New publication: Open Societies and Ecological Challenges: Transformation to Sustainability?

As part of the collection ‘The Open Society and its Future‘ (free download here), Giuseppe Feola published a chapter titled ‘Open Societies and Ecological Challenges: Transformation to Sustainability?‘.

In this chapter, Giuseppe Feola argues that the threat posed by ecological  challenges, such as climate change, exposes the dysfunctions of our common socioeconomic perspective of open societies. This perspective represents a normative ideal as well as an empirical reality with regard to the societal institutions and practices that have contributed to environmental degradation in the first place. Therefore, in order to regenerate and sustain human as well as non-human life on this planet, one of our tasks as social scientists is to conceive of and contribute to realising societies that are socio-economically open in other ways. Social scientists should ask critical questions about the kinds of socioecological relations that we collectively wish to construct. They should also engage with civil society experiences that experiment with concrete principles and practices of other types of openness.