In Aliette K. Frank’s article, What is the story with sustainability? A narrative analysis of diverse and contested understandings, she explores eight different sustainability “stories”, both those in public and scholarly contexts, that each show to a different approach to sustainability measurement. With this, Frank attempts to provide alternatives to conventional sustainability practices and ways of thinking.
Frank conducts research through a process of narrative analysis called narrative constructivism which “critiques the processes in which knowledge of identity (place and character) is created through a first lens called ‘narrative identification’. Narrative constructivism also critiques the processes in which knowledge of time is constructed, through a second lens called ‘narrative temporalism’. Finally, narrative constructivism critiques the processes in which different identities intersect with different times, through a third lens called ‘narrative sociocriticism’”.
Through this process, she arrives at eight different sustainability stories:
Deep Ecology – “Back to nature”, ecocentric approach, a romantic philosophy
Social Ecology – Critiques human domination over nature and other humans, an anarchistic political philosophy
Eco-Feminism – Patriarchy is cause for man’s dominion over nature and women, a dialectical materialist philosophy
Environmental History and Human Geography/Ecology – How distribution of nature has changed over time, tries to overcome human/nature divide, based on ontological and epistemological differences in nature(s) and culture(s)
Political Ecology – Emphasizes the political implications of different epistemological issues resulting from interdisciplinarity in the natural and social sciences
Complex Adaptive Systems – Focus on science and technical fixes, quality vs. efficiency and functionality, what is to be sustained and for whom?
Ecological Economics – Emphasizes ecological sustainability through fair/just distribution and allocative efficiency, internalizing externalities
Business and Sustainability – More pragmatic and socially focused than Ecological Economic, includes concepts such as corporate social responsibility, ethical investing, supply chain management, social auditing, and triple bottom line
Frank then categorizes these stories through categories such as primary tradition, critique of modernism, and human-nature relationship.
This is important for our research for several reasons. First, it is easy to see how these different stories take hold in a variety of sustainability assessments. For example, while assessments like STARS and GRI show most all of these threads, their indicators tend to fall under the category of business and sustainability. The indicators for assessment are generally to provide technical and institutional reform to some pre-set ideal. However, this is not the only possibility for assessment. An institution could assess them self on the technical adaptations of Complex Adaptive Systems or rethinking their social hierarchy for Social Ecology. All of these provide other opportunities for sustainability assessment.
In addition, Frank’s methodology is useful to consider as well for our research. She is getting at a similar goal as ourselves to expand conventional sustainability thinking, and she is able to do so through narrative constructivism. By bringing into question the time, place, and other perspectives where knowledge is created, we too can provide a critical analysis of the information we collect. This method could prove useful when we conduct in-depth interviews.