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albeit on a localised level. It is here in the local that Hornborg offers up an interesting point

relevant to the four-pillar model of sustainable development:

Rather than approach indigenous knowledge as another “resource” to be tapped,
ecological anthropology might concentrate on the socio-cultural contexts which
allow ecologically sensitive knowledge systems to evolve and persist over time.
There are reasons to believe that the best conditions for such local calibrations are
precisely when they are not being subjected to attempts at encompassment by
totalising frameworks of one kind or another. (Hornborg 1996, pp. 58-59)

On the topic of expert knowledge, Hornborg (1996, p. 48) highlights the paradox that would

be involved in incorporating such local knowledge into wider sustainability regimes. The

notion of expert scientific knowledge, he suggests is decontexual (1996, pp. 45-62). On the

one hand this position resists the notion of an overarching model for sustainability and hints

at the epistemological foundations of such a grand scheme. Thus he adds to the previous

critiques that resist such grand definitions, offering a chance to rethink the global project,

universal goals, and the definitions of culture that sustainability encompasses. However, the

classification of knowledge as contextual and decontextual is somewhat problematic for

reasons I have indicated in relation to the generation of a global/local binary. This point I

analyse further in chapter five.

The Inevitable Ordering of Things

Returning to the quagmire of an integrated version of sustainability, we can say there exist

challenges in the separation of cultural (social and economic) and natural

(environmental/ecological) realms in the first place, as well as attempts to reunite them. In

general terms the dilemma has been posed as the separation of nature and culture, and the

solution, by and large has been the breaking down and then fusion of these binaries by

seeking out alternative cosmologies. Yet there are several problems I would like to raise here

and that I will analyse further in chapter five when I look specifically at knowledge practices

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