Community perceptions of sustainability

(Re)framing what matters for more just, ethical, and liveable municipalities

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21690657
AutoresKathryn Riley (0000-0003-4883-4197, University of Manitoba), M Iakovleva (0000-0002-4840-1132, University of Saskatchewan), Erin Dueck (University of Saskatchewan), Heather O’Watch (University of Regina), Margot Hurlbert (0000-0003-3825-8413, University of Regina), Candice Minott (University of Saskatchewan), Akram Mahani (University of Regina), Akram Khayatzadeh‐Mahani (0000-0003-3297-7660, University of Regina), Tanvir Ahmed (0000-0001-8421-7626, University of Saskatchewan), Michaela Lynds (0000-0003-0633-1022, University of Saskatchewan)
Año2024
Volumen29
Número3
Páginas296-316
Fecha de publicación2024-03-03
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLocal Environment (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1354-9839 • E-ISSN: 1469-6711
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13549839.2024.2306598
OpenAlexW4391291469
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas85

Municipal governments and community organisations are key stakeholders in the mobilisation of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through opportunities to make and implement sustainability policies at local levels. However, as perceptions of sustainability are normalised through globalising, colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist discourses, alternative stories of sustainability become marginalised. In response, this article positions diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting perceptions of sustainability within a relational assemblage to map the affects of difference between normalising and alternative perceptions of sustainability in local governance contexts of Saskatchewan, Canada. This article adopts cartographic and diffractive storytelling to map diverse perceptions of sustainability gathered through a series of focus groups and a Skills Forum event, as part of the Governing Sustainable Municipalities (GSM) project. By reading perceptions of sustainability through each other, economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability and diverse perceptions of sustainability from diverse stakeholders come into an entangled/differentiated relationship. As there is no central point of reference in a relational assemblage, heterogeneous perceptions of sustainability are held together through complex patternings of diverse, multiple, and often sticky, uneven knottings that dislodge hierarchical assumptions about what counts as sustainability. Providing an emplaced and situated account of perceptions of sustainability, we illustrate how municipal and organisational actors can transform through co-implicated relationships with social and material forces. To this end, assemblage thinking provides important anticolonial possibilities for sustainability policy making and implementation in the municipal sector

Community engagement · Environmental ethics · Geography · Perception · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Sustainability · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology