Routledge International Handbook of Social and Environmental Change

Stewart Lockie, David A. Sonnenfeld, Dana R. Fisher, Stewart Lockie, David A. Sonnenfeld, Dana R. Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136707988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Today, the risks associated with global environmental change and the dangers of extreme climatic and geological events remind us of humanity's dependence on favourable environmental conditions. Our relationships with the landscapes and ecologies that we are a part of, the plants and animals that we share them with, and the natural resources that we extract, lie at the heart of contemporary social and political debates. It is no longer possible to understand key social scientific concerns without at the same time also understanding contemporary patterns of ecosystem change.

The Routledge International Handbook of Social and Environmental Change reviews the major ways in which social scientists are conceptualizing more integrated perspectives on society and nature, from the global to local levels. The chapters in this volume, by international experts from a variety of disciplines, explore the challenges, contradictions and consequences of social–ecological change, along with the uncertainties and governance dilemmas they create. The contributions are based around the themes of:

• Climate change, energy, and adaptation
• Urban environmental change and governance
• Risk, uncertainty and social learning
• (Re)assembling social-ecological systems

With case studies from sectors across both developed and developing worlds, the Handbook illustrates the inter-connectedness of ecosystem health, natural resource condition, livelihood security, social justice and development. It will be of interest for students and scholars across the social sciences and natural sciences, as well as to those interested and engaged in environmental policy at all levels.

1

Socio-ecological transformations and the social sciences

Stewart Lockie, David A. Sonnenfeld and Dana R. Fisher

Our relationships with the landscapes and ecologies that we are a part of, the plants and animals that we share them with, and the natural resources that we extract, lie at the heart of contemporary social and political debates. Mitigation of anthropogenic climate change is among a handful of issues that dominate the world’s political imagination early in the third millennium of the common era. Risks associated with global environmental change combine with dangers of extreme climatic and geological events to remind us of humanity’s dependence on favourable environmental conditions. In every one of the first ten years of the century, natural disasters affected some 200–300 million people and caused around US $100 billion in damage (Armstrong et al. 2011). Such costs increased fourfold in 2011, following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami off the east coast of Japan, as well as a spate of (comparatively smaller) disasters in other advanced economies including the USA, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Ferris and Petz 2012).

The technological infrastructure of industrial society has not isolated us from environmental threats; it has simply changed the nature and distribution of vulnerability. Numerous social movements seek to strengthen our appreciation of the relationships between people, health, livelihoods, dignity, safety, environmental quality and access to the planet’s ecosystems and resources. Environmental and climate justice groups highlight the disproportionate exposure to pollution, resource degradation and climate risk borne by the poor and marginalized. Nanotechnologies, genetic engineering, pesticides, indigenous land rights, ecological footprints, food security and unfettered global networks and material flows sit alongside traditional interests in habitat conservation and nuclear non-proliferation in the campaign portfolios of mainstream environmental NGOs. The major issues of our times, to paraphrase Latour (1993), blend politics, biology, economics, ecology, chemistry, ethics, engineering and so on, with no respect for distinctions between society, nature, technology and economics.

Even still, human–environment interactions do not receive the attention or response that they deserve. Countries’ failure to meet targets established at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit for slowing the rate of species extinction by 2010 attracted little media or political attention. The secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity merely announced new targets, more attuned to the underlying causes of biodiversity degradation (Perrings et al. 2011). This decision is despite suggestions that biodiversity loss already may have passed critical thresholds of irreversibility, and despite what we know about the contributions that biodiversity makes to ecosystem adaptability and resilience in the face of other processes of environmental change such as global warming (Rockström et al. 2009). Whether inadequate governmental responses are due to continued faith in the project of modernity, vested political and economic interests, lack of institutional capacity or other causes, it is clear that we have entered a new era of approaches to addressing today’s environmental and natural resource challenges. Environmental politics can no longer be simply about preserving ‘pristine’ nature in isolated parks and reserves. Natural resource management can no longer be focused exclusively on soil conservation and sustainable forest yields. Sustainable development – contested though it may be – presupposes the interdependence of social and environmental well-being across space and through time.

Such parallel shifts in our material (inter)relations with the planet and in political consciousness mirror a new consensus across the social sciences that the environment is within our domains of interest and expertise. Biophysical nature is not something to be ignored by social scientists. Nor does it lie somehow outside of society. The (socio-)natural environment is now everyday social science fodder; a staple of undergraduate and graduate programmes in anthropology, sociology, human geography etc.; the foci of numerous sub- and cross-disciplinary professional organizations; and increasingly visible in mainstream social science literature and meetings. To many, the relevance of the social sciences to understanding and dealing with environmental issues is self-evident. Human beings are, and have been for some time, major agents of global environmental change and – to the extent that this change is threatening or undesirable – human patterns of organization, production and consumption must be reformed and human beliefs, attitudes and dispositions must be reoriented. At the same time, the influence of environmental change on traditional foci of social scientific concern such as inequality, political conflict, social movement mobilization and so on, is increasingly apparent. The negative consequences of environmental change are unequally distributed, as are exposures to risks associated with natural disasters and hazardous industries. Political conflicts abound over how environmental matters should be prioritized relative to other values and concerns, and uncertainties inherent to scientific understanding of global environmental change (climate change, in particular) have become lightning rods for anti-environmental movements.

Several of these dynamics may be incorporated readily within the dominant theoretical and methodological approaches of the social sciences. Environmental attitudes, politics, inequalities, behaviours and movements are no less amenable to description, measurement and/or comparison using accepted concepts and social research methods than are, for example, financial inequalities, class politics or gender relations. Each of these topics allows us to leave questions of environmental change to the natural sciences and to concentrate our efforts on determining the causes and consequences of human-induced environmental change. Other human–environment dynamics, however, require us to reconsider the adequacy of existing theory and method. Take, for example, the politics of knowledge about global climate change. It is a basic assumption of the social sciences that all knowledge is, in some way, socially constructed; a reflection of institutional processes, political values, existing theory, etc. Given this point, it is important to map competing knowledge claims. However, it is also necessary to participate in the generation of new socio-ecological knowledge and inform transformations in policy and practice in relation to the ways people and environments interact.

With these two related but different goals in mind, the following section of this chapter introduces some of the ways in which social scientists are attempting to conceptualize more integrated or co-evolutionary perspectives on society and nature. By way of providing an overview and introduction to the themes of this volume, the chapter then explores several frontiers of contemporary environmental social science. These perspectives include theories of global socio-ecological change; climate change, energy and adaptation; urban environmental change and governance; risk, uncertainty and social learning; and the (re)assembly of vital social-ecological systems.

Conceptualizing social-ecological change

It is no longer possible (if indeed it ever were) to understand broad patterns of social inequality and a number of other key social scientific concerns without understanding patterns of ecosystem change. Social theory that is environmentally blind is as potentially problematic as social theory that is gender-, race- or class-blind. It still makes sense to talk about the ‘social’ (the ways in which people interact and organize), and many or even most ‘social problems’ have little or nothing to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’. What makes less sense is talking about the natural as a residual domain of everything that is left over when people are taken out, and vice versa. Some branches of social theory have grasped this notion better than others and social scientists have a long history of debating the best ways to incorporate human interaction with the biophysical environment within social theory. Numerous terms have been coined to capture the interpenetration or inseparability of the social and the natural – co-evolution, co-constitution, methodological symmetry, social metabolism and so on. Similarly, a variety of methodological approaches have been developed to integrate this basic insight into social-ecological research.

How, then, are we to conceptualize relationships between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’, ‘society’ and ‘environment’, and what roles do such conceptualizations imply for the social sciences? One of the more common ways to organize the various theoretical approaches to environment and society has been to assimilate them into two broad categories: those deemed ‘constructivist’ in orientation and those deemed ‘materialist’. The social construction of reality refers to the ways in which we humans make sense of and in turn shape our social and natural environments through language, symbols, culture and so on. It follows, according to constructivists, that ‘there is no socially unmediated position from which to apprehend material reality’ (Lockie 2004a: 30). In its more extreme idealist and postmodernist guises (often referred to as the ‘strong programme’ in social construction), constructivism argues that there is in fact ‘no reality whatsoever outside the symbolic world-building activities of humans and no way of knowing about that reality that is, in principle, any better or worse than any other way of knowing’ (Lockie 2004a: 30). Materialist perspectives, conversely, challenge the primacy in such arguments accorded to ideas, symbols and beliefs. They accept the realist proposition that phenomena in both the social and natural worlds exist independently of humans’ perception of them and thus argue the importance of scientific inquiry as a rational and systematic means to comprehend reality. Some variants of materialism go further in arguing that key, historically situated dimensions of social organization such as the capitalist mode of production largely determine people’s ideological dispositions (environmental values, for example, reflecting particular class locations).

The distinction between constructivist and materialist perspectives is useful but, as a means of categorizing major approaches to eco-social theory, has its limitations. In practice, few environmental social scientists ascribe to a strong constructivist position, while even the most materialist in orientation would acknowledge that the ways in which people understand and communicate environmental change play a recursive role in those very same processes of transformation. This point is exemplified in Ortwin Renn’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 17). Renn argues that acknowledging the role of social construction in knowledge creation is crucial to bringing our understanding of social and ecological change into better alignment with the realities of these processes. There is a lot at stake here. Inadequate knowledge undermines our capacity to identify and deal with environmental problems. But this issue is not simply about collecting more data and correcting misconceptions. Human values and aspirations (not to mention routines and ways of life) are deeply implicated in the definition and prioritization of environmental problems, and in the goals of environmental research and management interventions. Failure to recognize this fact potentially amplifies pressure on ecosystems by misdirecting policy and research.

While Renn argues that it is analytically useful to maintain clear distinctions between ‘society’, ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ (the latter as those aspects of nature that have been transformed through interaction with humans), others argue for a more inclusive notion of the social in which people are joined by non-human species, ecosystem processes, technologies and so on in diverse networks, or collectives, that enable, ultimately, the expression of human agency. In developing this argument, several contributors to this book draw on actor–network theory (ANT), a perspective developed primarily through sociological studies of science and technology (see Law and Hassard 1999). ANT adopts what may be called a ‘radically relational’ approach to the theorization of key concepts in the social sciences. Power, agency, structure, subjectivity, micro- and macro-levels of organization, even the social itself, are all conceived as network effects; that is, as the generative outcomes of relationships between entities within a network. Social scientists are required not to define concepts like agency or power in advance, let alone attribute them to particular actors or treat them as self-evident explanatory categories. Rather, the actor–network perspective requires social scientists to approach power, agency, etc. as phenomena that may take a variety of forms and that therefore require description and explanation in specific collective contexts (Callon 1995; Latour 1999). The admittance of non-humans to these collectives is not intended to discount uniquely human traits such as language, consciousness or intentional action and resistance, but to highlight the ways in which non-human objects, beings and processes both enable and confound the attempts of humans to enact their own projects (Lockie 2004b).

The ‘relational materialism’ of ANT (see Law 1999) has certainly attracted criticism, not least due to suspicion that its decentring of human agency may lead to a discounting of power and domination in the production of social and environmental damage. We will not review this debate in detail here (see Lockie 2004b). However, we will point to the very useful contributions that actor–network studies have made to our understanding of how knowledge, techniques and technologies are implicated in the constitution and extension of power (a theme we return to below, in relation to the assembling and reassembling of social-ecological systems). We will also point to the implications of relational materialism for our understanding of scale. A network perspective suggests that there is no change of scale in the social domain between the micro/actor and the macro/structural. According to Latour (1999), macro/structural phenomena are neither the sum of localized interactions nor the context for those interactions. They are better conceived, he argues, as attempts to sum up and thence to influence ‘interactions through various kinds of devices, inscriptions, forms and formulae, into a very local, very practical, very tiny locus’ (Latour 1999: 17). Several contributions to this book problematize spatial and/or temporal scale in a way consistent with the idea that scale ought to be conceived as a potentially unstable network effect.

Categorizing theoretical perspectives on environment and society according to a constructivist–materialist dualism not only is somewhat forced; it also understates diversity and debate among theorists who might otherwise be positioned on the same side of this dualism. An excellent example of such diversity is provided by proponents of, variously, ecological modernization and ecological Marxism, both of which are predominantly materialist in orientation. These and other key theoretical perspectives on global socio-ecological change are presented in Part I of this volume.

Challenges, contradictions and consequences of global socio-ecological change

The contributions to Part I of this volume address the conceptual and policy challenges associated with the global acceleration of markets’ social inequality, and anthropogenic environmental change early in the third millennium. Written from a variety of perspectives and empirical points of reference, the chapters all take up the seriousness of the challenges; the necessity of drawing from social scientific theories, methods and evidence to discern important patterns and dynamics in those changes; and the fashioning of effective policy instruments to encourage change in more socially and ecologically benign or even beneficial directions. Underlying each of the six chapters is a critical realist approach to the thoughtful integration of theory, evidence and policy application. Altogether, these six contributions give evidence of the significant breadth of issues, variety of approaches and depth of critical engagement and debate being utilized in contemporary environmental social science inquiry on the challenges, contradictions and consequences of global socio-ecological change.

Arthur Mol, Gert Spaargaren and David Sonnenfeld (Chapter 2) take stock of scholarship on processes of ecological modernization in advanced and developing economies around the world. Reviewing the accomplishments of three decades of such studies, they discuss key debates involving this socio-environmental approach and outline a research agenda for the study of institutional environmental transformation. For the further development of social theory of (global) environmental change, they argue, three advances are critical: extending the geographical scope of environmental social science to include more places around the world; increasing analysis of transboundary social and environmental flows, and their regulation and reform; and examining the vital cultural dimensions of change necessary for greater sustainability.

In Chapter 3, Andrew Jorgenson and Jennifer Givens explore two frontier areas within quantitative, cross-national, world-systems analysis of global social and environmental change: ecologically unequal exchange theory, which ‘considers how international trade’ allows more powerful developed nations to externalize at least some of their environmental impacts to less-developed countries’ (p. 40); and studies of foreign investment dependence and environmental impact, exploring the relationship between ‘increased levels of foreign investment within less-developed countries … [and] dirtier forms of extraction and production … environmental harms, and … costs to human beings’ (ibid.).

Dayong Hong, Chenyang Xiao and Stewart Lockie (Chapter 4) use the dramatic rise of China as a global economic power and its attendant significance for global environmental change to explore limitations of Western socio-environmental theory. Chronicling both China’s extraordinary economic accomplishments and the daunting environmental challenges now facing the Chinese people and government, the authors push ecological modernization theory, in particular, to: ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Socio-ecological transformations and the social sciences
• PART I Challenges, contradictions and consequences of global socio-ecological change
• PART II Climate change, energy and adaptation
• PART III Urban environmental change, governance and adaptation
• PART IV Risk, uncertainty and social learning
• PART V (Re)assembling social-ecological systems
• Index