Resumen de Conflicting alternatives: power and privilege in the alterity quest of sustainability-led initiatives
In recent years, researchers across the social sciences have studied a range of so-called alternative economic and political practices. Such alternatives are understood as spaces, initiatives, or organizations to which some sort of difference is attached in relation to a mainstream Other. Alternatives represent a safe place and an idea widely used to describe or inhabit something different. Alterity, in this context, refers to the spirit of building initiatives and practices, uncovering how they do things differently, and apparently more ethically, justly and sustainably than the “dominant paradigm.” Moreover, the rise of sustainability-oriented alternatives in the Global North illustrates far-reaching dynamics of changing environmental governance, particularly in relation to the growing role of civic society actors.
However, as alternatives are deployed as the new activism, the discourse of alternatives too often lacks a reflection on the meaning and significance of the proposed alternatives with critical questions - about what and whose alternatives are being widespread and accepted, for whom, how and why - remaining largely absent in public conversations and scholarship about alternatives and their speculative futures.
In this dissertation, I aim to critically examine the often celebrated alternatives-provisioning strategy for social change and the way it is articulated by sustainability-oriented alternatives to the mainstream system of consumption-production. I seek to answer the following overarching research question: What roles do power and privilege play in the construction and expansion of an alternatives-provisioning strategy for social change? Specifically, I examine questions of power and privilege within the creation, expansion and institutionalization of such initiatives and I explore their theoretical and political significance.
I explore Community-based Economies and so-called Alternative Food Networks in Europe and in the United States in three empirical studies. Throughout, I use analytical tools derived from political ecology, environmental justice and critical food studies to highlight the mutual construction of an alternative subjectivity and strategy, power, privilege and social transformation. Drawing on in-depth qualitative field-based research, the thesis addresses important conceptual and practical questions about the tensions between the resistance to hegemonic powers and the reproduction of power and privilege.
The results of the empirical studies that compose this dissertation demonstrate how an array of existing power and privilege relations are embedded in the construction and expansion of an alternatives-provisioning strategy for social change. In particular, I identify four major power and privilege dynamics across the three case studies: i. Neoliberal rationalities shape alternative subjectivities; ii. The neoliberal governance apparatus embraces the provisioning of alternatives; iii. Privileged imaginaries entangled with socio-economic and political structures construct and sustain certain alternatives; and iv. Unequal discursive power and broader power imbalances allow the thriving of privileged and biased narratives around alternatives. The results bring important insights about what social change the alternative strategy can achieve and what present constraints prevent this social change from materializing for all.
Acknowledging these results, I challenge the strategy of reading for difference, while I call for a more egalitarian and unifying strategy for social change. Such a strategy, rather than seeking artificial alternativeness for a few, would unite allies - without homogenizing - and find similarities in the effects of the current socio-economic political system among social classes and groups, putting the political efforts for social change on the spaces where the impacts of neoliberalism, racism and capitalism have profoundly concentrated.
