What is it? (Wiki)

• emerged in the 21st century as a new academic discipline
• officially introduced with a "Birth Statement" at the World Congress "Challenges of a Changing Earth 2001"
• reflects a desire to give the generalities and broad-based approach of “sustainability” a stronger analytic and scientific underpinning
• brings together scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives from north and south, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine (Clark, W.C., & Dickson, N. M. 2003.)
• can be usefully thought of as "neither 'basic' nor 'applied' research but as a field defined by the problems it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs (Ecologist William Clark)
• focused on examining the interactions between human, environmental, and engineered systems to understand and contribute to solutions for complex challenges that threaten the future of humanity and the integrity of the life support systems of the planet, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and land and water degradation
• provides a critical framework for sustainability (Komiyama, H., Takeuchi, K. 2006)
• From Harvard's Sustainability Science programme page: 'Sustainability science' is problem-driven, interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to facilitate the design, implementation, and evaluation of effective interventions that foster shared prosperity and reduced poverty while protecting the environment. It is defined by the problems it addresses rather than the disciplines it employs. It thus draws as needed from multiple disciplines of the natural, social, medical and engineering sciences, from the professions, and from the knowledge of practice
• Others take a much broader view of sustainability science, emphasizing the need to analyze the root causes of the fundamental unsustainability of the prevailing economic system, such as the emphasis on growth as key to solving political and social problems and advancing society's well-being. In a 2012 article entitled "Sustainability Science Needs to Include Sustainable Consumption,", Halina Brown argues that sustainability science must include the study of the sociology of material consumption and the structure of consumerist society, the role of technology in aggravating the unsustainable social practices, as well as in solving the problems they create, the macroeconomic theories that presuppose economic growth as a necessary condition for advancing societal well-being, and others
• Objectives:
  
  • Knowledge-Structuring of Issues: essential first step in the effort to acquire a comprehensive view of sustainability issues
  • Coordination of Data: key research and data for sustainability are sourced from many scientific disciplines, topics and organisations. A major part of knowledge structuring will entail building up the tools that provide an “overview” of what is known - SS can construct a framework in which vast amounts of relative data can be accessed
  • Interdisciplinary Approaches: attempt, by sustainability science, to understand the integrated “whole” of planetary and human systems requires cooperation between scientific, social and economic disciplines, public and private sectors, academia and government. In short it requires a massive global cooperative effort and one major task of sustainability science is to assist integrated cross-disciplinary coordination
    
    

What is it? (Slides)

• Kates et al 2001 was the seminal article on sustainability science
• Led by lots of harvard scientists who set up a programme on it at their uni
• 'Sustainable Science seeks to understand the fundamental character of the interactions between nature and society, with a view to supporting sustainable development'
  
  • Post-positivist definition: First half is more objective, but the latter has an explicitly non-normative agenda - it's not value-free - this is deliberate as they're acknowledging that they're using science to support a certain agenda

What is it? (Wiki)

• Aka Citizen Science
• Conducted in whole or in part by non-professional, non-expert, amateurs
• Linked to sustainability science as social values are endogenous to it in addition to factual information and hypotheses
  
  • To best find out what these social values are, we use broad and inclusive public discourses on sustainability
  • Another vital reason for using it is that people have place-based knowledge that scientists may not have/have access to
  • Backstrand argues that as scientists are finite groups, civic science is a great way to pull in local understanding
    
    

Examples:

• European breeding bird survey data provide input for the Farmland Bird Index, adopted by the European Union as a structural indicator of sustainable development
• the Monitoring through many eyes project collates thousands of underwater images of the Great Barrier Reef and provides an interface for elicitation of reef health indicators ( Queensland University of Technology)
• A study from 2016 indicates that the largest impact of citizen science is in research on biology, conservation and ecology, and is utilized mainly as a methodology of collecting and classifying data (Kullenberg, 2016)

Examples of Risks due to Conflict

• In Gaza:
  
  • Sanctions such as limited fishing grounds, smaller market for crops, reduced availability of pesticides and herbicides, increased solid waste tipping etc. all leading to consequences such as increased groundwater contamination, lower yields, lower incomes from agriculture, all of which then reduce livelihood wellbeing and public health
  • An example of how conflict and environmental vulnerability are linked: closing the country off means very limited aquifer supply, this means it's overdrawn which allows salt water to permeate into the aquifer, leading to contamination which will eventually render it undrinkable
  • E.g if you want to understand why they don't have enough food supply, can you really just look at increasing climate change decreasing yields or do you also need to appreciate the fact that the conflict has meant people have had to abandon many greenhouses used for farming in?
• In the West Bank:
  
  • Again, stakeholders argued you need to understand CC through the lens of the occupation
  • Things like restrictions on farmer's movements, restrictions on ability to extract water, etc. all feed into reducing yields
  • Of course, you need to be careful about motivations to exaggerate, but what was said more or less correlated with what the humanitarian organisations were seeing on the ground
  • If the farmers can't get to tend their land, which is now separated by a wall, for a certain amount of time, it is confiscated from them

Civic Science and Sustainability Science

• Share key concerns - we need participation, transparency and we need to take a problem-based approach
• SS Recommends 'co-production' between scientists and citizens - but rather than accepting that there's an issue with how science is done, they treat this as an 'inclusion' of the stakeholders/citizens and Backstrand notes that SS doesn't yet have a clear outline of how the norms, institutions and procedures of science must be changed to increase inclusivity
  
  • He argues SS hasn't theorised enough its own post-positivist position
  • SS talks about the need for co-production, but doesn't yet grasp the reforms needed for if they truly believe in the post-positivist approach
  • SS sees social science as an input to SS to help us solve issues in applied ways, but the post-positivist argument is much more radical - E.g. Thinking back to Haraway; science is more infused with values and politics than SS is acknowledging - e.g. there's nothing yet in SS that acknowledges the gendered nature of scientific systems
  • So whilst many conflate CS and SS, there's a clear argument, particularly that the Hardal perspective hasn't accounted enough for PP views

Continued...

• Which and whose knowledges are represented as true, legitimate and authoritative? These insights are supported by critical feminist epistemology questioning the universal aspiration of modern science and calling for an inclusion of local, subjugated knowledge in societal and technological decision-making
• The representative paradox of science is that a very small group who holds the title of "scientist" can speak on behalf of a universal humanity (Fuller, 2000)
  
  • civic science as democratization challenges the conduct of scientific problem solving by aspiring to transform the institutions of science to incorporate democratic principles
• Can the rules of modern democracy be readily transferred to the heart of scientific inquiry without compromising scientific quality and politicizing scientific expertise?
  
  

Why CS emerged:

• As a response to:
  
  • the emergence of "big" planetary science:
    
    • civic science can be conceived as a reaction to the expansion of "mega-science" enabled by innovations in global environmental modelling
    • is epitomized by the expansion of global models of atmospheric, hydrological and terrestrial systems in international negotiations, research programs and international organizations
    • This emerging global environmental change science has been represented as global and universal knowledge even if the modelling activities are concentrated in a few laboratories in the Northern hemisphere
    • Critics point to a failure to couple global western scientific knowledge with local and indigenous knowledge, agendas, needs and concerns. A remedy for this is to increase public participation in scientific assessment processes, recognizing the "glocal" level of knowledge production.
  • the emergence of the "legitimacy crisis" in science:
    
    • more pronounced in Europe in the backdrop of food safety scares in the 1990s
    • inflationary use of expert advice has paradoxically produced more uncertainty
    • Science has been called on to provide a firm basis for justifying and making political decisions credible
    • is in many areas provisional, uncertain and incomplete. Thus, competing expert knowledge has in many instances given rise to a battle between experts and counter-experts (link to exam question)
    • Corporate science has contested environmental advocacy science and vice versa
    • This politicization of scientific knowledge has paved the way for the erosion of the authority and legitimacy of science as objective knowledge. When the public experiences that science can be both contested and uncertain, the policy-process, which relies on purportedly objective knowledge, loses credibility. The erosion of the legitimating function of science in certain domains has spurred the calls for making science more accountable and democratic.

Continued...

• A basic tenet in this model is to promote public use of reason, argument and free deliberation. Free deliberation has the potential to transform preferences, enable a new collective will and render public decisions more legitimate.
• An unsettled issue is whether the rules for production of scientific knowledge will have to change in order to enact civic science.
• Civic science can be conceived as an instrument to dethrone science or to deprive scientific knowledge from its authority and legitimacy conferred by society
• Issue: citizen deliberation in science will be cumbersome, time-consuming, ineffective and slow
  
  • problems grasping the complexities of the highly specialized knowledge of environmental science. Elite models of democracy are highly skeptical of lay citizen participation
  • The ordinary citizen does not only lack time and capacity to understand the complexity of issues, but the public can be outright ignorant and irrational
  • They should trust specialized experts as they trust their political representatives.
• Issue: advent of global environmental problem-solving may limit the scope for civic science
  
  • ongoing experiments with citizen and participatory expertise have primarily taken place at the domestic level. Is the strong version of civic science compatible with the effort to manage global environmental risks relying on global modelling and "big science"?
• Issue: deliberative democracy may be insufficient in promoting the democratization of scientific expertise
  
  • Deliberation does not necessarily change the ground rules for debate and may ignore the way power enters speech itself. The power largely resides in setting the agenda and establishing norms and rules for decision-making.
    
    

NOTE: reflexive modernisation: We've moved beyond the issue of trying to harness nature to the issue of trying to deal with the consequences of techno-economic development itself - i.e. think about social development that arises as a reflex to previous decisions/activities, and how this can lead to unintended consequences - useful as it gives a long-term perspective

NOTE: risk society: Concept by Beck: the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk - a risk society is "a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk," - beck defines it as "a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself

Civic Science in Sustainability Science:

• How do the current proposals to restructure science toward the goals of sustainable development fare with civic science?
• in the evolving field of sustainability science a more participatory account of scientific expertise is articulated
• An overarching idea is that science needs to turn toward society and even establish a "new contract" with society.
• was consolidated in preparation for the World Summit for Sustainable Development
• Inter-disciplinarity, policy-relevancy and holistic perspectives are cornerstones
• Sustainability science has to be accountable beyond peer review and include a variety of actors in assessment processes
• Moreover, the local-global connectivity is a central aspect of sustainability science. Global knowledge about environmental degradation has to be coupled with local knowledge to produce sustainable solutions.
• In the quest for sustainability, "universal" knowledge must be connected to "place-based" knowledge.
• indigenous or traditional knowledge is recognized as a cumulative body of knowledge that can provide alternative, local perspectives. Science and traditional knowledge should be coupled in order to realize a more equitable partnership as well as mutual learning
  
  

The Reality:

• Nevertheless, the focus is more on participation than on changing the rules and practices of scientific knowledge production, utilization and communication
• Sustainability science envisions an increased transparency and participation in science and technology in order to foster the legitimacy of the scientific endeavour
• These proposals can be conceived as a step toward the kind of reflexive scientization that Beck calls for.
• However, increased participation in scientific assessment does not necessarily have bearing on the practices, norms and institutions of scientific knowledge production - e.g. getting people to photograph birds in their gardens doesn't go a long way to the kind of rules change that CS is advocating
• Sustainability science does not address how the practices of science have to change to accommodate democratic participation
• unanswered: how institutions and procedures in science have to change to enable broader participation
• there is a lack of a coherent social science perspective
• the field of sustainability science is still an expert-driven inter-disciplinary endeavour, it simply/only raises critical issues on how to make science more transparent and responsive to the needs of society

Conclusions

• Basically, there's an issue of whether science should remain the privilege of experts and should retain its status as the superior form of knowledge production, OR, should it be geared towards a participatory, reflexive and collaborative effort involving societal stakeholders?
• Is it defensible to privilege scientific knowledge over other knowledge forms?
• Civic science says: questions the boundary between scientific expert knowledge and lay knowledge, between global western knowledge and local indigenous knowledge - all expert knowledge is situated in a specific political and cultural context, inherently value-laden and imbued with worldview - scientific and technological decision-making should rest on participation by and collaboration among scientists, citizens and civil society
• Objectivist view says: an objectivist epistemology emphasizes the uniqueness of scientific knowledge epitomized by its systematic features, its transformative effects and its global impacts - i.e. there's things science can only achieve because of its isolation from citizens - The systematic features of science, in terms of the capacity to observe, explain, describe and represent the world, reflect an unprecedented accumulation and progress of knowledge - note that it's about accumulation - this doesn't fit with paradigm shift concepts - local/indigenous knowledge: these knowledge forms do not display the systematic and universal features of modern science - the uniqueness of science grants natural scientists and engineers a continued privileged status in the quest for uncovering the scientific aspects for sustainability
• Therefore, no universal solution can be offered with respect to the balance between democratic and technocratic modes of scientific decision-making. The success of civic science is largely dependent on the context, i.e. the nature of the environmental risk and problem at hand. Finding a balance between traditional scientific inquiry and participatory expertise and between technical and deliberative approaches will be an ongoing endeavor.