The anti-politics of sustainable development : environmental critique from assemblage thinking in Bolivia
Abstract
In this paper I argue that assemblage theory provides an innovative way to extend critique of sustainable development as it is being remade by the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Drawing on recent fieldwork in Bolivia, I examine the early take‐up and implementation of the SDGs in a site of intensifying resource extraction and struggles for radical development alternatives. I foreground the assemblage of institutions, discourses, landscapes, and infrastructures that are at once disciplined and held together to materialise and legitimise particular interpretations of sustainable development. This helps highlight what I term the “lost geographies” of the assemblage. Based on this analysis, I argue that the SDGs as assemblage act as a form of anti‐politics by rendering neutral and apolitical the conflictive politics of extractivism. As global momentum to combat climate crisis and environmental crisis grows, such assemblage work helps explain how powerful, extractivist development logics are nevertheless being maintained and reworked.
Citation
Hope , J 2021 , ' The anti-politics of sustainable development : environmental critique from assemblage thinking in Bolivia ' , Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , vol. 46 , no. 1 , pp. 208-222 . https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12409
Publication
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0020-2754Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: Royal Geographical Society Environment and Sustainability Grant; University of Bristol (Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellowship)Collections
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