Moving beyond the sustainability impasse: reframing global crises as societal dysfunction

There is clear evidence of continuing and dangerously high levels of socio-environmental harm in today’s world, such as widespread hunger (2 billion people experiencing food insecurity) and biodiversity loss (70 per cent reduction in the wildlife population over the last 50 years). The lack of substantive progress in dealing with these global challenges means that many of these problems have now turned into crises, dangerous tipping points where human and natural systems start to break down and collapse. This failure to bring about necessary transformative change demonstrates the inadequacy of strategies underpinned by the mainstream sustainability discourse. In this article we deliberately decentre sustainability and argue that socio-environmental harms are the consequences of a dysfunctional society. We identify the set of dominant values and assumptions that are the underlying drivers of the current dysfunctional state. Based on this diagnosis we imagine an alternative kind of society that has the central purpose of human and environmental flourishing and is organised around the core principles of dignity, justice, sufficiency and pluralism. We avoid prescription but rather outline a methodology or philosophy for systemic and structural social change based on the institutionalisation of this alternative set of healthy values or societal design principles. Our narrative offers some hope for a healthier kind of society, but history shows this can only be realised if we commit to a sustained and ongoing struggle involving political, institutional and epistemological work.