Sustainable development and environmental politics: Case studies from India and Australia

Abstract

This paper uses Castoriadis’s idea of the imaginary and Agnes Heller’s conceptualization of modernity as an interplay of the historical and technological imaginations, to examine how modernity engages with the idea of development to foster a particular vision of the future as always in progression. It uses the examples of Tasmania and Kerala, in Australia and India, respectively, as case studies which challenge the dominant perception of development as a linear and progressive ideology of growth that translates into ‘the development of productive forces and the rational mastery of nature’. The case studies also show how, despite the radically different paths through modernity, it is the same logics of modernity that are at work in both locations.