Abstrack:
Global ecological crisis has fostered the emergence of transformative knowledge projects, one of which is sustainability science. Examining the prospect of sustainability science as a counter-hegemonic project, this paper discusses critical junctures that involve intellectual hegemony as the formative elements of an alternative politics of knowledge production. Hegemonic knowledge relies on the supremacy of modern science in making sense of how and why contemporary ecological crises are present as they are. Mainstream understanding also converges on the managerial dimensions of the knowledge order as the feature of future humanity. Using Gramscian political ecology critics, this paper examines how the internal contradictions within the sustainability science literatures open up the recognition of the limits of such an approach by making knowledge production more inclusive and democratic. Three political aspects of knowledge production are being scrutinized. This includes accumulation (the redistributive aspects of knowledge production), domination (the power supremacy of particular knowledge over others), and resistance (the struggle to transform the mainstream and the dominant knowledge order into an alternative knowledge order). There is a need to further the critical sustainability science project in order to address more explicitly the question of power imbalances in knowledge production on the ecological crisis. The critical project is facing the complicit aspect of intellectual endeavors in sustaining the status quo associated with the industrial way of knowing at the roots of the ecological crisis. As an implication, there is a need to locate transformative knowledge at both material and ideological levels towards structural and systemic change.
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