Drawing upon low impact development (LID), a radical approach to housing, livelihoods and everyday living, this article interrogates the notion of sustainability and argues for greater attention to be paid to its geographies. We wish to reconceptualise the geographies of sustainability to do five things: (i) pay close attention to ‘actually existing sustainabilities’; (ii) consider radical solutions; (iii) consider sustainability as holistic, integrating social, economic and environmental factors; (iv) be more assertively political; and (v) include a clearer consideration of scale. Drawing on a detailed case study of LID, we identify seven insights into how geographers, and others, can further shape debates about geographies of sustainability. LID emphasises flexibility, holism, engaging with questions of scale, transferability, mixed and modern approaches, and popular participation whilst acknowledging the difficulties of practising sustainability. All of this allows LID to offer valuable insights into how geographers could be considering questions of sustainability.
There has been particular interest in ‘alternative’ food over the last 10 years, with many policymakers and researchers throughout the Minority World following a growing number of consumers and producers in supporting organic farming and a host of ‘alternative’ food networks. To date, there has been a tendency for theory and policy to emerge somewhat divorced from the grounded practices and experiences of producer‐suppliers themselves within these networks. Urging a shift from ‘alternativity’ to ‘sustainability’ as a more critical and valuable tool to analyse food networks, this paper draws upon in‐depth ethnographic research with small‐scale producer‐supplier case studies in south Wales and southern Ontario. In so doing it explores often overlooked voices and stories within sustainable food discourses. Focusing on the value of farmer‐led understandings and responses, the paper highlights important implications for policymakers and consumers and outlines future research on sustainable food networks.
This article considers why price-based frameworks may be inherently unsuitable for delivering unprecedented global emissions reductions while retaining the necessary public and political support, and argues that it is time to instead draw on quantitybased mechanisms such as TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas). TEQs is a climate policy framework combining a hard cap on emissions with the use of market mechanisms to distribute quotas beneath that cap.
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