The context of ‘thinking space relationally’

The narrative that I present in this section is the step-by-step shift in the conceptualisation of space from ‘absolute’ to ‘relative’, then ‘relational’ conditions. This is a large task to undertake in the limited space available. The absolute (or substantivalist) versus relative debate is well known – it forms the backdrop to geography, aspects of the social sciences dealing with space more broadly, and its evolution over the last century (compare Harvey, Reference Harvey1969; Jones, Reference Jones2009; Sack, Reference Sack1980; Sheppard, Reference Sheppard, Castree and Gregory2006; Smith, Reference Smith1984; 2004). Both approaches are variously concerned with topography. Absolute space is a condition in which space exists independently of any object(s) or relations: space is a discrete and autonomous container. Approaches such as Kant’s transcendental idealism see space as ‘a kind of framework for things and events: something like a system of pigeon holes, or a filing system for observations’ (Popper, Reference Popper1963, p. 179, cited in Harvey, Reference Harvey1969, p. 207). The job of geography here is to fill containers or pigeonholes with information, through techniques such as cartography and by prescribing categories for data collection and analysis. Callon and Law call this the ‘romantic’ approach, which assumes things in space have analytical fixity and complete affinity to their spatial reference point such that ‘distance and scale can be determined without ambiguity: we know who is big and what is small, and who is close to whom’ (2004, p. 3). Pre-1950s regional geography concerns with delimiting natural, climatic and later human regions best illustrates this. The preoccupation with environmental determinism and agency-free landscapes, though, highlights the weaknesses of this approach (see Jones, Reference Jones2009).

Pitched against this is relative space, which rests on two assumptions. First, space can be defined only in relation to the object(s) and/or processes being considered in space and time. Second, there is no defined or fixed relationship for locating things under consideration: a non-Euclidean perspective is adopted, where distance/relationships are relative and change over time and across space. Space, and also time, have ‘positional quality’ as Jammer (Reference Jammer1954) puts it. In turn, the traditional three dimensions of space, plus a separate one for time, are merged into a single unified ‘spacetime’, as Einstein puts it, with four dimensions. A point in space thus becomes an event or moment in spacetime. In geography, it was in this vein that Nystuen advocated a new ‘geographical point of view’ based on five key concepts: ‘direction or orientation, distance, and connection or relative position’ (Nystuen, Reference Nystuen1963, p. 384, emphasis original). The followers of regional science pushed this a stage further by making direct links with Einstein’s general relativity theory. Isard argued that regional science ‘must adopt a four-dimensional space-time continuum and speak of world lines (world helices, etc.) of behaving units and institutions [and] probe deeply the gravitational interaction among social masses, as well as the impact of accelerating masses upon other masses’ (1972, p. 151). Gregory has aptly noted this period as being one of undertaking ‘social physics in a spatial context’ (1978, p. 73).

As with absolute space, relative approaches to space have had limits, which partially explain why human geography is adopting a ‘thinking space relationally’ approach. First, drawing on Grünbaum’s (1963, p. 421) ‘intrinsic metrical amorphousness of space’ thesis, Harvey predicted that the ‘empirical problem’ that relativistic geography would ultimately face was to select a geometry to deal with the ‘complexities of fields and forces’, i.e. what is the source and structure of spacetime and what are the bounded or ‘boundary conditions’ that permit certain activities and relations to take place (Harvey Reference Harvey1969, pp. 196, 209). In philosophy, Whitehead’s writings tackled this conundrum by using process thought to capture the roles of ‘events as active conditions in the ingression of sense-objects into nature’ (1920, p. 158). He continued:

In this context, relational thinking is a paradigmatic departure from the concerns of absolute and relative space, because it dissolves the boundaries between objects and space, and rejects forms of spatial totality. Space does not exist as an entity in and of itself, over and above material objects and their spatiotemporal relations and extensions. In short, objects are space, space is objects, and moreover objects can be understood only in relation to other objects – with all this being a perpetual becoming of heterogeneous networks and events that connect internal spatiotemporal relations (compare Dainton, Reference Dainton2001; Massey, Reference Massey2005; Mol and Law, Reference Mol and Law1994). As Sklar puts it:

Relational thinking in spacetime philosophies originated with the work of Leibniz in non-Euclidean geometry and calculus, which critiqued (absolute) substantivalist theories for not analysing fluid dynamics, i.e. motion within and between objects, and for playing down the ‘inner principles’ of existence. In Shaw’s discussions of Leibniz’s Monadology (the text broadly covering the metaphysics of things) it is suggested that: ‘One Monad is said to act upon another and thus to be more perfect when its state explains the state of the other. They are only said to act upon each other. In reality, each Monad unfolds its series of changes from its own inner principle, and in conformity with the development of every other Monad’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw1954, p. 34, emphasis original). Elements of this thinking have been picked up and extended by Whitehead (see above) and in turn critiqued in the work of Russell (Reference Russell1937).

Relationalism, geography, and beyond

Before I discuss ‘thinking space relationally’ as a distinctive turn in the social sciences, I must acknowledge that its antecedents can be located in Harvey’s work on spaces of historical materialism, the limited malleability of space thereafter, and later discussions on permanence and dialectics (see Harvey, Reference Harvey, Castree and Gregory2006). And, outside geography, Dainton (Reference Dainton2001) has clearly documented the various twists and turns in how relational thinking has morphed, and we should always be wary of treating this body of thought as a homogenous concern. As Earman notes, ‘there are almost as many versions of relationism as there are relationists’ (1989, p. 12) and ‘[t]o defeat one tribe of relationists…is not to vanquish the whole nation’ (Maudlin, Reference Maudlin1993, p. 187).

In the 1990s with social constructionism and post-structuralism (compare Doel, Reference Doel1999; Harari, 1979), and the displacement of topography with topological thinking and its notions of pleats and folds (see Deleuze, Reference Deleuze1993; Deleuze and Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1983; 1988; Serres and Latour, Reference Serres and Latour1995), more recent relational brands have become embedded in the social sciences and human geography through science and technology writings (Latour, Reference Latour1988; 1993; Law and Mol, Reference Law and Mol2001), human/non-human–nature hybridities (Whatmore, Reference Whatmore2002), accounts based in actor network theory (Hetherington and Law, Reference Hetherington and Law2000; Latour, Reference Latour2005; Thrift, Reference Thrift1996; 2005; 2008), world-city networks and topologies (Smith, Reference Smith2003a; 2003b), cities more generally (Amin and Thrift, Reference Amin and Thrift2002), research on mobile objects (Laurier and Philo, Reference Laurier and Philo2003), Bergson-inspired approaches to the nature of time (compare Deleuze, Reference Deleuze1988; Massey, Reference Massey2005; Prigogine, Reference Prigogine1997), discussions on political subjectivities and identity (Mouffe, Reference Mouffe1993; 1995), new theories of local and regional development (Amin, Reference Amin2004a; 2004b; Storper, Reference Storper1997), critiques of scale (Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005; Jones, Woodward and Marston, 2007)…the list goes on. In short, the spatial project for relational thinkers is to replace topography and structure–agency dichotomies with a topological theory of space, place and politics as encountered, performed and fluid. For Latour (Reference Latour1988), this is ‘infra-physics’, which replaces systems of coordinates (Einstein, etc.) with ‘activities’ for ‘framing’ space. For Callon and Law, and following Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1993), this signifies a ‘baroque’ position in the social sciences, which insists: ‘there is no distinction between the individual and his or her environment; that many, perhaps most, relations remain implicit; that entities are made out of a myriad of heterogeneous entities; that these in turn are made out of an infinity of other entities, and so on’ (Callon and Law, Reference Callon and Law2004, p. 7).

‘Thinking space relationally’ is a hugely empowering perspective. It suggests that space and its orders are always open such that ‘the local is an achievement in which a place is localised by other places and accepts “localisation” itself. But this means that no place is closed off’ (Callon and Law, Reference Callon and Law2004, p. 6). Advocates suggest that the conditions of economic circulation, hyper mobility, time–space compression and cultural insignia warrant a completely new conceptualisation of space. For Thrift, ‘[s]pace is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from “global” to “local”. This absurd scale-dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what counts is connectivity’ (2004, p. 59, emphasis added). This squares with writings in philosophy, where relationists ‘only recognize the material bodies and the spatial relations between material [and] are committed to the non-existence of unoccupied places and regions’ (Dainton, Reference Dainton2001, p. 143, emphasis original).

Relational thinking, the region and limits

Relational space, certainly that brand used in human geography, is heavily normative and it has been used to make arguments about an unbounded politics and a non-territorial form of policy-making and policy delivery. Applying this to ‘the region’ – one of the core concepts in human geography that relational approaches have sought forcefully to redefine, and more broadly an ongoing battleground for redefining the discipline (Jonas, Reference Jonas2006) – Massey and colleagues, for instance, propose that ‘an adequate understanding of the region and its futures can only come through a conception of places as open, discontinuous, relational and internally diverse’ (Allen, Massey and Cochrane, Reference Allen, Massey and Cochrane1998, p. 143; see also Massey, Reference Massey1994, pp. 152–55) and ‘thinking “a region” in terms of social relations stretched out reveals, not an “area”, but a complex and unbounded lattice of articulations’ (Allen et al., 1998, p. 65). Drawing on London – ‘only because it came to mind first, not because it is any more relationally constituted than any other place’ (Amin, Reference Amin2004a, p. 34) – Amin adds that cities and regions should be seen as places ‘without prescribed and proscribed boundaries’ (p. 34, emphasis original) and conceptualised as:

Bringing both perspectives together, Amin, Massey and Thrift (Reference Amin, Massey and Thrift2003) propose a ‘relational grammar of politics’ to challenge the contemporary state-driven territorial management practices of devolution and constitutional change (in the UK). This advocates: dispersing some of the political/policy forms and functions of capital/global cities into provincial regions by using mobile and travelling political performances; creating alliances between places/regions to foster ‘external connectivity’; and nurturing a ‘cosmopolitan regionalism’ that replaces regional identities, and their deemed-to-be parochial senses of belonging (a ‘politics of territorial confinement’), with a ‘politics of local and translocal engagement’. This last is a distinctly non-territorial project because performing/performed politics takes place in and across territory, as opposed to being a politics of territory, and this harnesses an important practice of democracy in a relational world (Amin and Thrift, Reference Amin and Thrift2002; Massey, Reference Massey2005).

As noted by Jones and MacLeod (Reference Jones and Macleod2004; MacLeod and Jones, Reference Macleod, Jones, Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinge2006; 2007), given that all territories are mutually constitutive and reflective of dynamic social, economic and political action (Paasi, Reference Paasi1996; 2003a; 2003b) the relational programme has considerable appeal. Moreover, given the prominence of global spaces and networks of flows, it is reasonable to claim that economic and cultural geographies will increasingly be imagined and performed in and through an intricate geometry of trans-border (though never placeless) networks (Amin, Reference Amin2002; 2004a; 2004b). A relational approach to space and place, then, would seem a promising theoretical avenue to explore the contemporary mobile world and its circuits of commodities, people and ideas. Nonetheless, the advocates of ‘thinking space relationally’ seriously overstate their case. Despite the multiple potentials of space flagged in relational thinking, factors can constrain and structure space. All things considered, ‘potential’ does not necessarily become ‘an actual’ (see Messina and Rutherford, Reference Messina and Rutherford2009). This needs to be considered more carefully by relational advocates, as do issues of connection.

First, while Massey (Reference Massey1994; 2007), Allen et al. (1998) and Amin (Reference Amin2004a) present a convincing case of London/the southeast as a region of relational topologies vis-à-vis various maps of transregional and transnational economic flows and interchange, this is only part of this region’s ‘story’, and of a unique (English) region at that, given its long-established international networks. Other regions and places for that matter might lend their weight to different theoretical perspectives and also perform more conventional territory-based political, economic and cultural strategies – a point conceded in later work by Allen and Cochrane (Reference Allen and Cochrane2007). The obvious danger of translating uniqueness into one-region-tells-all scenarios is certainly an issue for relational thinkers to critically consider.

Second, Cochrane points out that relational thinking implies openness that often belies the lived-experience of many. Contextual forces within advanced capitalism (such as class, race and gender) are considered important for framing and allowing certain possibilities and opportunities to exist (Cochrane, Reference Cochrane, Imrie and Raco2003). To ignore this runs the risk of lapsing into spatial voluntarism. In economic geography, Allen makes similar arguments, drawing our attention to the importance of power relations and actor-specific practices in the making of relational economic spaces (Allen, Reference Allen2004).

Concerns with the spatial relations of permanence (material and discursive) follow from this, concerns with which relational thinkers seem uncomfortable. Work on regions and identity, for instance, has pointed out that many everyday realpolitik acts of regionalisation and/or regionalism – as, for instance, in state forces classifying a region as a ‘problem’ or local activists campaigning for devolved government and cultural rights – often distinguish a pre-existing or aspirant spatial scale or territorially articulated space of dependence through which to conduct their actually existing politics of engagement. In other words, when performing their practical politics, agents imagine and identify a discrete, bounded space characterised by a shared understanding of the opportunities or problems that are motivating the very nature of political action (Jones and MacLeod, Reference Jones and Macleod2004; MacLeod and Jones, Reference Macleod and Jones2007; also Tomaney, Reference Tomaney2007). However, for Amin we should not assume:

This statement does not pay sufficient attention to how regions are being constructed and mobilised in and through territorially defined political, socioeconomic and cultural strategies. On this, much of the political challenge to devolution prevailing across Europe and elsewhere is being practised and performed through an avowedly territorial narrative and scalar ontology (Jones, Reference Jones2004; Paasi, Reference Paasi1996; 2002a; Painter, Reference Painter2008): albeit often enacted through topologically heterogeneous transregional and cross-border networks of ‘fluidity’ and circulation. An example of this is the approach taken by the European Commission to regions, which are perceived to be ‘the basis for Europe’s cultural wealth and a point of identification for the citizens. [Regions] are a source of economic growth and social welfare’ (Hüber, Reference Hüber2008, p. 1). The European regional map of various territorial and territorialised units, which is used to deliver Directorate General funded Regional Policy, is being continually produced and reproduced through stretched-out and heterogeneous social and political territorial relations involving actors in individual demarcated territorial spaces and also their networked and relational representatives in places such as Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg (see Keating, Reference Keating1998).

Contrary to the beliefs of relational approaches to space, then, mobility and fluidity should not be seen as standing in opposition to territories and we should, therefore, not be forced to adopt a ‘networks versus territories’ scenario. On the one hand, networks should not be seen as non-spatial and without ‘geographical anchors’ – a much forgotten point made by Haggett and Chorley (Reference Haggett and Chorley1969) – and on the other hand, territories and scales should not be viewed as closed and static (Bulkeley, Reference Bulkeley2005; Dicken, Kelly, Olds and Yeung, 2001; Hudson, Reference Hudson2007; Jessop, Brenner and Jones, Reference Jessop, Brenner and Jones2008; Leitner, Pavlik and Sheppard, Reference Leitner, Pavlik, Sheppard, Herod and Wright2002; 2008; Leitner and Miller, Reference Leitner and Miller2007; MacLeod and Jones, Reference Macleod and Jones2007).

This behoves us to make analytical distinctions between ‘territory’ (appropriated enacted space), ‘territoriality’ (the sum of relations between subjects therein) and ‘territorialisation’ (the process through which these relations are established) – see Raffestein (Reference Raffestein1986, cited in Philo and Södertström, Reference Philo, Södertström, Benko and Strohmayer2004). Relational thinkers appear to create a crude caricature, whereby all non-relational thinking is conveniently displaced into notions of static space and deemed to omit ‘much of the topology of economic circulation and network folding’ that is characteristic of contemporary capitalism (Amin, Reference Amin2002, p. 395). This non-territorial trap (cf. Agnew, Reference Agnew1994) plays down the fact that territories are ‘not frozen frameworks where social life occurs. Rather, they are made, given meanings, and destroyed in social and individual action’ (Paasi, Reference Paasi, Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift2003b, p. 110). Furthermore, territorialisation involving social and political action is being constantly articulated to form conic geometries, or what Peterson (Reference Peterson1988) calls ‘topologia’? The question here becomes how far territorialised forms of political power can be folded or bent without losing identity. Relational thinking rarely questions whether ‘topology’ – a concept from mathematics that describes the geometry of relations whose qualitative structure is robust to various kinds of transformation or ‘folding’ – has certain properties that ensure that its relational constituents and coordinates return to their spatial form, thus limiting the open-endedness inferred by geographers (on this, see Harvey, Reference Harvey1969; Peterson, Reference Peterson1988; Stewart, Reference Stewart1975). The rare exception to this is work of Whatmore – who posits relationally that territory and its governance are in practice ‘plastic achievements’ and research needs to ‘focus attention on the tangle of socio-material agents and frictional alignments in which it is suspended and to recognise that they harbour other possibilities’ (Whatmore, Reference Whatmore2002, p. 87).

Political geometries of emergence

This paper has endeavoured to give an overview of what it means to ‘think space relationally’. This approach has its strengths and weakness, and relational space has to address the critique of Dainton (Reference Dainton2001, pp. 140–44; see also Harrison, Reference Harrison2006; Sunley, Reference Sunley2008) if it is to transform the social sciences. Dainton claims that five areas need to be addressed in future research on relational space, which are:

1. (1) What are the relations in question? A distinction needs to be made here between relations and relational properties.

2. (2) How exactly should we think of them, i.e. what are the relational properties for existence in spacetime?

3. (3) What is it, exactly, that they relate? The answer to this, of course, is material objects, but which objects are relationists talking about, and what forces govern their existence through internal and external spatial relations/extensions? Not engaging in this results in ‘the connection problem’ (Dainton, Reference Dainton2001, p. 143): that where it becomes impossible to distinguish between necessary and contingent spatial relations, such that all objects are necessarily spatially related – the everything is connected thesis – and, as Harvey reminds us, the ‘reduction of everything to fluxes and flows, and the consequent emphasis upon the transitoriness of all forms and positions has its limits’ and says nothing about nothing (Harvey, Reference Harvey1996, p. 7). The thinking behind this statement and the search for an alternative can be further spelled out as:

   ‘[I]n addition to providing an explanation of the constraints on spatially related things, such an account must provide some explanation of the distinctive ways that such things are connected’

   (Dainton, Reference Dainton2001, p. 138, emphasis original)

4. (4) Can and how do we distinguish between different states of motion, i.e. acceleration and fixity, and are all relational things equally mobile?

   These four questions get to the concern that ‘it must be by virtue of some structural features of the world that material objects, were they present, would enter into certain patterns of relations and not others’ (Malament, Reference Malament1976, p. 315, emphasis added). Pushing this further, for Dainton (Reference Dainton2001, p. 197), relationism needs to ‘embrace a richer collection of spatiotemporal relations’ and also consider ‘inertial paths’, i.e. conceptualise forces that restrict, constrain, contain and connect the mobility of relational things. Writing on Leibniz, Hacking notes that: ‘[s]ubstances are bundles of attributes, but not all attributes are substances. Only active principles of unity will do’ (Hacking, Reference Hacking and Frankfurt1972, p. 151). Harvey’s critique of Leibniz’s ‘windowless’ world and Whitehead’s (1978) process philosophy is also highly relevant here: it is suggested that there should not be ‘barrier[s] to construing things and entities as “permanences” or even relatively autonomous entities provided we recognize how those things and entities are constituted, sustained and ultimately dissolved in flows and how all entities are relationally defined with respect to others’ (Harvey, Reference Harvey1996. p. 73). Last, Bhaskar’s skilful writings on critical realism also apply.

   ‘[I]n working towards a relational conception of collectivities we need to understand any given collectivity both in terms of its relationships with other collectivities (and in particular those in terms of which it is oppositionally defined or defines itself) and in terms of its international relationships.’

   (Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar1989, p. 8)

5. (5) Two readings of relational space exist, the realist approach and the ideal approach, and these are frequently conflated by those working outside philosophy, which can lead to problems of translation. For realist relationists, true statements about space are made true by facts about material bodies and the way they are related, which can involve detailed and diverse empirical observations and abstractions from reality. By contrast, for idealist relationists, true statements about space are made true by facts about human minds and/or patterns of sensory experience. This captures how we believe things could and should be, often based on more normative, abstract and selective experiences. Based on selective, and at times without, empirical connections, the ‘thinking space relationally approach’ often falls into the latter category: it lacks a widely applicable and observable material basis.

Addressing all this is a serious challenge. A heightened appreciation of time and bringing this more centrally into relational thinking is one way forward. With the exception of Massey’s (2005) recent writings on the elusiveness of place, it is difficult to trace any temporal depth, or what Smith (Reference Smith1990, p. 160) calls ‘deep space’, in relational approaches to space. Current accounts on ‘thinking space relationally’ in many ways resemble Abbott’s (1952) ‘flatland’ – a flat and timeless plane, which is be contrasted with a multiple dimensional ‘spaceland’ where time gives space ‘extra height’ – because their open-ended networks, events, encounters and fluids appear to operate in a spatiotemporal vacuum, when it is impossible to picture empty space and empty time (compare Dainton, Reference Dainton2001; Earman, Reference Earman1989; Field, Reference Field1980; Manning, 1960). Amin et al. (2003), for instance, have no time for locally rooted territorial identities that are often embedded in the consciousness of inhabitants, and instead support ‘cosmopolitan regionalism’ with its open-ended and timeless politics of connection and encounter as preferred political and cultural strategy. Cosmopolitan things, though, can knock up against each other in all kinds of interesting and networked ways, be sticky, gel and get anchored or ‘moored’ (Urry, Reference Urry2003, p. 49) through power, political strategy and acts of social resistance. Relational entities are thus not always hyper-mobile. An embedded perspective, which after Field (Reference Field1980, pp. 154–55) we might want to call the ‘space-time point’ dynamic, is fundamental to the juxtaposition and order of things in/as space (cf. Crang, Reference Crang, Cloke and Johnston2005; Massey, Reference Massey2005).

All this, of course, has further implications for the normative brand of relational thinking alluded to above in my discussion on regions. Thinking space in a connected relational manner, which is what I have argued in my critique, opens up a field of political geometry, whereby researchers can track multifarious spatial synchronisations and when these are in synch, or what Golubitsky and Stewart (Reference Golubitsky and Stewart2000) term the ‘symmetry perspective’ when referring to the behaviour of complex systems, they can be institutionalised as contiguous and symmetrical or territorial shapes (cf. Painter, Reference Painter2008). Pushing this point further, although I am sympathetic but cautious of notions that ‘[c]onceptualising space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics’ (Massey, Reference Massey2005, p. 59), there may be certain circumstances in which, as an object of analysis, practical and bounded spaces that have been institutionalised through particular struggles and become identified as discrete territories in the spheres of economics, politics and culture, matter (see Hudson, Reference Hudson2007; MacLeod and Jones, Reference Macleod and Jones2007). My take on relational space, then, is also sensitive to cross-border complexities and tensions, strategies and tactics, in its recognition of the unfolding, dynamic and overlapping nature of space. Rather than compete for mobile economic dividends in an increasing neoliberal context, by focusing on territories, spaces and flows, my perspective provides a basis for articulating collaboration and coherence.

On a related point, by momentarily freezing spacetime, my connect reading of relational space asks questions about what type of economic development is actually taking place, exploring at the same time which constellations of forces are energising this. Martin and Sunley (Reference Martin and Sunley2007) have been exploring similar issues in recent work on the interfaces between complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography. My relational space is the active product of reciprocal relationships between economic behaviour, the politics of representation and identity, state power geometries, and the sedimentation of these practices in spacetime. In turn, coalition building and its politics are active and ongoing processes – rich in political strategy, territorial awareness and cultural expression – which may allow activists and policy-makers to actually uncover behaviour in relation to the very formation of those interdependent conventions and constellations that are always being talked about within ‘leading-edge’ economies (Scott and Storpe, 2003).

My critique of relational space could provide a way of tracing the polymorphic organisation of sociospatial relations expressed in the work of Jessop et al. (2008) and Leitner et al. (2008). The latter propose a multidimensional framework for studying contentious politics with scale, place, positionality, networking and mobility shaping each other and in turn influencing the trajectory of politics. Last, connected relational space is a way of taking forward the notion of ‘multitude politics’, found in the work of Hardt and Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2004; 2009). These authors are striving for an ‘altermodernity’ politics of connection and ‘left assemblage’ (Tampio, Reference Tampio2009), whereby the many spaces of social movements can be joined up and their energy channelled in a more sustainable manner than has previously been the case, so that political goals can be realised. Watch this space…