Beyond plug-and-play: Sustainability as a relational practice

MA Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability student Vix Anderton explores why truly sustainable solutions must be rooted in people and place, not designed to work everywhere.

What do electric vehicles, oil rigs, and military operations have in common? They're all 'plug-and-play' technologies, designed to work anywhere and everywhere. But when ‘green’ solutions are designed without connection to place and people, can they ever truly be sustainable? 

I didn’t see it then. It felt so normal, just the way things were. Every deployment was self-contained, its own little world. We talked about where we were by using the operational codename, rather than the name of the country we were in: places and people reduced to acronyms and callsigns.  

Reading Hannah Appel’s ethnography of offshore oil rigs helped me recognise the logic at play during my deployments with the Royal Air Force: modular infrastructure designed to be replicated, moved and scaled, beyond view and accountability. The plug-and-play efficiency pretends to be neutral, but depends on disconnection, from place, from people, from time, from consequence.

The plug-and-play efficiency pretends to be neutral, but depends on disconnection, from place, from people, from time, from consequence.

That same modular logic now shapes approaches to sustainability, and it's fundamentally at odds with what’s needed in the face of the metacrisis: relational practices rooted in specific places and communities, not scalable solutions. 

The violence of disconnection 

Modular systems remove themselves from local entanglements while transforming the political and physical landscapes they inhabit. This is a violence of disconnection, erasing people, places, rhythms, and histories in pursuit of the universal. The harm is displaced and unseen: uranium miners in Gabon suffer from radiation poisoning invisible to the French nuclear industry they fuel. 

Even knowledge risks becoming modularised. Dislocating knowledge from its socio-political, historic, and ecological context risks its erasure or co-optation. Zoe Todd rails against this in her critique of anthropology’s ontological turn. Western scholars extract concepts without attending to indigenous authorship, sovereignty, land or governance, that is, how that knowledge is embodied in place by both human and more-than-human persons.

Dislocating knowledge from its socio-political, historic, and ecological context risks its erasure or co-optation.

This is more than simply a feature of capitalism; it’s capitalism’s operating logic, the ‘how’ beneath the ‘what’.  

The green trap 

The danger is that many sustainable and green solutions risk reproducing this same modular logic. We need to change how we engage with the world, not just what we do. Swapping petrol vehicles for electric ones doesn’t challenge car-centric infrastructure or the lithium mines devastating Chile’s Atacama Desert.  

Growth-oriented, technocratic, transferable solutions reproduce the same disconnection by changing what we use without changing how we relate to the world. 

What would the alternative look like? 

Vandana Shiva calls it a shift “from oil to soil”: “from a mechanical-industrial paradigm centred on globalized [i.e. modular] markets to a people- and planet-centred one”. Think community-owned energy cooperatives where decisions are made by those who live with the turbines, where profits circulate locally, and where seasonal rhythms matter. 

This is relationality: worldviews grounded in reciprocal responsibilities to place, time, and more-than-human beings.  

Sophie Chao’s work with the Marind in West Papua grounds this relationality. For the Marind, forests are not resources but living communities of kin, made up of many beings with their own presence and agency. When plantations replace forests, they don’t just change ecosystems; they rupture kinship networks.

Sustainable solutions cannot simply be copied and pasted. They must be lived, situated, and accountable.

Sustainable, or rather regenerative, futures must be inherently relational. They must reconnect us to our bodies as nature beings, to people, to place, to land, to time, to the more-than-human. These solutions are localised, responsive to local needs, not the demand for global profits. 

Sustainable solutions cannot simply be copied and pasted. They must be lived, situated, and accountable. Not scalable solutions, but thousands of place-specific responses; scaling itself is a feature of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s time we stopped trying to plug-and-play and instead started to ask, “does this deepen connection or sever it?” then choose accordingly.