Future Material Wellbeing: A Speculative Approach to Transitioning Sustainable Societies

The contribution of this paper is a speculative model of future material wellbeing grounded in the theory of recognition. I explore wellbeing through Honneth’s (2012) concept of recognition, which emphasises how reciprocal social interactions contribute to the ethical development of individuals, promoting social justice and individual and collective wellbeing. Material wellbeing is discussed as a compound of life-qualities derived from conditions granted in the public sphere. The model evokes critical questions about existing social justice and economic systems, which may not make sense in transitions to sustainable societies; and renders possible futures in a trajectory of material wellbeing in relation to social justice. I narrate a fictional story containing familiar norms and interpretations of social setups and relate these as life-qualities elemental to the material wellbeing of future societies. In essence, I sketch an imagined social futures context, the reality of which would require governance, policies, laws, and economic distribution alternatives to today’s. My starting point is to challenge the visionary space of future sustainable societies, with a looser grip of markets-dependencies and utility-maximisation on our beliefs and attitudes, and where other possible worlds may arise from recognition and reciprocity that build social justice. The speculative model is a medium to raise questions about our relationships with reality and to project an alternative potential world, provoking us to think of our place within it. I use the sufficiency paradigm for revealing critical points in our present systems, while building on the paradigm’s ideas for reduced material outputs and increased social justice as a potential for sustainable societies.