Economic Crisis, Long Waves and the Sustainability Transition: An African Perspective

Mark Swilling analyzes economic crises from both a global and a more regional (global south/South African) perspective, examining sociological and technological changes from the post-WWII era into the future green economy. He notes that “a growing body of popular and academic literature has turned to long-wave theory to contextualise the crisis and predict the system dynamics of possible future trajectories of transition. While long-wave theory certainly helps to overcome the problem of seeing the crisis as a surprising accident that will soon be rectified by rational economic policy interventions, it suffers from a tendency to focus on global logics that are presumed to apply to all regions thus ignoring the specificities of regional dynamics. Both angles are needed: a sense of longer-run historical trajectories and appreciation of regional specificities.”