Sustainable Intensification in Uruguay and Eco-localization in Germany: Making a Case for Harnessing Difference

• In Event: Towards Sustainability - I: Exploring Paths for Transformative Innovation Through Renewable Energy and Waste Management

Abstract

Contrasting disparate ways of envisioning, knowing and enacting transitions towards sustainability renders the multiplicity and contingency of reified pathways visible. While differences are often understood in terms of power relations and discursive formations, this presentation explores how they unfold ‘on the ground’ and interrelate.
Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork along two dissimilar grain supply chains (rice and breadstuff), the paper tackles practices of producing and trading food and their entanglement in knowledge-driven more-than-business networks. It notices the intensive rice production sector in Uruguay on one hand and a small-scale alternative food network in Germany on the other hand, as being engaged in realizing the promise of sustainable food systems.
Rather than linking the two networks to distinct food regimes (McMichael 2009) or assigning them to opposing storylines on growth and innovation (Pesch 2018), the presentation traces the relations allocating them as facilitators of sustainable food production. Despite the limits of the enactments of both models (eco-localization and sustainable intensification), these relations of knowledge production generate thick, perseverant responsibilities (Guyer 2011), respectively. Based on this insight, the process of transition towards sustainability is viewed as in need of diplomatic practice (Stengers 2005) that explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of existing models and takes disparate, situated obligations seriously.
By (1) analyzing the relations between practices of knowledge production and the agri-food sector, and mobilizing these insights for (2) engaging with differences between models of transition towards sustainability, the paper brings together two major, yet hitherto barely connected STS discussions.

Author

• Ruzana Liburkina, Goethe-University Frankfurt