Mitigating the current crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation is a matter of political rather than private (consumer and corporate) agency. At the same time, private agency is also necessary for successful climate practices. For the necessary constraining and regulatory political measures to be legitimate and enduring in democratic societies, these measures cannot be in contradiction with the dominates anthropocentric ontology of human-being-in-the-world.
PACA's fundamental assumption is that to bring about meaningful change, we must replace the dominant narrative that places humanity outside of nature and treats economic growth as an endless pursuit with a new positive narrative. Thus, a post-anthropocentric ontology underpinning private actions is a prerequisite for a successful implementation of regulatory measures to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crisis. This is a fundamental social change, but the good news is that traces of this narrative is already detectable in various parts of society.
Thus, the aim of the SCC elite center PACA is to map post-anthropocentric social theory and investigate selected traces of such post-anthropocentrism in the population. Our objectives are to assess the extent to which such practices and beliefs can provide a positive narrative for a new social organization of production and consumption processes and, finally, the role of universities as mediators of the emergent post-anthropocentrism and its challenges to the nature-culture divide.