Beyond Technical Fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement

Abstract

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

A historical, scaled approach to climate change adaptation: the case of Vietnam

“…Importantly, these issues are generally problematized as issues of water management rather than unsuitable development trajectories, so critical reflection on the premises of high modernist development is sidelined in favor of finding the proper technical solutions (CCAP 2012). This reflects a broad tendency towards depoliticization in dominant climate change adaptation approaches (Lindegaard 2018;Nightingale et al 2019;Swyngedouw 2010: 64-65;Taylor 2015: 51-52).…”

Framing Climate Services: Logics, Actors, and Implications for Policies and Projects

“…Second, inclusiveness in the conduct of CIS projects, for both producers and users of climate information, is necessary for the recognition of the existence of several forms of knowledge, the establishment of trust, and the guarantee of the longer-term involvement of all the stakeholders [93]. Nightingale et al [140] propose, in this regard, going beyond traditional reflections on the interfaces between science and society and opening the door to new visions that better consider the different forms of existing knowledge. In other words, for these authors, it is not necessary to produce more knowledge or to improve knowledge integration, but rather, it is necessary to orient framing towards the plurality of knowledge.…”

New Science Institutions for Global Sustainability

“…It follows that, to be transformative, science needs to address deeper socio-economic and political arrangements (Blythe et al, 2018;Fazey et al, 2018;Patterson et al, 2018;. And yet, what is presented as solutions-oriented or transformative research often fails to challenge current dominant practices and structures in science and society (Blühdorn, Butzlaff, Deflorian, & Hausknost, 2018;Daly & Dilling, 2019;Jagannathan et al, 2019;Kueffer, Schneider, & Wiesmann, 2019;Nightingale et al, 2019;Turnhout, Metze, Wyborn, Klenk, & Louder, 2020). This includes persistent neutrality towards capitalism in sustainability transitions research (Asara, Otero, Demaria, & Corbera, 2015;Feola, 2019), a dominance of technical fixes in responding to climate change (Hulme, 2009;Nightingale et al, 2019;Wesselink et al, 2013) and inattention to power relationships and knowledge politics in coproduction of knowledge and outcomes for sustainability (Daly & Dilling, 2019;Jagannathan et al, 2019;Turnhout et al, 2020).…”

“…Nevertheless, science institutions, perhaps more than individual research projects, hold the potential to address the challenges of transformative research for sustainability by attending to societal change across different scales and societal institutions (Jagannathan et al, 2019;Wyborn et al, 2019). Yet, most importantly, for science for sustainability to achieve its mission of sustainability transformations, science institutions need to open their perspective to the power and politics of societal change (Fazey et al, 2018;Marshall, Dolley, & Priya, 2018;Nightingale et al, 2019;Wyborn et al, 2019). Without explicitly addressing politics and power in science for sustainability, science institutions risk reproducing existing power structures and fall short of supporting structural societal transformations (Blythe et al, 2018;Fazey et al, 2018;Jagannathan et al, 2019;Nightingale et al, 2019).…”

“…R. Miller, Muñoz-Erickson, & Redman, 2011); and it provides a barrier to the transformative mission of science for sustainability (Fazey et al, 2018). In recent years, with sustainability scholars increasingly reflecting on the role of science in societal transformations, questions of values and politics in science start to receive more attention (Nightingale et al, 2019). Scholars, for example, have pointed to the importance of addressing normative dimensions of science and practice in supporting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Schneider et al, 2019).…”