Benessaiah Karina, Eakin Hallie
Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, 21111 Lakeshore Road, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, H9X 3V9 Canada.
School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, PO Box 875502, Tempe, AZ 85287-5502 USA.
Sustain Sci. 2021;16(6):1841-1858. doi: 10.1007/s11625-021-01043-5. Epub 2021 Oct 5.
Transformations are fundamentally about agency: human intention, motivation, and power to influence and to resist. Most studies focus on deliberate system-level transformations, usually guided by a set of influential actors. However, system-level transformations may also occur as the result of the cascading effects of multiple individual transformations in response or in anticipation to various crises. Little is known about how crises foster these individual transformations, and how these may relate to different types of system-level change. This article fills this gap by looking at how crisis fosters two different types of agencies-internal and external-and how these link to individual transformations in the case of Greece's back-to-the-land movement whereby urbanites sought to reconnect with land-based livelihoods during the economic crisis (2008 onwards). The article draws on the qualitative analysis of 76 interviews of back-to-the-landers to further understand why people are going back-to-the-land (their motivations), how these relate to the concept of agency and individual transformation, and what implications might there be for system-level social-ecological transformations. This article makes three key points. First, crises create different opportunity contexts that may lead to rapid changes in what is valued in the broader social discourse. While social values and discourses are usually considered to be "deep levers" and slow to change, we found that they can rapidly shift in times of crises, challenging notions of the role of fast vs. slow variables in system transformations. Second, agency is needed to respond to crises but is also further catalyzed and enhanced through crisis; activating one's internal agency leads to personal transformations as well as collective transformations (linked to external agency), which are mutually co-constitutive. And third, systemic-level transformation emerges through multiple pathways including through the aggregation of multiple individual transformations that may lead to emergent system-level changes.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01043-5.
转型从根本上说是关于能动性的：人类的意图、动机以及影响和抵抗的力量。大多数研究关注蓄意的系统层面转型，通常由一群有影响力的行为者引导。然而，系统层面的转型也可能是多个个体转型的连锁效应的结果，这些个体转型是对各种危机的回应或预期。对于危机如何促成这些个体转型，以及这些转型如何与不同类型的系统层面变化相关，我们知之甚少。本文通过研究危机如何促成两种不同类型的能动性——内部能动性和外部能动性——以及在希腊回归土地运动的案例中这些能动性如何与个体转型相联系，填补了这一空白。在该运动中，城市居民在经济危机（2008年起）期间试图重新与基于土地的生计建立联系。本文借鉴了对76位回归土地者的访谈的定性分析，以进一步理解人们回归土地的原因（他们的动机）、这些动机如何与能动性和个体转型的概念相关，以及对系统层面的社会生态转型可能有何影响。本文提出了三个关键点。第一，危机创造了不同的机会情境，可能导致更广泛社会话语中所重视的事物迅速变化。虽然社会价值观和话语通常被视为“深层杠杆”且变化缓慢，但我们发现它们在危机时期可能迅速转变，挑战了关于快速与缓慢变量在系统转型中作用的观念。第二，应对危机需要能动性，但危机也会进一步催化和增强能动性；激活个人的内部能动性会导致个人转型以及集体转型（与外部能动性相关），它们相互构成。第三，系统层面的转型通过多种途径出现，包括通过多个个体转型的聚合，这可能导致突发的系统层面变化。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11625 - 021 - 01043 - 5获取的补充材料。
