The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World

Mark Swilling proposes that “we need to understand the dynamics of the current global polycrisis as the emergent outcome of intersections between four dimensions of transition: socio-metabolic transition, techno-economic transition, socio-technical transition and long-term global development cycles. When understood as multiple cycles that intersect concurrently and asynchronistically across these four dimensions, the emergent outcome can be understood as a deep transition” (p. 108) of import comparable to the agricultural or industrial revolutions. He then discusses possibilities for making the deep transition a just one.