonic’ temporalities? In order to investigate these questions, the paper employs the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to explore the constituting dimensions of contrasting understandings of ‘urban transformations’ in Kenya and ‘the nuclear renaissance’ in the UK. Q method and in-depth interpretive policy analysis are used to test patterns in relationships between imagined transformations and their unfoldings over time. The findings suggest that current mainstream approaches may indeed unduly simplify vital complexities in the ways these political dynamics play out – with potentially important practical implications.