Environment strategy: transformative changes for sustainability

8. Conclusion

Exploring and acting to achieve transformative change has never been more necessary given the inter-connected nature of social and ecological challenges facing humanity, and intensifying damage to ecologies and peoples. Transformative change has different interpretations, but they can be considered to include deeper shifts in goals, values and paradigms than previously envisioned in many sustainability efforts. A focus on such deeper shifts and how to achieve them is where hope can be found for more effective future action, which is so urgently needed. Drawing upon existing evidence and new research, it possible to think of deep leverage points as those that reimagine and redesign economies towards post-growth approaches, including higher scale global and national measures and more autonomous regeneration in places. Legal pathways, socio-cultural approaches, and rights-based and customary approaches can all be mobilised in addition to achieve deep change towards ethics of care.

Economic and financial policy lever recommendations include reimagining and redesigning economies towards post-growth and convivial relations, expanding public participation in economic decision-making, changing notions of wellbeing predicated upon over-consumption, diverse measures to tackle growth dependency and expand alternative economies, as well as changing economics research and teaching. Indirect measures such as anti-monopoly regulation to break up large corporations is also necessary. Legal and regulatory policy instrument recommendations include initiatives on rights of nature, including relational approaches and attention to the kinds of social movements required to achieve practical change. Legal support for expanded community land ownership and access, especially Indigenous customary and community ownership/access, is essential for equitable transformations. Social and cultural policy instrument recommendations include which can revitalise Indigenous cultures and learning from Indigenous Peoples, embedding the environment across education and employing relationality insights, engaging communities in building consciousness of relationality and ethics of care, place-based approaches for autonomous regeneration, radical and speculative future-making processes, relationality in sustainability research. Rights-based and customary instrument recommendations include investment in and expansion of Indigenous and Local Peoples’ human rights including customary land rights. Political participation measures include support for micro-deliberative democracies, steps to change the nature of democratic states for strong post-growth economies and consumption regimes, and rebuilding and reinvesting in inter-governmental cooperation including future-making.

Relationality thinking offers huge potential for revitalizing sustainability efforts, by challenging solely anthropocentric perspectives and expanding attention to the non-human, to how human-non-human relations are intimately entangled, and to how care can be actively circulated and amplified.