Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change

Leigh Price, Heila Lotz-Sistka, Leigh Price, Heila Lotz-Sistka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317338475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions of structural and epistemic violence. Research deliberations and applied research case studies in environmental education and activism from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions.

This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: "How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth's people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?" The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realist-influenced research methodologies. Offering contributions from a small but growing community of researchers working with critical realism in the global South, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of environmental education, sustainability, development and the philosophy of critical realism in general.

1
Why critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change?

Introducing the book

Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Leigh Price

The contemporary social-ecological condition is characterized by powerful changes in the way that we relate to each other and to the environment. This has led to increased ecological vulnerability, which is also accompanied by ongoing, and increased societal vulnerability. Nevertheless there remain opportunities for developing new social-ecological relations, and for social-ecological learning and change. This would seem to require a strong project of recovering ontology, and a challenging and broadening of dominant ways of knowing (Mignolo, 2000) that also tend to commit what Bhaskar describes as the ‘epistemic fallacy’, or the ‘the analysis or reduction of being to knowledge of being’ (Bhaskar, 2010, p. 1). In response, Bhaskar (ibid.) suggests critical realism as an alternative that embodies a ‘compatibility of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality’. This includes a ‘re-vindication of ontology’ and the possibility of recognizing and accounting for structure, difference and change in the world in ways that escape ontological actualism and ontological monovalence or ‘the generation of a purely positive account of reality’ (ibid., p. 15).

Addressing the social-ecological concerns of our times would seem to require intentional human agency of all ‘planetary subjects’¹ (Spivak, 1999, p. 46), to achieve transformation towards sustainability in ways that ensure the flourishing of all current and future generations. Bhaskar (2008 [1993], p. 9) describes agency as: ‘radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably groundable projects’. This implies a role for education and social learning, as transformative praxis involves knowledge, values, skills, beliefs and motives that are learned in various socio-cultural and educational contexts, both formal and informal. Bhaskar (2010), arguing from the standpoint of concrete utopianism, suggests that a key role for intellectuals and educators is be involved in the envisaging of alternative possible futures for humanity. The field of environmental education has been engaging with these ideas and possibilities for the past 40 or more years, but has experienced difficulties which are ascribed to underlying commitments to untenable philosophical positions of either positivism, participation or postmodernism (Price, 2007). In this book we explore how critical realism can offer possibilities that overcome these difficulties. In doing this, we recognize that our efforts are necessarily fallible, partial and incomplete since all of our efforts take place in open systems.

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of the regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change (UNEP, 2006; IPCC, 2014). At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century-long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions, structural and epistemic violence (Neocosmos, 2012). Research deliberations and applied research case studies from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions.

This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: ‘How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth’s people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?’ Many of the contributions in this book arise from academic work supervised and supported by the Rhodes University Environmental Learning Research Centre where explorations of critical realist scholarship emerged following the work of Price (2007). The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realist-influenced research methodologies. They represent a small but growing community of researchers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many southern African researchers decided to use critical realism as a result of similar frustrations to those that originally motivated the founder of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014).^2,3 Essentially, Bhaskar wanted to contribute to making the world a better place. However, he was frustrated to discover that he was not allowed to talk about the world, only about theories of the world. Against the flow of contemporary philosophy of science at the time, he countered this prohibition by arguing that to change the world, and to change our beliefs about the world, it is necessary to have a conception of the world. If one says that a belief about the world is inadequate then there must be something which remains the same between the inadequate belief and the more adequate belief that one wants to replace it with (Bhaskar, 2014). Therefore, the starting point of critical realism was that to coherently critique beliefs, we need a notion of the (real) world.

In addition to making emancipatory research a possibility, critical realism also has important implications for education.⁴ In discussing Bhaskar’s naturalism in the context of educational research, David Scott (2010) explains that social objects, though they are real, change constantly. He suggests that researchers need to focus on the changing object, as it is this that is ‘relatively enduring’. Scott suggests that it is possible to see that objects can change to such an extent that they can become barely recognizable in relation to their former selves; it is possible to re-imagine education (Kanu, 2003). For example, unlike 50 years ago when curricula and education largely ignored issues of the environment, there is today a worldwide engagement with the processes of integrating environment and sustainability concepts, knowledge, pedagogical practices and values into national curricula, and into a range of community and public education programmes, including higher education (UNESCO, 2014). This project is not uncontested, and remains an emergent ‘unfinished project’ as can be seen from the chapters in this book.

This points to another key tenet of critical realism, which recognizes that knowledge is fallible, because it may be refuted. What counted as legitimate knowledge 50 years ago is not the same today. In interpreting this change, environmental education researchers need to take account of changes at deeper levels of social-ecological reality, where generative mechanisms and deep-seated structures are at work. Indeed, these have not only generated significant changes in educational thinking and practice the world over, but they have also generated a change within the field of environmental education research itself, where environmental education research and practice activities are nowadays often framed within, replaced by, or linked to the often conflicting discourses of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), social-ecological justice, political ecology, deep ecology and/or conservation discourses.

In the past 40 or more years environment and development concerns have become more closely coupled, as environmental justice movements have gained ground, and as deeper understandings of the relationship between political economy and political ecology have emerged. In a global South context, this has also been accompanied by a greater focus on decolonization (Mignolo, 2000; Dussel, 1998) and framing of a de-colonial ‘ecological consciousness’ as counter-narrative to mainstream neo-liberal capitalism (which can include some forms of sustainable development thinking) (Leff, 2009). In this regard, Dussel (1998) suggests that the ‘end’ to the system of Western epistemology is rapidly being constituted by three limits: (1) the ecological destruction of the planet emerging from a concept that nature is an ‘exploitable object’ for serving capital’s interests; (2) poverty, emerging from a conception that unequal distributions of wealth are limitless; and (3) the impossibility of subsuming peoples and cultures through homogenizing modernization processes (see also Neocosmos, 2012).

In ways that are not unrelated to this, Martinez-Alier (2002, p. 14) identifies what he calls ‘three clusters’ of environmental concern and activism that are emerging, and describes them as:

1. the ‘cult of wilderness’, concerned with the preservation of wild Nature, without anything to say on industry and urbanization, indifferent or opposed to economic growth, most worried by population growth, backed up scientifically by conservation biology;
2. the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’, concerned with the sustainable management or ‘wise use’ of natural resources and with the control of pollution not only in industrial contexts, but also in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, resting on a belief in new technologies and the ‘internalization of externalities’ as instruments for ecological modernization, backed up by industrial ecology and environmental economics;
3. the environmental justice movement, popular environmentalism, the environmentalism of the poor, livelihood ecology, and liberation ecology, grown out of local, regional, national and global ecological distribution conflicts caused by economic growth and social inequalities. Examples are conflicts over water use, over access to forests, over the burdens of pollution and over ecologically unequal exchange, which are studied by political ecology.

Interesting for a text on education are the disciplinary roots that partly shape these forms of environmentalism vis-à-vis conservation biology, industrial ecology, economics and political ecology (amongst others). De-colonial theorists have much to say about how modern (Western-centric) education system disciplines have come to ‘discipline reason’ in particular ways that exclude and/or marginalize much of what there is to know or how we come to know reality. They also describe how the mainly Western epistemological disciplines tend to ignore the ontologies of a wider range of more complex forms of epistemology and reason (Gordon, 2014; Mignolo, 2000; Spivak, 1999; Kanu, 2003), a point that is reflected in a number of the chapters in this book, partly also motivating their use of critical realism.

Significant from an ontological and epistemological perspective for environmental education, Martinez-Alier (2002) argues that there are ‘points of contact’ and ‘points of disagreement’ amongst these varieties of environmentalism. He ultimately suggests that the points of contact are ontological, as the common ground that unites all environmentalists (despite epistemologically diverse perspectives) are the deep-seated structural conditions and mechanisms that shape and hold a (globally) powerful, colonially inspired anti-environmental lobby in place, which he suggests has more powerful effects in the global South than in the global North. This lobby tends to use epistemological strategies such as anti-development discourse to marginalize environmental action, a strategy that creates a tension-laden space for transformative environmental education praxis in the global South. As can be seen in the chapters of this book, this appears to give rise to a need for environmental educators to more clearly examine and understand the deep-seated and ontologically grounded contradictions that shape environmental practices and activism in a context where political ecology and livelihood ecology often show anti-development discourse to be filled with false assumptions (i.e. that environmental concerns can be separated out from development concerns). This is an issue that is considered by a number of the authors in this book, and appears to be partly motivating their use of critical realism. In Chapter 16 for example, Victor Munnik makes a clear argument as to how critical realism can advance environmental justice work in South Africa. As pointed out by Leigh Price in Chapter 2, such forms of critical engagement require humility, reflexivity and criticality.

As shown across the chapters in the book, critical realism provides explanatory tools and forms of reasoning that allow for making the complexities found in our contexts more visible and open for dialogue, engagement, learning and reflexivity. Most of the influences for the educational work shared in this book appear to be located at the intersections of sustainable development and environmental justice orientations outlined above, with many leaning in the direction of environmental justice, which is also where the emancipatory interests in environmentalism and associated forms of scholarship are most pronounced. There are also various intersectional forms of engagement with decolonization, especially in attempts to assert cognitive justice, indigenous knowledge and epistemology, and to open new spaces for learning engagements with absences. These various emancipatory/decolonization educational engagements tend to largely intersect with environmental justice discourse. This is a research arena that could potentially be further advanced in environmental education scholarship in southern Africa.

Being aware that our educational research activities and practices are an outcome of deep-seated generative mechanisms and emergence over time (morphogenesis) allows us to theorize our agency as educators. This, however, requires reflexivity as indicated by Price (Chapter 2). This agency is a pre-condition for an effective educational practice that will contribute to our emancipation from social and environmental ills (Bhaskar, 2008 [1993], pp. 163–173) (see also Chapters 2 and 17). As stated by Scott (2010, p. 6):

Critical realists designate the relation between structure and agency as the key framing device at the ontological level; and furthermore, understand all observational or experiential statements as framed by a specific set of conceptual relations, that is, all observational or theoretical statements are in some sense theory-laden. As a consequence, any description of the world is both explanatory within a particular set of conceptual relations and potentially transformative of those relations. In short, educational processes take place in open systems.

That social researchers must engage with the systemic openness of the social world differentiates them from many (although not all) natural scientists who have the luxury of being able to close their system of enquiry. Social science thus requires the ‘use of methods and strategies that fit with systemic openness’ (Scott, 2010, p. 5). Scott suggests that such methods should include ‘inferential judgements from the analysis of indirect evidence’, that is retroduction, as described in the approach to science advocated by Bhaskar (2010) called the DREI(C).⁵

This book chronicles how environmental educators in southern Africa have tentatively explored what environmental education might look like if it were to assume that our research describes an open system context. As suggested by Scott (2010), several of the authors have made use ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change? Introducing the book
• 2 Key critical realist concepts for environmental educators
• 3 Using critical realism to explain change in the context of participatory mapping and resilience
• 4 Networking: enabling or constraining institutionalization of environmental education courses in universities
• 5 Underlabouring systems thinking with critical realism in understanding Rhodes University’s response to the sustainability imperative
• 6 Bhaskar and collective action: using laminations to structure a literature review of collective action and water management
• 7 Absenting the absence of parallel learning pathways for intermediate skills: the ‘missing middle’ in the environmental sector in South Africa
• 8 The emergence of environmental ethics discourses in laminated, open systems: some educational considerations
• 9 Working with critical realist perspective and tools at the interface of indigenous and scientific knowledge in a science curriculum setting
• 10 Indigenous knowledge and critical realism on the Eastern Coast of Tanzania
• 11 Dialectical critical realism and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT): exploring and expanding learning processes in sustain able agriculture workplace contexts
• 12 Community learning as a passage through the dialectic? Engaging with absences in an irrigation scheme in Mozambique
• 13 Exploring contradictions and absences in mobilizing ‘learning as process’ for sustainable agricultural practices
• 14 Exploring critical realist insights into transformative environmental learning processes in contexts of social-ecological risk
• 15 Emergent properties and position-practice system of university educators in the mainstreaming of Education for Sustain able Development
• 16 Steel Valley and the absence of environmental justice in the new South Africa: critical realism’s kinship with environmental justice
• 17 Absenting absence: expanding zones of proximal development in environmental learning processes
• 18 Some implications of metaReality for environmental educators
• Index