How norms, needs, and power in science obstruct transformations towards sustainability How norms, needs, and power in science obstruct transformations towards sustainability (original) (raw)
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How much time do we have? Urgency and rhetoric in sustainability science
Sustainability Science, 2012
Sustainability challenges are multitudinous, urgent, and complex. They are beyond the capacities of our current institutions to address, caused by path-dependent behaviors, and require substantial change from systems with crippling inertia. These problems are born of largescale industrial economic policy, the rise of materialism, and the supremacy of profit over sustainability. Currently, academia is poorly positioned to address sustainability problems because of anachronistic pedagogy, mismatched incentives, insufficient expertise, lack of personal commitment, and insular products and communication. What transformational methods for research and practice, which involve relevant communities throughout problem-solving processes in meaningful ways, does sustainability science offer? Though rhetoric outweighs real-world sustainability transitions so far, we argue that operationalizing the goals of the field, developing the necessary competencies, and seeking novel partnerships between society and the academy will position academic institutions to make a bigger impact on the transition to sustainability.
Over the past decades, numerous science institutions have evolved around issues of global sustainability, aiming to inform and shape societal transformations towards sustainability. While these science-based initiatives seem to take on an ever growing active role in governance for sustainable development, the question arises how they can claim any political authority in the first place. We present here a structured comparison of six international science-based initiatives, all engaged in governance processes related to the recently established Sustainable Development Goals. We focus on the material and rhetorical strategies employed by these science institutions to acquire authority by fostering perceptions of salience, credibility and legitimacy among governance actors. We distinguish three modes of scientific authority: an assessment-oriented mode that combines a strategy of salience through integration, with credibility by formal mechanisms of review, and legitimacy through representation; an advice-oriented mode, which appeals to salience through the promise of independent and timely science advice, to credibility through the credentials of the scientists involved, and to legitimacy through formal recognition by governance actors; and a solution-oriented mode, with science institutions claiming relevance based on the promise to contribute to solutions for global sustainability, while credibility is sought by invoking support of the scientific community, and legitimacy through a strategy of participation. Based on this analysis, we provide a framework for reflection on the claims and strategies of science-based initiatives, and their role and responsibility in governance for sustainable development. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.
Ambiente & Sociedade
The socioenvironmental framework that characterizes contemporary societies shows that human impact on the environment is causing increasingly complex changes both in quantitative and qualitative terms. Therefore, while highlighting the complexity of the events and the need of dialogue among science, managers and society, it emphasizes the prevalence of an instrumental cognitive rationality, which generally disregards the interdisciplinary dimension of problems affecting and maintaining life in our planet. The main objective of this work is to analyze factors affecting the connection between science and politics and to overcome those obstacles, emphasizing triggering and mobilizing factors.
Innovation, 2024
The gap between what is known about climate change and the action taken to prevent it has instigated debates around how to reconfigure global environmental assessment organizations to better inform and foster transformative change. One recurring request involves the need for a broader and better inclusion of social scientific knowledge. However, despite such intentions, the inclusion of social scientific research remains limited. How can this be explained? Through a detailed analysis of the IPCC special report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, this article reveals how the institutional conditions of global environmental assessments condition and shape what knowledge is included in these assessments, as well as how this knowledge is represented. It discusses how and why the understanding of social processes and structures remains underdeveloped, despite such knowledge being critical for transformative change. To integrate such knowledge into environmental assessments would require substantial changes to the current epistemic infrastructure used by global environmental assessments. It is therefore time to think beyond global environmental assessments and consider complementary institutional science–policy relations through which social scientific research can assist policy actions to promote deep transformative change.
Critical Sociology, 2008
This article investigates why science often does not speak with one voice within the context of environmental controversies. I argue that sociologists must be willing to turn to those processes and phenomena that are internal to science. In doing this, we find that many environmental conflicts are products, at least in part, of science itself. What is it about science that helps to breed these conflicts? In answering this question, this article first reflects upon the effects that disciplinary and methodological diversity have on scientific disputes. Attention then turns to the topics of proof and consensus, highlighting how these terms have often been employed to amplify conflict. I then speak to how science presupposes values. The article concludes by making policy-relevant suggestions about how to 'do' environmental science in a way that acknowledges its various epistemic bright-and blind-spots.
At the Edges of Science: Dissolving Dichotomies and Transforming Power
2008
Climate change has become an important and politically-charged arena where Western scientific knowledge meets traditional indigenous knowledges. How we react and adapt to the threats and challenges of climate change will depend greatly on the philosophical framework(s) through which we understand the world. Too often, the ability of society to hear and learn from other perspectives and worldviews is blocked by science's dominant position of power. When science and traditional knowledge meet, boundaries can be created, reinforced, or overcome. The positioning of Arctic science, at the edges of the scientific discourse but the centre of the climate change debate, makes it a possible, and politically crucial, location for questioning the foundations and assumptions of science. Based on a discourse analysis of texts and interviews about attempts to bridge scientific and traditional knowledge of climate change in the North, I discuss how the science discourse, coherent and powerful at its centre, views traditional knowledge either as a source of information or as a distinct and very different worldview. At its edges, however, it blurs with both traditional and personal ways of knowing. With more humility and less ideology, science can engage more equitably with alternative ways of understanding and more productively with climate change.
Who speaks for nature? On the politics of science
Contemporary Political Theory
The natural sciences have a peculiar prominence in arguments about environmental issues, including climate change. Climatology, glaciology, field botany, conservation biology, and others possess seemingly unrivalled authority to frame public understandings of anthropogenic climate change. But where does that authority originate and how is it sustained and justified? Here, climate science and political theory can intersect. Of course, most practicing scientists would vehemently reject any suggestion that natural science is or should be inherently 'political.' Rather, politics 'interferes' with, prevents, or otherwise 'contaminates' science, which is 'above' politics. Accordingly, good policy based on good science will be 'non-political.' Laura Ephraim contests the conventional view. Science, she argues, is, or must be viewed as, an inherently political enterprise. Acknowledging this reality need not debunk the authority of science (p. 3), but rather strengthens it. Lay citizens and science do (and should) mutually support each other in a political way. This support, along with epistemological validity, generates the authority of science. To the question that entitles her book, 'Who speaks for nature?' Ephraim replies that scientists rightly do, yet their authority is established, sustained, eroded, and challenged-in part-by processes outside science proper. These processes are political. The familiar worry about the 'politicization of science' is, then, mistaken and misleading. Ephraim's position is a welcome corrective to the 'linear' conception of science, i.e. 'science proposes, policy makers implement'. Although her contention that scientific practice can be strengthened through constructive relations with citizens and policy elites is not unique (Brown, 2009; Fischer, 2017; Moore, 2017), her focus on the problem of authority is distinctive and raises significant questions about the sources and justification for trust in science, and perhaps also for distrust of science.