[In] Conclusions

by Peter Doran

Ireland can occupy a special role in movements towards a pluriversal response to calls for Wellbeing Economies and Just Transitions[1], including solidarity with movements linking decolonial politics with the positing of Buen Vivir and related notions of wellbeing based on a profound shift to relational ontologies (“ways of being in the world”). 

Ireland has always been between stories….a place “in between” where histories of colonialism have partitioned memory, language, ecology and territory but only up to a point. Just transitions on the island of Ireland can embrace not only our socio-ecological crisis but afford opportunities for re-im- agining ways of belonging across the island. 

There are already signs of an emergence of pluriversal politics on the island, with the recent irruption of demands for a relational turn in our recognition of Rights of Nature. It is interesting to note that these early calls for a pluriversal politics have emerged in the borderlands of Donegal and Derry. Local authorities in Derry and Donegal, among others, have embarked on public consultations on what a Rights of Nature approach would mean for their local policies. The Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss in the Republic of Ireland has received a number of expert submissions also calling for a recognition of Rights of Nature as an appropriate response to the biodiversity crisis, including calls for an amendment to the Irish Constitution.[2]  The Assembly’s call for a constitutional referendum on the Rights of Nature has been repeated by the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action. 

• Wellbeing in the context of pluriversal politics is a call to human / non-human conviviality. According to this approach, Buen Vivir, for example, is not solely a political alternative for redistributing economic resources or providing a more sustainable and cleaner environment, but also a proposal to open up life to a cosmos of worlds that would be intra-connected through respect, a proposal for a politics that, rather than requiring sameness, would be underpinned by new departures, to the far side of difference. 

• Buen Vivir, in the context of the wellbeing economy policy debate in Ireland, is a call for a solidarity with social movements posing alternative responses to the modern challenges of climate change and ecological breakdown, in ways that respond to the claim that solutions couched in modern epistemologies and ontologies cannot produce answers to the problems that modernity-as-closure has presented. This is the observation at the heart of Akomolafe’s call for a postactivism. The wellbeing economy policy debate must become an invitation to think otherwise; to bring something new into our world. For this reason, wellbeing and transition discourses share something profoundly in common with the work of art and cultural creativity.

 • This is not solely a response to the urgent contemporary need to find dialogues, convivial well-living, and understanding between increasingly polarised ideological extremes, but also to the modern yearning for connectedness with oneself (as reflected in some forms of radical mindfulness, where questions of power, oppression, gender and race are not set aside), other human beings, and earth beings. There is a deep longing for a renewed life of interiority, even the contemplative, as we increasingly encounter the fact that the physical exhaustion of the earth’s capacities and boundaries has an index in our experi- ences of mental exhaustion, which shows up in epidemics of tiredness, depression and addiction in response to disconnection. Wellbeing in the register of the pluriverse is a call to reconnection and entanglement that includes a mindful embrace of the re-enchantment of life as we cultivate a return to our senses and with the sensorial.

If our reception of wellbeing narratives in policy deliberations does not herald a disruption of the dominant stories that silence and subjugate the strange and unfamiliar landscapes of the pluriverse, we must look again. Let the wellbeing economy and its Community of Practice become an invitation to render the familiar unfamiliar in the anticipation of the unexpected. There are contemporary cultural and political narratives and openings that have already disturbed what was once thought to be the stable languages and practices of our post-colonial landscapes.

1. Ireland is confronting calls for two just transitions: one is the familiar transition to a new socio-ecological order; the second, convergent transition, refers to the prospect of constitutional change on the island under the terms of the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement. These transitions and narratives will, ultimately, converge and inform one another.

2. See the Peter Doran et al. (2022), Rights of Nature submission to the Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss submitted by the Environmental Justice Network Ireland, available here: www.ejni.net