From 30 March 2023, Professor James Ogude, Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, presented a keynote address at the Engaging Sustainability Workshop at the University of Tübingen.

Professor Ogude presented a paper titled “Sustainability as an Act of Environmental Justice” on the first day of the two-day hybrid workshop, that included scholars from a range of African universities, from the University of Tübingen, and from the Caribbean. The workshop aimed to “engage theoretical problems about sustainability, including how we should understand sustainability, the roles of ethics and ontology in sustainability thinking, and methodological issues in framing sustainability.”

In his presentation, Professor Ogude focused on the overlap areas where “political, ontological, epistemic, and moral issues come together” The full abstract is below.

Sustainability has gone a long political way from prudent use of forest resources of European cameralist 18th-century states to an idea of justice in the United Nations’ concept of Sustainable Development. It is not to be underestimated to have a shared – at least declared – political basis of i) a principle of intra- and intergenerational justice combined with ii) a principle of priority of the basic needs of poorest, with also iii) acknowledging the techno-environment as a limiting boundary condition. Yet at the same time, the approach rests on a partly outdated anthropocentric ethics – with a considerable exception in UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be discussed further. Also, ideas of permanent economic growth seem no longer fitting or even being the source of more unsustainability. How should and could the concept of Sustainable Development be reframed, facing challenges of non-binary philosophies of human-nature relations, more-than-human approaches to non-anthropocentric ethics, the issues of which kinds of knowledge are (not) needed to grapple with multiple crises? The paper will explore the contact zones, where political, ontological, epistemic, and moral issues come together. It will be critically discussed: Whether and how could and should fundamentally ‘new’ and iconoclastic ontologies, epistemologies, and morals be? Might rather a more pluralist mosaic of approaches to be sought, still acknowledging which common ground?

You can read more about the workshop and see the programme on the University of Tübingen website.