Unpacking sustainabilities in diverse transition contexts: solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experiments in India and Thailand

It is generally accepted that the concept of sustainability is not straightforward, but is subject to ongoing ambiguities, uncertainties and contestations. Yet literature on sustainability transitions has so far only engaged in limited ways with the resulting tough questions around what sustainability means, to whom and in which contexts. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by unpacking sustainability in India and Thailand in the context of solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experimentation. Building on a database of sustainability experiments and multicriteria mapping techniques applied in two workshops, the paper concludes that sustainability transition scholarship and associated governance strategies must engage with such questions in at least three important ways. First, there is a need for extreme caution in assuming any objective status for the sustainability of innovations, and for greater reflection on the normative implications of case study choices. Second, sustainability transition scholarship and governance must engage more with the unpacking of uncertainties and diverse possible socio-technical configurations even within (apparently) singular technological fields. Third, sustainability transition scholarship must be more explicit and reflective about the specific geographical contexts within which the sustainability of experimentation is addressed

Rethinking natural resource management in Thailand

The global 'development epoch ' began with an emphasis on formal development planning in the 1950s, and it ended with the onset of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, under the political leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. It corresponds to what the World Bank calls the "second phase " of globalisation (World Bank, 2002), which were experienced in Thailand and other countries in South-East Asia. During Thailand's thirty-year "development epoch", commercial agricultural development became the backbone of economic development. Specialised agricultural sciences, working in a variety of institutions across Asia, developed widely-disseminated "Green Revolution " technologies, and growth in the agricultural sector helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent boom in export-oriented manufacturing that led economic growth from the mid-1980s. It is our aim in this article to illustrate how perceptions of environmental changes and environmental problems in Thailand have been created and deployed in this socio-political context. We argue that agricultural environments and their management have become contested domains in contemporary Thailand, but often this contestation has occurred because of narrow positions corresponding to the academic disciplines. We explore an alternative, transdisciplinary approach to knowledge creation that is more akin to the current thinking on resource management offered by critical political ecologists. Thi