Dynamic sustainabilities: technology, environment, social justice

This book discusses the practical, political and moral challenges of linking environmental sustainability with poverty reduction and social justice, and making science and technology work for the poor. It addresses emergent threats from epidemic disease, or the challenges of water scarcity in dryland India, as well as climate change, such as African farmers' needs related to seed systems and appropriate energy strategies development.

The book lays out a new pathways approach to address sustainability challenges such as these in today's dynamic world. Through an appreciation of dynamics, complexity, uncertainty, differing narratives and the values-based aims of sustainability, the pathways approach allows us to see how some approaches are dominant, even though they do not produce the desired results, and how to create successful alternative pathways of responding to the challenges we face.

As well as offering new ways of thinking about sustainability, the book also suggests a series of practical ways forward--in tools and methods, forms of political engagement, and styles of knowledge-making and communication. Throughout the book, the practicalities of the pathways approach are illustrated using four case studies: water in dryland India, agricultural seeds in Africa, responses to epidemic disease and energy systems/climate change.