Towards just and inclusive community sustainability initiatives: learning from the Mixed Ability movement

Sustainable development is centrally concerned with collective action, but has paid limited attention to inclusivity. An emerging critical approach has begun to address this, by pointing out the risks of exclusion in an interest area dominated by white, middle-class and able-bodied participants. Community activities that are designed and run by a relatively homogeneous group of people are unlikely to take into account diverse voices, address a range of needs and abilities, or offer solutions that are inclusive, effective and just. In this paper, we profile a radical attempt to design-in inclusivity, drawing on the lead author’s sustained ethnographic engagement with the Mixed Ability movement in the UK. The movement brings people with and without disabilities together to play sport in community settings, alongside facilitating peer education, to raise awareness about inclusion and diversity. The Mixed Ability movement offers a challenge to sustainable development action at community level, by recognising social difference, creating an inclusive process, as well as integrating and celebrating diversity for effective and just outcomes. It also offers a radical vision of socially just community initiatives in demonstrating that inclusion is not solely a remedy to recognition injustices experienced by marginalised groups, but can also be a route to better outcomes for the entire community.