Towards ‘just sustainability’ - Grassroots initiatives to merge social and environmental justice

In the face of multiple and overlapping global crises, demonstrated by an intricate blending of socio-ecological problems, JUSTAINABILITY focuses on grassroots organizations and local communities worldwide, who resist contamination, expropriation, and exploitation while experimenting with alternative sustainabilities. Those experiences have contributed to an accumulation of transformative knowledge that allows us to understand and react to the multiple crises in different ways. Strengthened both with academic and practitioner partners in 8 countries (Brazil, India, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden and Turkey), JUSTAINABILITY aims (a) to recover and understand the envisioned alternative sustainabilites, (b) to catalyze the interaction of their proponents, and (c) to legitimize and incorporate grassroots knowledge and experiences in the collective search for transformations to sustainability.

Ultimately, this project aims to profoundly change the concept of sustainability to champion issues of socio-ecological justice. We plan to accomplish this objective by creating pathways through which knowledge/experience produced in environmental justice struggles can be communicated to achieve sustainable public policies and by demonstrating how grassroots solutions to socio-ecological problems work, and how they can be scaled up and applied to different contexts.

Funding agency: International Social Science Council

Duration: Seed grant, 2014-2015