Zoom Talk
Time: 1pm-2:30pm
Date: 5 May 2023 (Friday) HKT
Speaker:
David Tyfield
Professor of Sustainable Transitions & Political Economy
Lancaster Environment Centre & Centre for Mobilities Research
Lancaster University, UK

The PRC’s high-level policy slogan of ‘Ecological civilisation’ (shengtai wenming) has achieved increasing global interest as a response to intensifying challenges of climate change and other ecological crises. Whether approving or critical, though, most such commentary is formulated within rather constrained definitions – both of ‘ecological civilisation’ as formal governmental programme of intervention, and of the ‘problem’ it is tackling as one of ecological sustainability specifically. Exploring the latter, however, as a much broader issue concerning the very definition – and possibly survival – of ‘civilisation’ opens up, in turn, a much wider purview regarding the potential significance, meaning and agencies of ‘ecological civilisation’ beyond Chinese government-sponsored policies and initiatives, including within China itself. Specifically, by taking ‘civilisation’ per se seriously, we are propelled upon profound rebasing of our concepts for analysis and strategic illumination of how humanity is currently (and could or should be) responding to the challenges of the Anthropocene, including the highly consequential actions on this front by Chinese actors. In particular, two parallel changes in view take place, which then combine into a wholesale paradigm shift, with the two elements reinforcing each other in a self-sustaining hermeneutic circle.

Prof. David Tyfield is Professor in Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at Lancaster University. His latest book is Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China: Global Crisis, Innovation and Urban Mobility (2019).