Equality, not sufficiency! Critical theoretical perspectives on the inequality-unsustainability nexus

Attention to inequality is increasingly taking centerstage in the fight against climate change and environmental devastation. More and more scholars and activists emphasize the need to put the reduction of inequality at the core of environmental and climate politics, and more and more propose a (socially just) "sufficiency" approach and politics to do so. Just sufficiency is presented as the new desirable societal pact, tasked with taking over from the current dominant growth pact driving "excess," and replacing it with a politics of "enough," through "collectively defined self-limitation." However, an excess/enough lens misses the dynamics of production of inequality in the first place, with important political implications. This article thus seeks to contribute a tighter critical theoretical understanding of the inequality-unsustainability relation as a nexus historically powered by specific mechanisms of fossil, metabolic, as well as "green" accumulation. Through the theorization of these relations, one can better apprehend how inequality is not only a question of unfair distribution or exclusion from affluence demanding to be addressed through social and environmental justice, but also the condition for the modes of extraction and exploitation that produce and reproduce unsustainability. I argue that the counterhegemonic struggle must be waged on that terrain: putting limitations (not self-limitations) on the accumulation machine and its inequality-unsustainability nexus. This reading, which builds on critical theory and Marxist and feminist political ecology, is related to notions of class as structured not only by exploitation, but also, crucially by dispossession and status hierarchization. Adopting a nexus approach to inequality and unsustainability offers a critical theoretical method that can hopefully shift the assessments and orientations of the sufficiency movement away from the moral terrain of self-limitation (whose self?) toward the class politics of limits on capital needed today for socio-ecological transformation.