Rethinking Social Metabolism – Towards Decolonial Relational Ecologies in Times of Crisis

This paper rethinks the concept of social metabolism, a concept currently weighted towards aggregative ‘green’ thinking. This accounts for common problems of planetary destruction and accumulation on a world scale (Moore 2015), but does not adequately integrate ‘red’ social dimensions, inadequately accounting for differentiated burdens and vulnerabilities (Sultana 2022; 2025) and necropolitics - power relations that enable some to live, but others to die (Mbembe, 2015).

Green Marxism, materials flow analysis, and world-ecology are the leading strands of ‘green’ thinking about social metabolism. Green Marxism is the starting point, while the dialectical world-ecological concept of oikeios is fruitful for thinking about the Anthropocene as a scene of a shared global problem. However, the oikeios nevertheless remains an over-universalizing, under-differentiated ‘green’ idea.

A decolonial emancipatory rethinking of social metabolism draws on insurgent anti-colonial and decolonial ecologies (Hickel 2021; Ferdinand 2022) and emerging thinking about solidarity (Khader 2019; UNDP 2022) to overcome over-generalizing, uncritical assumptions about ecological crises as undifferentiated ‘societal-level’ problems (Fischer-Kowalski and Hütterl 1998, 120). The flip side of this over-generalization is the resort to individual therapeutic learning instead of political and social redistributions of environmental goods and harms. A more ‘social’ global metabolism points to degrowth, redistribution and reparation for past and current unjust harms, confronting the claim that current levels of resource use cannot be sustainably extended to all people globally (Fanning et al 2020).

Rethinking social metabolism requires the ‘red’ lenses of social struggle to recognise and accommodate diverse demands, counterbalancing common concerns for aggregate planetary sustainability with differentiated struggles for survival, livelihoods and dignity, loss-and-damage reparations and ecological restoration. Social metabolism involves complex, pluralistic relationalities, since a diversity of paths exist to respond to crises and bring different communities towards justice, ecological health, and sustainable transformations.