Patrick Jørgensen

My PhD project ‘The Sustainable Development of Human Praxis’ seeks to explore the possibilities for, and challenges to, counteracting global climate change through the development of local, sustainable practices. The project is funded by Innovationsfonden and in collaboration with the public utility company, Vand & Affald, who is responsible for developing climate projects according to national climate act and the target reduction of green-house emissi­on by 70 percent in 2030.

My intent is to investigate these projects as concrete attempts at addressing global crises, while taking into consideration the local environment as well as social and economic interests. My theoretical approach is rooted in the tradition of critical psychology with the concepts of common causes and conflictual cooperation serving the purpose of framing sustainable development as an inherently contradictory endeavor; how mitigating global climate, while being a unequivocal goal, in our concrete attempts at changing practice becomes a concern among other concerns, and how the involved participants approach this wicked problem of handling and integrating these contradictory concerns through economic and political deliberations. Furthermore, and following UN’s notion of sustainable development as a “redefinition of our relationship with the environment”, my ambition is to provide insight into how we in practice go about such transformations. Hereto, I wish to contribute to the ongoing and interdisciplinary engagement with developing theoretical concepts and methodological means to grasp the human-environment relationship as an interrelationship and thus the development process as, with the words of Jason W. Moore, “dialectical movements of human making environments and environments making humans.”