How can we govern if we don’t see our feet? Speaking of the matter of sustainability transitions

Abstract

Sustainability transitions bring together many different disciplines focussing on the interrelations between the social and the material. The burgeoning field of transition studies is becoming more inter-disciplinary, less normative, less modernist in nature, and more open to both discursive and material dynamics (e.g. Bosman et al., 2018; Moss et al., 2016). Social-ecological systems thinking, already sensitive to ecological relations and vulnerabilities in their governance thinking, is similarly opening up to other disciplines, and considering the social and discursive with more care and open minds (e.g. Partelow, 2018). In geography and anthropology, a turn to the body, to materiality and to affect preceded these developments, sometimes inspired by Deleuzian theory, sometimes simply through careful observation (e.g. Davidson et al., 2013). Policy studies and planning, meanwhile, have picked up on the need to contribute to transitions and the pathways of sustainable development. The contributions to this special issue explicitly aim to contribute to these inter-disciplinary debates on governance for sustainability. They explore the integration of insights from various disciplines to regain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of material environments, both natural and humanmade, on the formation and functioning of communities, their cultures, and their governance systems. The collection aims to contribute to this collective re-balancing of theories between discursive and material by highlighting how both connect: in governance, where collectively binding decisions are made to shape, exploit and protect the environment while the wider social issues and governance are simultaneously shaped by its material substrate. Nobody wants a return to material determinism (Marxist or otherwise) which dominated anthropology for a while, nor should we be waiting for a comeback of historicist approaches to landscape design, where the landscape can dictate what is coming next. This Special Issue therefore draws on evolutionary governance theory (EGT) (Van Assche et al., 2013), together with a variety of other perspectives, and puts forward the concept ofmaterial dependencies as a useful way to connect governance, discourse, and environment. Material dependencies are effects of the material world on the functioning of governance, and the legacies they leave (Van Assche et al., 2017). These effects can be direct or indirect, as governance structures, procedures, institutions, and decisions, all of which can be framed, constrained, and enabled by natural and human-made environments and their objects and obstacles. More indirectly, the communities which develop in a particular environment, are shaped in a myriad of ways by that environment, with materially-dependent practices, values and narratives, then seeping into governance systems (Davidson et al., 2013). The key framing paper by the Guest Editors (Van Assche et al., 2022) locates the importance of materiality for any real understanding of sustainability transitions. They connect the idea of material dependency to the idea of material events. Before material dependencies develop, material events need to occur. Things happening in the environment can be observed (or not) in governance, they can have effects without being directly observed and these effects can be slow, fast, modest, and disruptive. The observation of such effects makes a difference, as it can lay the groundwork for responses, which in turn, can become part of coordinated