Framing the alternative: socio-political Dynamics toward sustainability

With the arrival of the xxi century the relationship between humans and nature is reaching a critical stage. At stake are the planetary liveability patterns of both human and most non-human life forms. Despite the sometimes conflicting data on the urgency of the need to rethink this relationship, there is a growing consensus that we face an unsustainable status quo (Capra 2004; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2013). As a result of this socio-ecological crisis and overall public inability to address it glocally, there has been a substantial increase, over the past decades, in the number and variety of social movements favouring sustainability, commonly self-referred to as alternatives (Barry and Quilley 2009; Alexander and Rutherford 2014). In this chapter we propose a framework of inquiry into these emergent alternatives.