26 Human-environmental integration and social power in global environmental change research
Introduction
The last three or four generations are causing and/or enduring unprecedented rates of global environmental change (GEC), a human-induced phenomenon linked to the globalization of capitalist modernity. However, academic and policy arenas tend to formulate and represent it as a geophysical, chemical and bioecological (natural) event with a ³human dimension² (see for instance: Committee on Global Change Research, 1999; Munn, 2002). Such representations acknowledge that GEC requires policy and market responses, but these responses are not necessarily related to the socio-political phenomena that traditionally concern social sciences (e.g., power, space, inequality, coloniality, identity).This “human dimension” perspective both deters, and is a consequence of social scientists’ persistent disengagement from GEC research (Lever-Tracy, 2008; Shove, 2010). This situation is starting to change as calls, proposals, and efforts to bring society (and social sciences) into the core of GEC analysis are rapidly multiplying. For more than two decades, research on society’s role on GEC has been institutionally channeled through the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), which nurtures a loose interdisciplinary community heavily inspired by complexity, systems thinking and disaster risk analysis. A crucial task for the “IHDP community” is to articulate relational/ ecological concepts and grammars to bridge (ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically) entrenched human-environment divisions. The involvement of social scientists in this bridging endeavor, and the incorporation of insights from mainstream social theories, will be crucial as well as exceedingly challenging.
This chapter argues that the increasing popularity of systems thinking and relational perspectives within some social disciplines, and the growing centrality of climate change in socio-political discourse, can contribute to reformulate GEC as a human-environmental phenomenon, instead of an environmental one with a “human dimension.” However, two main epistemological obstacles stand in the way of this interdisciplinary reformulation. The first is the pervasive assumption that political (and ethical) question(s) ought to be – and indeed can be – left outside of science (e.g., to civil society or politicians). This assumption hinders the involvement of social scientists interested in explaining socio-political (and human-environmental) phenomena from power-laden and culture-laden perspectives. The second obstacle is the assumption that social change is not significantly influenced by the paucity of traditionally sluggish environmental change, an assumption challenged by the very acceleration of human-induced GEC and the realization that, in the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002), human agency is as much bio-geological as it is socio-political.
The next sections review recent developments within the IHDP community to transcend formulations of GEC as a phenomenon with two separable dimensions (i.e., biophysical and human), which can be independently studied and, later on, combined into management and policy-making proposals. Transcending dichotomous understandings of human-environmental relations reformulates the origins of GEC, and repositions it in relation to contemporary socio-political phenomena. This is furthering the incorporation of social theory, ethics and values (O’Brien, 2009). In fact, concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation or resilience, which were either borrowed or adapted from ecology and systems thinking, are being problematized, refined and reconsidered in the light of human behavior, social power and global inequalities (Janssen and Ostrom, 2006; O’Brien et al., 2008; Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2011).
In parallel to IHDP efforts, there is a proliferation of social science interventions in climate change debate. This involvement is perhaps harnessed by the growing policy and public relevance of climate change, which turns GEC into a fully-fledged social phenomenon susceptible of sociological research (Urry, 2011). At the same time, the premise that social change unfolds against the background of a stable environment is being rapidly eroded (Chakrabarty, 2009). Interestingly, such interventions are parallel to social scientists’ increasing engagement with systems and relational thinking. It is argued that a key issue to explore further is the role of relational paradigms, such as systems and complexity, in further bridging the gap between biophysical and social sciences and thus advancing formulations of GEC as a fully human-environmental phenomenon (Bhaskar et al., 2010). Yet, relational and systems-based paradigms need to be problematized when applied to socially conflicting issues rooted in power structures and related to global inequality, such as GEC. This “political question” can be framed in terms of political reform, including discourse struggles, behavioral change, ecological modernization, or (post-political) neoliberal governance, but it also opens the floor to critical approaches that question forms of domination embedded in epistemologies, power relations, identities, subjectivities, agency and everyday life (Escobar, 2007; Manuel-Navarrete, 2010).
Towards the human-environmental dimension
Human-environment separability allows interpreting GEC as an environmental problem that can be solved from the status quo of current institutional frameworks (Hulme, 2009). Biophysical sciences become crucial to predict the impact of anthropogenic emissions on biogeochemical processes (including tipping points) and recommend safe mitigation levels, while the “human dimension” may focus on the implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures to cope with predicted and actual changes. Overall, mitigation/adaptation provides a basis for the “scientific management” of GEC (Folke et al., 2005). This is useful to construct and legitimize metrics aimed at guiding legislation, markets and management decisions, or serving as inputs to participatory decision-making processes. However, subsuming all aspects of GEC under the rubric of mitigation/adaptation is largely unattractive to social science because it downplays the internal dynamics of social change, which are driven by conflict, contradiction, subjectivity or politics (Swyngedouw, 2010). In fact, the emphasis in outcomes such as technological fixes, risk assessments, policies, management strategies, or incentives takes current socio-political contexts for granted and tends to analyze away social power.
In the “disasters” literature, Hewitt’s edited book (1983) was the first to criticize human-environmental separability and the apolitical construction of natural disasters and development. Wescoat et al. (1991) observed that climate change response was dominated by “scenario assessments” in which nature was conceived as a separate entity. As in the case of mitigation/adaptation, assuming human-nature separability enabled representations of environmental risks as threats external to society. More generally, isolating and objectifying nature outside society allows abstracting GEC response as an activity foreign to on-going socio-political processes, and consequently external to social and personal transformations. In fact, the framework of risk assessment can be seen as enabling technocratic and policy-based responses to GEC. This is not to negate GEC’s role in increasing and worsening emergency situations (i.e., circumstances marked by exceptionality) in which technocratic action might be the most effective means to ensure security in the short term and restore certain forms of social order. Yet, a broader understanding of GEC is also necessary to transcend specific emergencies and question the socio-political and socio-ecological structures and forms of agency that are increasing the recurrence of emergencies through GEC.
The reinterpretation of GEC as an integrated human-environmental phenomenon has been a major concern in disasters literature and also within the IHDP community. Epistemological integration is proposed to transcend reductionist, impact-driven and sectorial approaches that dominate relief programs and agencies. Such proposal is based on disciplinary integration, but also seeks to amalgamate perspectives and paradigms. For instance, Cardona (2004) distinguishes epistemologies of vulnerability and risk along the following three disciplinary categories: natural sciences, applied sciences, and social sciences. Similarly, Füssel (2007) combines disciplinary and other epistemological criteria in his classification of approaches to climate change research: pure deterministic, mechanistic engineering, human ecology, and political economy. In an attempt to rise above disciplinary boundaries, Hilhorst (2004) identified behavioral, structural, and mutuality/ complexity paradigms to hazard response. Some authors have included integrative categories as part of their classifications. For instance, Kasperson and colleagues (2005) suggested five approaches to vulnerability: risk-hazard, political economy, pressure-and-release model, resilience, and “integrated.” In a similar vein, McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) identified five perspectives to the study of vulnerability: biophysical, human ecological, political economy, constructivist, and political ecology. In addition, these authors propose to transcend this theoretical fragmentation through a critical realist epistemology that interprets social change as an evolutionary process. This is a promising path to formulate GEC as an integrated human-environmental phenomenon in which social structures, human agency and the environment are interpreted as co-constituted. As discussed in the following section, McLaughlin and Dietz’s (2008) proposal runs parallel to the recent involvement of critical realist philosophers in the formulation of climate change as an interdisciplinary and complex (open-systemic) phenomenon (Bhaskar et al., 2010).
The application of human-environmental integration has been championed within the IHDP by proposals to take “socio-ecological systems” or “coupled human-environmental systems” as a basic unit of analysis (Young et al., 2006). This has led to rethinking and reformulating key systems concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation and resilience (e.g., Anderies et al., 2004; Folke et al., 2005; Gallopín, 2006). However, this notion of a social-biophysical hybrid unit of analysis has failed to appeal to mainstream social sciences, despite the fact that systems and complexity terminologies are increasingly adopted within some social disciplines (e.g., Walby, 2007). The integration of modern societies and the environment is a traditional concern in anthropology (e.g., Ingold, 2005) and in ecological subfields of social disciplines such as environmental sociology or ecological economics. Mainstream social science is also integrating the environment through influential theories that assume human-nature simultaneous co-enactment (such as Latour’s (1993) actor-network theory and cognate developments). The question is then: Are we at the verge of a scientific revolution marked by the integration of the environment into social thinking through systems and relational theories? If so, what will be the role of GEC, and the “human dimensions” community, in setting the agenda? What ontologies and epistemologies of human-environmental interaction are more useful for dealing with GEC challenges? For instance, shall we consider Latour’s flat ontology with no a priori privileging of the agency or “effectivity” of any particular categories of beings (Clark, 2010)? Shall we instead assume fundamental incommensurability between (interacting) social and ecological systems (in the sense that the former display self-reflexive properties that the latter lack) as in socio-ecological systems analysis (Young et al., 2006)? The following sections build on recent interventions on climate change debates from influential social scientists. It is argued that a crucial challenge lays in the need to problematize systems thinking by fully incorporating social power and subjectivity (Jasanoff, 2010; Manuel-Navarrete and Buzinde, 2010).
Social science recent interventions
The IHDP promotes research on key social aspects of GEC. In particular, it complements biophysical global scenarios with social information, and analyzes the science-policy interface, technological regimes and socio-technical transitions (Biermann, 2007). Generally, the analysis of institutions, governance and policy has been a major concern. Global environmental governance has been recently proposed to overcome excessive emphasis on governments and account for non-state actors, as well as informal sectors and social movements (Bulkeley, 2007; Newell, 2008; Okereke et al., 2009). The IHDP also draws on social-environmental subfields such as environmental sociology or environmental psychology. The ethical question is acquiring growing relevance as development discourse is problematized (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008), and agency is reformulated beyond stakeholderism (Betsill et al., 2011). Political science and international relations have been central to discussions of global environmental politics and climate change (e.g., Paterson, 2007; Pettenger, 2007). In addition to all these developments within the IHDP, the growing concern within mainstream social sciences on climate change highlights the role of social power and the political question.
Recent social science interventions on climate change can be clustered into three strands according to the role attributed to human-environmental integration and power. The first cluster endorses conventional formulations of GEC as a biophysical event with a “human dimension.” The role of political and social analysis is to enhance and refine adaptation policies and the rapid implementation of green technologies. These analyses assume either current socio-political liberal regimes: “we are in the hands of our political leaders” (Giddens, 2009: 228), or innovation-driven fixes that transcend neo-liberalism as in Urry’s (2011) “resource capitalism.” These authors theorize capitalist solutions to sharp declines in available resources and multiplying environmental shocks. In Urry’s case, complex systems theories are embraced to explain change in both social and environmental systems. This is an important step aimed at bridging the human-environmental chasm, which has been pervasive in sociology, economy or political sciences.
A second cluster of interventions argues that GEC challenges the dominant ways in which knowledge is produced and used (Chakrabarty, 2009, Bhaskar et al., 2010). This requires integration across disciplinary boundaries, but also across cultural paradigms. Interdisciplinary cross-fertilization is already frequent within social science and humanities, and boundary crossings between the biophysical and social realms are no longer uncommon. However, the argument of critical realism goes beyond crossing disciplinary boundaries. It postulates that structures, mechanisms, processes, fields and the other intransitive objects of scientific knowledge (epistemology) are fundamentally distinct from, and irreducible to, the actual patterns of events they represent (Bhaskar, 2010). This highlights the artificial nature of drawing boundaries between biophysical and social systems, which in fact contradicts the ontological assertion that the world is constituted of open human-environmental systems. This critical realist argument is consistent with the so-called “ecosystem approach,” in which the world is conceived as being constituted of complex (open-systemic) and self-organizing phenomena, stratified in multi-layered holons (Kay and Boyle, 2008), of which GEC would be just one case.
A third set of interventions resituate GEC as an event that forces humanity to rethink the power relations ingrained in capitalist globalization and modernity (Pelling et al., 2012). On the one hand, the role of social sciences is to unveil power asymmetries embedded in climate politics. This unveiling is crucial to avoid taking for granted a consensual, de-politicized environmental governance regime that “combines apocalyptic environmental visions with an hegemonic neoliberal view of social ordering” (Swyngedouw, 2010: 228). On the other hand, social science shall explore the inextricable connections between GEC and social-ecological inequalities, the drive for economic growth, and representations of prosperity (Barry, 2012). This is not only a matter of justice, but of examining the power relations involved in the making of post-capitalist futures, perhaps based on cosmopolitanism or socio-ecological forms of agency (Beck, 2010; Manuel-Navarrete and Buzinde, 2010).
The power of GEC as a human environmental phenomenon
The need to consider power relations, institutions, and overall political and economic structures has been at the center of political economy approaches to vulnerability and adaptation (Wisner et al., 2004; Boyd et al., 2008). In fact, the importance of power is acknowledged in climate change literature addressing economic globalization (Redclift and Sage, 1998; Eakin and Lemos, 2006). Furthermore, political ecology approaches to adaptation have examined the institutional contexts and discourses that influence the adaptations of individuals, communities and specific social groups (Pelling, 2003). As discussed above, McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) have called for a comprehensive theory of vulnerability based on evolutionary perspectives of social change, and capable of theorizing the interrelated dynamics of social structure, agency and the environment. These calls are crucial and more research on GEC focused on power dynamics is needed.
Anthropologists have criticized vulnerability and the very notion of disasters for being articulated within Western discourses that essentialize other regions as unhealthy, poor and disaster-prone (Bankoff, 2001). The question of justice has been framed in climate change literature in terms of “fair adaptation” and “putting the vulnerable first” (Paavola and Adger, 2006). The idea is to insert social justice criteria within climate adaptation regimes and policies. The “vulnerable” are subjected to, and are recipients of, adaptation policies, but are usually unable to influence their design and implementation. Accordingly, the “climate regime” should be modified in order to guarantee equal participation and increase the accountability of the powerful. The notion of fair adaptation is a step forward acknowledging the role of power in GEC. However, it also highlights the need to combine systems analysis of GEC with critical theories of social power. For instance, the category of “the vulnerable” is problematic as it may be judged as inherently disempowering. Likewise, the idea of “incorporating the vulnerable” into “the” process (versus creating a joint process or incorporating Western processes and practices into those of “the vulnerable”) puts them in a disadvantageous starting position. Thus, the use of categories such as “the vulnerable” has the risk of slipping into managerialism and what Duffield (2006: 70) describes as “the biopolitical incorporation of a species-life [‘the vulnerable’] that, lacking the insurance-based safety-nets and welfare regimes of mass [Western] society, is cast as essentially self-reliant; in other words, ‘non-insured.’” Consequently, development, emergency relief and adaptation policies may become “a set of biopolitical compensatory and ameliorative technologies of security that define and act upon non-insured populations to improve resilience by strengthening self-reliance” (Duffield, 2006: 74). As a corollary, advocating for empowerment of “the vulnerable” and keeping a commendable commitment with justice does not necessarily lead to any fundamental revision of human-environmental power relations.
If we assume that GEC is not external to humanity but a human-environmental phenomenon, then we need proactive approaches to change the social conditions under which GEC is produced. This proactive perspective involves redirecting GEC research towards the interrogation of power itself, its origins, essence, and rationalizing mechanisms. This requires social sciences’ involvement to inspire and enable the kind of creative political changes that are required to reformulate dysfunctional power relations and align institutions according to socioecological co-evolution, instead of the interests of the powerful few. Arguably, the full consideration of power relations in the complex dynamics of human-environmental systems may open up a universe of unexpected and unpredictable social trajectories that can be characterized by sudden flips and transformations. These trajectories result from interactions between autonomous agents, but these agents are in turn influenced by past evolutions and current structures.
This path-dependent structural coupling of agents and human-environmental systems raises some important political questions. For instance: How do human and non-human forms of agency operate at the multiple interrelated domains of complex human-environmental systems? What room is left for free will and emancipatory politics as well as autonomous biological entities and physical forces? How can we avoid the risk of falling into the “everything is connected” thesis and thus failing to discern the distinctive ways in which human-environmental co-constitution takes place? If dealing with GEC involves a full realization of the inextricably human character of the environment and vice-versa, then: What are the consequences for “partial” forms of engagement with the world (e.g., as consumers, voters, managers, workers, scientists)?
Thoughts towards a research agenda on power relations in human-environmental systems
This chapter argues that the formulation of GEC as an environmental phenomenon with a “human dimension” is increasingly challenged both within the IHDP community and through recent interventions from mainstream social science in climate change debates. The main outcome of this challenge is the reformulation of GEC as a truly human-environmental and interdisciplinary phenomenon. Another outcome is a problematization of dominant climate change epistemologies based on the mitigation/adaptation couplet. These dominant epistemologies rely on structuralist policy concepts, such as governance and regimes, and reduce social power to a design problem rather than a matter of domination, resistance, and emancipation. The question is whether improving institutional arrangements and policy outputs (e.g., mitigation measures, vulnerability reduction, bringing together poverty alleviation and adaptation) will suffice to address GEC. Although some authors believe it to be the case (e.g., Giddens, 2009), this chapter shows the potential of richer interpretations of power emanating from, for instance, constructivist, poststructuralist, Marxist, or postcolonial perspectives (Demeritt, 2006; Glover, 2006; Pettenger, 2007; Chakrabarty, 2009). Within the IHDP, these critical perspectives can enrich the “Earth systems governance” framework, and its exploration of the interplay of agency and structures, by inviting GEC scholars to draw more deeply on social theories of power.
The increasing involvement of social sciences is crucial to foster power analysis and move GEC beyond a focus on emergencies and the amelioration of external vulnerabilities. In fact, the eventual recurrence of crisis, disasters, or extreme weather phenomena brings about unique opportunities to rethink society and culture. As a result, GEC response may have more to do with meaning-making than policy or decision-making (Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2004). Complexity and systems thinking may provide a common language to describe biophysical, social and interrelated human-environmental phenomena. Yet, the use of systems thinking in the analysis of human-environmental phenomena remains problematic. Can concepts such as attractors, patterns, feedbacks, trajectories, or thresholds equally describe the melting of icecaps as much as the collapse of financial institutions? Proposals from the IHDP community to study coupled socio-ecological systems, and some interventions from social scientists on climate change, including critical realist philosophers, seem to embrace this possibility. However, the question of human-environmental integration calls for more thinking on the potentially distinctive self-reflexive character of human systems (i.e., the capacity to consciously reflect on, and act upon, systems’ evolution) and challenges the simple transposition of systems concept from biophysical to social sciences without reflecting on the specificities of human agency and social power.
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