The notion of justice in funded research on urban sustainability : performing on a postpolitical stage or staging the political?
Luger, Jonathan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Kotsila, Panagiota (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)
Anguelovski, Isabelle (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Data:	2022
Resum:	Urban sustainability has often been accused of tending mostly to its environmental and economic dimensions, neglecting or marginalising issues of justice. Simultaneously, the European Union has been increasingly funding research explicitly focused on the intersection of justice, sustainability and the city. The role of such research in furthering or jeopardising just urban sustainability objectives and outcomes so far remains underexplored. We conducted a discourse analysis on 27 selected research projects funded by the EU FP7 and Horizon 2020 schemes and which focus on the themes of urban sustainability and justice, supplemented by qualitative interviews with core researchers in those projects, to examine their potential in (re-)politicising or depoliticising urban sustainability. Our findings indicate that justice is often loosely defined through terms such as "stakeholder participation," "inclusion," or "diversity" in urban sustainability interventions, and research projects fail to pay attention to structural and historical drivers of injustice within a broader context of political economy, society and culture. We find this trend mostly in international collaborative projects that are implementation-oriented and promise to fast track inter- or trans-disciplinarity within a context of precarious research contracts and limited timescales for researchers. We build on earlier critiques of the ecological modernist character of EU research and policy priorities and contribute further by demonstrating how the academic entrepreneurial system perpetrated by EU-funded projects can undermine the politicising possibilities of research. To overcome funding constraints, we urge funders to allow for broader methods and timescales to examine and reflect on what are, or could be, just urban sustainabilities.
Ajuts:	European Commission 822357 European Commission 678034 European Commission 764908
Nota:	Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M
Nota:	Altres ajuts: Maria de Maeztu MDM-2021
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	Academic capitalism ; Depoliticisation ; Funded research ; Participation
Publicat a:	Local Environment, (August 2022) , ISSN 1469-6711

DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2022.2113867

24 p, 2.4 MB

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