Sustaining local practices: introductory remarks

Our lifeworlds are increasingly global in the claimed new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This signifies that human and nonhuman enactors are connected by worldwide anthropogenic processes (Heikkurinen 2017). Mounting climate emissions and biodiversity loss, as well as the cumulative amount of microplastics and drug residues in drinking water, for instance, are matter-energetically real and they conjoin our practices, including discoursing (see Heikkurinen et al. 2019b).

Today, the earthbound world is shared to an extent that even many of the traditional or novel local communities aiming to dwell outside the neoliberal techno-capitalist system need to constantly struggle for their existence and many of them fail. Despite some desired climate and health benefits, even the most self-sufficient systems of provision are unable to fully escape the planetary changes the system is causing (Suomalainen et al. 2023). In the Anthropocene, local dwelling is also increasingly vulnerable to the undesired cultural influences spread throughout the globe, for example, by the commercial Internet, the colonial and Eurocentric schooling system, and the international entertainment industry shaped far away from peripheral households and communities.

A diagnosis for our time can easily be rather bleak. If the neoliberal techno-capitalist system already has a global reach and it keeps us in a tight grip, where is the place for local cultures to exist and prosper? In this special issue, we are particularly keen on understanding how the more local ways of living could be sustained (and advanced)? For us, such societies, for instance some indigenous communities, eco-villages, and municipalities around the polar circle, that manage to resist the global influences and carry on their everyday practices – and thereby sustain their unique characteristics – not only hold value in themselves but are also invaluable in the process of contributing to the cultural and more-than-human diversity.

Research on sustainability, which also seeks to secure and advance biodiversity on the planet, emphasizes structural and individualist solutions to the pressing problems of over-globalization (see e.g. Wackernagel and Rees 1996). Concerning agency for social change, for example, sustainability scholarship has consequently called for enlightened consumer and citizen behaviour and multi-level policy across sectors to steer us to sustainability (Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen 2019). Recently, however, Bonnedahl, Heikkurinen, and Paavola (2022) argued that the success of local sustainable changes is bound by the global structural distances between the individual and the consequences of their actions. In other words, as long as we can act without more direct consequences, effective change will not take place.

This Catch-22 observation of change where individuals are constrained by their structures and yet the structural changes require individuals to overcome their structures, has led the new wave of sustainability scholars to seek answers from theories of practice. Martin Heidegger, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Theodore Schatzki, for example, are philosophers stressing practice over the individualist and structuralist accounts of social change. What theorists of practice suggest is a change of our analytical focus from the individual and its structures to human doings and sayings, i.e. to follow the verbs (see Schiølin 2012). In the case of sustainability studies, this refocusing is about going from accentuating nouns to the acts of sustaining.

Another subject that has been recently developed in sustainability research is the definition of sustainability (see e.g. Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen 2019; Holland 1997). To date, perhaps the most important advancement is the distinction between the notions of weak and strong sustainability. While sustainability theorizing in its weak form does not recognize the ecological overshoot of human societies, literature on strong sustainability locates the unsustainability problem in excessive economic growth and urbanization. The line of reasoning has its base in the works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who introduced the laws of thermodynamics to economics.

It goes without saying that if the problem at hand is poorly defined the solution is likely not to be effective. In the task of problem definition, obvious challenges of sustainability sciences have been a rather one-dimensionally positivistic attitude and the consequent instrumentalization (or even ignorance) of social sciences and humanities. The science of sustainability, however, is also constrained by its heavy reliance on growth-contingent techno-capitalist arrangements. In its simplest, this means that if the economies do not grow (in terms of matter-energy throughput), the funding for sustainability science is in jeopardy.

Without suggesting that our growth-dependency significantly influences the results of sustainability research, the connection creates a delinquency by reproducing the unsustainable global system. In addition to this troublingly close relation between the theory of sustainability and the practice of unsustainability, there is an epistemological difficulty for the scholarship to arrive at locally relevant understandings of what sustainable change means. In other words, while the preceding issue is largely about that academic work generates wealth for its practitioners at the expense of others – e.g. by participating in the ecologically unequal exchange of the world (Hornborg 2021) and by contributing to the global monetary system of growth (Heikkurinen, Lozanoska, and Tosi 2019a), the epistemic issue again arises from engaging in academic practices that are detached from the place and people under investigation.

Despite the conceptual advancements and the on-going self-reflection in sustainability scholarship (see Ruuska 2024), their generic definition proposes that sustainability is a global state where the human impact on nature is within limits, not overburdening the conditions of life. The state is reached when the continuity of diverse life on the planet is secured. It is often claimed that this end can be reached by acknowledging the so-called planetary boundaries, constructions of the mainly natural scientific community, and then translating the calculated limits on human action to local contexts.

In his essay “How to Imagine a Sustainable World”, the first article of this special issue, Tim Ingold provides an alternative definition to sustainability. According to him, sustainability is not about the achievement and maintenance of a steady state but “carrying life on” (Ingold 2024, 7). He argues that instead of building on a numerical utility function and technological solutions, our theorizing should start from “everything” rather than concluding with it. In doing so, we are to realize how the world and nature – or what Ingold calls the plenum – does not reduce to numbers and tools. We will then find ourselves “wrapped in its midst” (Ingold 2024, 8), where we begin to understand sustainability from the inside.

Ingold writes:

For science this is a hard pill to swallow – increasingly hard, as science has sought to immunize itself, through the perfection of its instruments and the elaboration of its methodology, from what are perceived as distortions arising from any affective involvement of practitioners with the objects of their study. (Ingold 2024, 12)

Not only has this influenced the division of the so-called sustainability labour in societies (e.g. concerning the question on the roles of scientists vis-à-vis policy makers, business, and local communities to enact for sustainability), but a crucial consequence of sustainability experts’ withdrawal from the lifeworld is a widened gap between science and the rest of the society.

It is of high societal relevance to note that rather than being life-worldly, the increasingly neoliberal techno-capitalist sustainability science is steering both global and local societies towards a collapse as it inadequately considers the intricacies of local, communal practices. In relation to this development, also expertise has become extremely narrowly defined in the Anthropocene societies.

In the second article of this issue, “Peripheral Sustainability Expertise on Technology: An Autoethnography Amidst the Polycrisis”, Pasi Takkinen and Pasi Heikkurinen seek to bridge this cleavage between local and global ways of knowing by demonstrating the existing breadth of sustainability expertise. With an autoethnographic study on technology, the authors arrive at a continuum between different kinds of expertise on sustainability. On the one hand, there is expertise of the global kind, and then on the other hand, there is a more local one, which the authors call peripheral.

From this continuum, the authors deduce and exemplify three archetypes of sustainability expertise: the Technocrat, the Humanist, and a Spurner. Amongst their key findings is that we lose important knowledge if we limit the expertise to technological practices, agencies, and worldviews. The authors write: “Recognizing peripheral ‘grey zone’ expertise may foster such self-reflection in individual experts and in expert cultures” (Takkinen and Heikkurinen 2024, 16), which hereby – we propose – may advance sustaining the local lifeworlds in the pressures of neoliberal techno-capitalism.

The third article entitled “Disclosing the Sacred in Technological Practices for Sustainability”, is a conceptual study on the technology-mediated experiences of the sacred. Johanna Hohenthal and Toni Ruuska examine how degrees of technology (from low to high) interact with different framings of the sacred, and how these experiences relate to the unsustainability of modern cultures, including the loss of shared purpose. They find that sacred experiences in low and medium technological practices (e.g. meditative barefoot walking in a forest or small-scale farming) that interfere only moderately with the matter-energetic throughput and cherish the bonds between the human and the more-than-human in a certain locale, may have better chances of constructing a sense of overall purpose in life than the sacred experienced in intrusive high-degree technological practices. However, they note that right kinds of endosomatic and mental skills are needed to reach these sacred experiences. They conclude that in order for humankind to “accept a sustainable low technological path as its common (and sacred) goal” and to restore “societal meaningfulness from the inside”, a new transformation of the sacred might be needed – that is “the sacred as some sort of elevated relational understanding and compassion for the sake of co-existence” (Hohenthal and Ruuska 2024, 41).

The article “Learning to Relocalize: Institutional Entrepreneurs as Transformative Agents in Public Food Services” by Heini Salonen, Milla Suomalainen, and Jarkko Pyysiäinen makes the fourth contribution of this issue. In their article, by using longitudinal qualitative data collected in 2014–2023, they study institutional change in the context of food services in Northern Finland, where a municipality has successfully learned to transform their mass catering system and increase the share of local food used in municipal food services as part of strategic efforts to develop more sustainable local and regional economies. They “found that that the established logic and modus operandi of the institutional field around municipal food services was challenged by deliberate interventions enacted by clearly identifiable transformative agents” (Salonen et al. 2024, 56) who were “[e]quipped with important resources (knowledge, social contacts, and networks, skills, symbolic and cultural capital)” (Salonen et al. 2024, 56). As their main contribution, the authors show how practitioners skilfully engaged in the process of institutionalizing local food provision by bringing forth different discursive and material practices.

The final article of the special issue is an essay by Pauli Pylkkö entitled “Premodern Handcraft Skills Foster a Language which Opens an Experiential Pathway to Local Nature”. It makes a case for an inherent connection between skills and language. Pylkkö argues that it is language that holds together a local community and its practices, and the problem is that we have mostly lost the connection between our language and the local environment. According to him, skills share a structural similarity with sentences. Pylkkö writes:

Along with every extinct language a whole treasury of untranslatable meaning and unique local knowledge is lost. After the loss there exists no way to find an experiential path to the local nature and no way to live in the nature without endangering it. (Pylkkö 2024, 61)

Practitioners of traditional handcrafts are hereby focal in restoring and advancing a meaningful relation to place. Pylkkö’s conclusion is that the decline of premodern handcraft traditions necessarily distances a culture from an indispensable source of meaningfulness, and finally from a vital experiential connection with nature. He ends his text by suggesting that: “As long as the logos of traditional handcrafts are forced to hide itself because its skills decline to become enlightened, the physis of our language is doomed to atrophy” (Pylkkö 2024, 63).

This special issue will shed further (gentle candle) light on local practices with an aim to understand how locality could be sustained in an increasingly global world characterized by multiple crises. The articles will go more in more detail to discuss how the practices of imagination (Ingold, this issue), expertise (Takkinen and Heikkurinen, this issue), learning (Salonen, Suomalainen and Pyysiäinen, this issue), technology (see Hohenthal and Ruuska, this issue) and language (see Pylkkö, this issue) relate to sustainability (Ingold, this issue) connect and differ. In addition to dealing with ways to sustain the local, the articles touch on the Greek theme of techne (τέχνη).

For the ambition of sustaining local practices, the concept of techne is crucially distinct from the modern notion of technology where techne and logos (λόγος) are hardly meaningful if separated, and particularly techne is found idle in techno-capitalist societies if it does not contribute to the accumulation of global affluence (Heikkurinen and Ruuska 2021). In this issue, however, the processes of learning and being skilled and crafty, for example, are found to be meaningful practices even if they have nothing to do with science or wealth, as they carry on life. For us, like for Heidegger ([1952–1962] 1977), techne is related to poiesis (ποίησις); it is the bringing-forth by means of unconcealing practices.

The poetic style manifested itself, among other places, in the craftman’s skills for bringing things out at their best. This is an ancient practice in the culture that was already recognized in Homer’s world where Hephaestus, the craft god, brought forth shining things, and Homer’s Greeks stood in wonder before them. (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, 206)

Articles of this issue will also be attached to literatures on social practice, where actions in space-time evolve around practical understandings (including skills and know-how) rules, teleoaffective structure and general understandings (Schatzki 2006). Techne serves here as an important connector within and between practices in different locales, and affects the emergence, diffusion, and performance of practices (cf. Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). For instance, even if translations of meaning in their totality are not possible, a practice of a craftsperson from Umeå is arguably more likely to be understandable for a North Karelian craftsperson than for a banker from Oslo. Owing to the similarity in their means of bringing-forth, an enhanced readiness may be in place for sharing an experience of meaning. As Dreyfus and Kelly (2011, 208–209) remark: “The wheelwright [for instance] sees meaningful distinctions in the wood – distinctions of worth and of quality – that in no way find their source in him”. While language plays a major part in unconcealing meaning locally, the task of craftspeople “is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, 209).

This implies that some individuals are more or less competent or fluent in carrying out a practice, that is: to do something like a performance, and that such abilities competently or fluently can be recognized according to certain (more or less shared) criteria (e.g. Attewell 1990; Dreyfus 2014; Pyysiäinen et al. 2006). While the criteria for evaluating skillfulness are largely contingent on the locale, the assumption that meanings are (at least partly) already “out there” suggests that a person of a community may also find meaning across or along the locales. In other words, if meaning discloses not only from within but also from without, the practice of techne may be able to connect locales and become trans-local and/or trans-contextual. In the case of sustaining local practices, the competence and fluency of practitioners would be to bridge communities in a manner that contributes to their mutual existence. Among others, McFarlane (2009) and Bateson (2021) have made some interesting explorations in this direction.

Through the practice lens, techne appears contingent on the context at issue. It does not “lie behind the specific activities by reference to which they are defined” (Schatzki 2000, 35). For Schatzki, it would be rather about “teleologically structured familiarities, readinesses, and know-hows that underlie indefinitely flexible initiative and response” (ibid). Although techne, in different forms, is widely acknowledged as a focal element of social practices (see Bourdieu [1980] 1990; Dreyfus 1991; Schatzki 2000) – as art, skill, and craft – it has received relatively limited attention in empirical research both in sustainability studies and practice scholarship. A refocusing to techne could also open a new avenue to examining how (and where) sustainable practices emerge, transfer, mutate, and diffuse.

We also find the border between traditional and modern techne of great relevance for the study of the locale, which we broadly see as the more-than-human context in which practices take place. An integration of a non-anthropocentric notion of the locale is arguable of relevance particularly in the Anthropocene (which we would like to exit). And, after all, local practices are never limited to humans, but they inherently intertwine with biological process (see Rinkinen 2019), as well as are embedded to be parts of the ecospheric whole (which does not reduce to bios).

Based on the contributions of this volume, we find the poetic advancement of techne central for the task on sustaining local practices in the global world.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editoral Board of Acta Borealia, especially Bryan Hood and Marit Pedersen, for the opportunity to publish this theme issue in the journal. We also wish to express our gratitude to the numerous, skilled reviewers of the published articles. The authors of this issue, however, deserve the greatest kudos – thank you for your effort of excellence!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland under Grants 343277 (Skills of Self-Provisioning in Rural Communities) and 356460 (Entanglements of Multilocality and Energy Demand).