Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia 9European modernity effaces the role of early modern formations elsewhere, such as
China and India, in shaping modern processes. This foregrounds the longstanding
development of Asian societies not simply as varieties of a singular modernity
but as alternative articulations of modernization (Abu-Lughod 1989; Rofel 1999;
Eisenstadt 2000; Wittrock 2000; Chakrabarty 2007; Shome 2012).
In the context of environmental debates, the multiple modernities thesis opens
the way for considering how alternative forms of modernization might enable the
development of potentially “green modernities.” Frans Berkhout and colleagues
suggest (in a special journal issue on emergent socio-technical regimes in Asia
and the potential for sustainability transitions), for instance, that Asia can be seen
as the site of various “sustainability experiments” that have the potential to create
what they term “trajectories of change in emergent socio-technical regimes, and
national and regional development pathways” (Berkhout et al. 2010, p. 262).
While still framed largely within a developmental model, Berkhout et al.
put forward a kind of alternative modernity argument, suggesting that late-
industrializing Asian nations might bypass the carbon-heavy industrial phase of
development gone through by developed economies. Drawing upon the concept
of the “socio-technical regime” (and here they overlap with the concerns of social
practice theorists such as Shove and their interest in how lifestyle practices are
both enabled by and shape certain socio-technical arrangements), they suggest that
many South East Asian nations are marked by a relative fluidity in terms of regime
formation and change and are, therefore, particularly open to innovation. The
language here is rather functionalist, and there is little recognition of how existing
alternative modernities might shape and enable green innovations on the ground.
Nevertheless, Berkhout et al. point to the sustainability potentials of alternative
and innovative articulations between various social actors and technological agents
in Asian contexts—articulations that might challenge the taken-for-granted social
and technical regimes that have come to support carbon-intensive 3C lifestyles.
We claim that latecomer countries can become a source of highly novel
innovations during processes of catch-up, often through novel interactions
between traditional regime actors and regime outsiders, including new firms,
spin-offs, environmental NGOs, farmers’ cooperatives, consumer groups, etc.
This is partly because sustainability experiments create new technological,
actor and market configurations, models for which may not yet exist in
industrialised countries
(Berkhout et al. 2010, p. 262)While the Berkhout et al. focus is largely on technology and market drivers in Asia
rather than on social actors and their practices, the notion of shifting and alternative
socio-technical regimes suggests the potential for “sustainability experiments” at
the level of Asian everyday life practices to shape different ways of being modern,
that is to model green modernities for a global “community of risk” (Beck 2015).
But what exactly might a green modernity look like? And in what ways might
it challenge the normative carbon-intensive triumvirate of comfort, cleanliness,