Jonathan BARTON, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
An under-researched field is the geography of ideas, or the geographies of (organic) intellectual histories. This article presents a framework for research on Geographies of Ideas, that brings together life histories, intellectual currents, and principal texts and influences, to show how ideas move over time and space, and through different epistemic communities. The idea of sustainable development is used to explore this field, in this particular case the emergence and circulation of sustainable development in Latin America, following the work of Leff, Alimonda, Escobar, Estenssoro, and others. The paper explores the ways in which hybridity - the crosscutting influences from other intellectual fields - and hegemony - the social constructions and power relations that lead to particular ideas displacing others - have created a landscape of ideas in the region during the postwar period that is diverse. Four principal lines of sustainable development thinking can be drawn out: the predominant ecological modernisation of international organisations; the eco-efficiency and communicative action theory of corporate social responsibility; the 'back to nature' environmentalism of deep ecology; and socio-ecological justice, that includes influences from Freire´s pedagogy and Gramcsi´s organic intellectuals, the liberation theology movement, Marxist-Leninism and social ecology, and indigenous cosmovisions (sumak kawsay). The research is based on 10 oral histories of key figures in Chilean alternative development, also original documentary sources from each decade from across the region. The conclusions highlight the importance of the historical political ecology of struggle over this contested social construction of development, and the need to reveal the regional diversity, hybridity and hegemony of development constructions and, critically, the geographies of their epistemic community roots.
Mots clés : geography of ideas|historical political ecology|Latin America|sustainability|sustainable development
A104259JB