In daily life, it is easy to feel surrounded by things in need of repair—be it a squeaky door or a broken computer. The same is true on a global level: various practices at different scales currently seek to establish cultural habits of restoration in the face of irreversible damage.8.2.1 Building this knowledge base is itself a process of re-pairing—of putting things together that don’t fit perfectly but serve a combined function. This pathway describes an eclectic repair movement that cuts across art, science, and policy. The preliminary results are six counterintuitive questions. 

1. Can repair projects help to reform a misguided perfectionism? When improvising on daily repair tasks, the results often are provisional. The book Belgian Solutions: Volume 1, which collects such makeshift solutions, inspires laughter and identification on social media.8.2.2 But repair is not only functional and funny. In many cultures, imperfect repair is a serious pursuit: practitioners of kintsugi, a Japanese craft tradition, for example, increase the historical value of broken dishes by leaving visible traces of repair.8.2.3 As kintsugi illustrates, devotion can pair with imperfection, and imperfection can be precise. Repair is even an alternative approach to the hubris of wanting to fix damage once and for all, according to scholars in science and technology studies. Aside from fixing things, repair practices can help to counter the dominant technological cultures of command-and-control that have inflicted deep, irreversible damage. As opposed to the “technological fix,” which the American nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg propagated in the 1960s,8.2.4 repair of modern damages cannot simply go back to fixing social woes by technological means. 

2. Can deep fractures inspire sensitive repair? Along several dimensions, current societies deal with what sociologists, including Steffen Mau in a study about East Germany,8.2.5 have pointed out as fractures. Be it in postcolonial Africa, postindustrial North America, or post-socialist Europe, past damages remain as ongoing, imperfectly healed wounds that undergird current action. In the conversation that accompanies this pathway, group facilitator Rebecca Freeth describes her work with people that experience violence and trauma in South Africa. She critically discusses the term “healing” and stresses that repaired relationships often remain fractured, or even build on older wounds. This dynamic also plays out in material repair (or the lack thereof). Potholes in Kinshasa, according to anthropologist Filip De Boeck,8.2.6 frequently become the ground for makeshift markets and other gatherings. The lack of repair facilitates social communities on top of the broken infrastructures of the colonial past.8.2.7 Fractures thus inflict a permanent vulnerability that can be a basis for newly found efficacy.

3. Can repair prevent a collective sense of resignation? Deep fractures often play into a phenomenon that historian Anton Jäger recently called “rebel regions.”8.2.8 Postindustrial ruptures of the past fuel a continuous fear of loss in affected places and communities, be it the loss of home, political voice, or the cultural or economic recognition of achievement. Being haunted by an industrial past and surrounded by things in need of repair—from mines to abandoned villages—can lead to a deep sense of resignation, as first pointed out by John Gaventa in 1980. Re-visiting this work, Gaventa has even argued that the loss of political voice and the non-participation that followed the industrial decline of the Rust Belt became a resource for rebellion in 2016 and beyond.8.2.9 I would add: resignation covers up and blocks the knowledge of repair that has accumulated through various attempts of regional transition. In the German coal region of Lusatia, anthropologist Felix Ringel likewise shows that repair knowledge is very real, but fleeting. The manifold repair practices in Lusatia, he argues, look backward in time, but also reconfigure future uncertainties.8.2.10 Fractures and repair, both cutting across time and space, often are best represented in aesthetic form. The artist Sven Gatter8.2.11 explores former mining districts in East Germany in two photo-text collages. They show how layers of disruption are superficially and awkwardly covered up by young forests8.2.12 or quirky imaginaries of tourism.8.2.13 Under the surface, the fractures remain intact. But the knowledge of repair is lost in transition. 

4. Can surrender of control be a driver of repair? The longing for agency and regularity is characteristic of repair practices. Especially when facing threats like devastating floods in Bangladesh8.2.14 and Germany,8.2.15 variously situated and culturally diverse desires to gain back control become visible. The lack of control is not necessarily an emergency—it can take place intentionally, for example, when preventing further floods: for a long time, the dominant imaginaries of river management had the habit of “cutting off lifelines” in the name of technological control, as filmmaker Monique Verdin8.2.16 and historian of science Thomas Turnbull8.2.17 recognize in the context of the Mississippi. But recent approaches to river restoration purposefully enroll the replenishing functions of flora and fauna. An illustrative example is the rewilding of beavers, as investigated by anthropologist Inge Dekker: while commonly anthropomorphized as river engineers, the rodents repair things in ways that often damage human infrastructure. Ecological repair thus reduces the need for intentional intervention while unintentionally triggering new reflections about repair. Repaired landscapes restore ecological functioning, but challenge human control.8.2.18

5. Is repair political? What is to be repaired, how, and by whom cannot be decided without friction and some degree of damage. Repair is bound to be a matter of negotiation. Unlike reform or revolution, however, it lacks normative direction, thus requiring constant institutional learning. The struggle is to respond quickly to damage while redressing power imbalances originally related to that damage. This dynamic even plays out at a planetary scale, where repair projects—like the closing of the ozone hole—are subject to nonhuman forces. In 2019, it was high-altitude winds that shrunk the ozone hole down to a record size of less than 10 million square kilometers.8.2.19 Lucky coincidences are integral to repair. But the institutions behind the phase out of the chemicals responsible for creating the hole in the ozone layer—chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—are bound to be imperfect. Originating with the Montreal Protocol of 1987, the measures taken prioritized the interests of the offenders and their one-sided definition of what damages are acceptable.8.2.20 Societal repair is a distorted process—the question is which bias to accept for the sake of deeper reparation.

6. Is there a social fix to unfair repair? Often dialogue is invoked as a panacea. However, dialogue can be disparaging rather than diplomatic. Saleemul Huq, a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the so-called least developed countries in climate policy, recently concluded the global summit with the statement “all we have is dialogue.”8.2.21 This statement, which in the past could be understood as a call to action, has become a declaration of resignation: the global regime of climate policy does not adequately address loss and damage through material compensation and relational empathy. Restorative justice will require moments of confrontational testimony, according to psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela.8.2.22 Based on her experience on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she argues that dialogue must actively involve the perpetrators, too. More confrontational dialogue formats—partly rooted in Indigenous practices such as conferences in Aotearoa New Zealand and circles in North America—may be one of the missing links in the “just environmental transition”: instead of swiftly moving to solutions, the damage is first collectively assessed.

Since there is no blanket approach, repair must always address and explore specific injuries; it is itself an embodied exploration. At the same time, this embodiment shows the need to critically reflect on repair practices, thus building a heterogeneous knowledge of repair.