This document discusses the differences between "controlling transitions" and "caring transformations" when addressing issues like climate change. It argues that ideas of control are part of the problem and that controlled transition does not equal real transformation. Caring for transformation instead of control could mean culturing transformation through myriad grassroots actions that challenge power and are driven by solidarity, values and hope rather than singular theories and top-down control. True transformation is shaped by unruly diversity rather than imposed order and expertise.

1. From Controlled Transition
to Caring Transformations
some big issues for practical thinking and action
www.steps-centre.org/
www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/
www.multicriteria-mapping.org
www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/people/peoplelists/person/7513
Andy Stirling
SPRU & STEPS Centre
University of Sussex
talk for session of the ‘System Change Hive’
University of Brighton
13th February 2019

2. TRANSITIONS? TRANSFORMATIONS?
Might ideas of transformation be a main obstacle to transformation?
What if the thing to be transformed (Modernity) is a ‘cult of control’?
Might then ideas of control themselves be a big part of the problem?
Would not then ‘controlled transition’, mean no real transformation?
How about caring for transformation instead? What might that mean?

3. What’s the Problem: Modernity?
Injustice, oppression and war are perennial. What is distinctive now: Modernity?
(climate disruption, ecological destruction, resource depletion,
toxic pollution, nuclear risks, weapons of mass destruction)?
And hasn’t Modernity always been about control?
(individualism, rationality, colonialism, capitalism, science, industrialism,
nations, bureaucracy, democracy, disenchantment from tradition)?

4. Modern Stories of Control?
Fixations, fallacies and failures of control … over: private lives, political domains, modes of
production, ways of reasoning, organisational behaviours, future directions?
But outside of machines, do ideas of control actually work?
Is society more like an inanimate ‘system’… or a living, wanting, thinking, being?
Aren’t ideas of ‘systems’ needing deliberate ‘transformation’, just another fantasy of control?

5. What is Control?
But what about power? Isn’t this at least about control? Take power, make transformation?
Isn’t ‘control’ just like flying a plane: steer a turn – and this is precisely and all that happens?
But what of experience of power – “events, dear boy, events!”… “don’t let a crisis go to waste”?
Is power less like a pilot controlling direction; more like privilege surfing whatever happens?

6. How to Reorient Power?
If power is less like driving and more surfing – can we take it at face value?
Wouldn’t desperate stories about a cockpit that isn’t there, simply reinforce the lie?
Might not then efforts to steer power, simply strengthen power surfing its own way?
Perhaps the best way to transform power is to surf it, not use it – move another way?

7. The Way Forward?
Core to Modernistic control: there is no other way!
’evidence based, sound science, pro-innovation’ policies?
One-track ‘race to the future’ stories: control ‘progress’ as whatever comes out of the machine?
Space for politics is reduced to ‘how much?’, ‘how fast?’, ‘what risk?’, ‘who leads?’
Leaves questions that cannot even be imagined around: ‘which way?’, ‘who says?, ‘why?’

8. The Grand Transition?
How different is this in top-down visions of ‘sustainable’ or ‘zero carbon’ transitions?
Just like ‘one-track progress’? Yet another ‘road map’ with only one road?
Doesn’t ‘the transition’ assert the same presumptively singular self-evidently desirable future?
A technocratic ‘s-curve’ from ‘here’ to ‘there’ … a ‘trajectory’ determined before it even starts?

9. Transforming Power
Think instead about what drove the great progressive transformations of history
(by serfs, slaves, workers, colonies; oppressed races, genders, sexualities)?
… culture more than structure? … solidarity more than hierarchy?
… values more than expertise? … action more than evidence?
… unruliness more than order? … care more than control?

10. Controlling Climate Change?
Instead a cockpit view: reduces messy diversities of politics to single parameter of carbon?
‘Controlling climate change’ rather than caring for Earth’s climate – resisting its disruption?
Authoritarian rhetoric (“five years to save planet”; “no alternatives”;… “put democracy on hold”)
sets the stage for ‘planetary geoengineering’ technologies already waiting in the wings?
Instead of expert-based aims to control model-calculated planetary mean temperature,
why not directly substitute polluting activities – as in values-based environmentalism of past?

11. How to Reorient Power?
Perhaps then, transformation is less about courting power, and more about challenging control?
Culturing transformation, not controlling transition – in myriad ‘knowing doings’:
‘political judo’? ‘keep it complex’ ‘playing edge balls’?
‘use a crisis?’ ‘talk about power?’ ‘opening up expertise?’
‘Trojan horses?’ ‘rebound adversity?’ ‘civilising hypocrisy?’ ...
Less about asserting control, more about caring – for each other, the Earth, our futures?

12. Controlling Transitions Caring Transformations
Transition or Transformation?

13. Controlling Transitions
singular calculating theories
separation of knowledge then action
imposes assertively concrete categories
performances of ‘visionary leadership’
emphasises technological solutions
directed under incumbent structures
tightly disciplined top-down expertise
often driven especially by fear
Caring Transformations
plural deliberative ways of knowing
to know is to act; action shapes knowledge
recognises open-ended mutual relations
many contrasting and contested values
social innovations, cultural creativity
shaped by unruly subaltern agency
multiplicities of bottom-up movements
best motivated most by hopes
Transition or Transformation?

14. Controlling Transitions Caring Transformations
Transition or Transformation?