Philosophy of sustainability experimentation _ experimental legacy, normativity and transfer of evidence

Abstract

The recent proliferation of types and accounts of experimentation in sustainability science still lacks philosophical reflection. The present paper introduces this burgeoning topic to the philosophy of science by identifying key notions and dynamics in sustainability experimentation, by discussing taxonomies of sustainability experimentation and by focusing on barriers to the transfer of evidence. It integrates three topics: the philosophy of experimentation; the sustainability science literature on experimentation; and discussions on values in science coming from the general philosophy of science, the social sciences, and sustainability science. The aim is to improve understanding of how sustainability experimentation has evolved, from a broader picture of the history and philosophy of science, with a specific focus on understanding evidence production and how evidence traveling in and from sustainability experiments can be improved, particularly in the context of complex and pervasive normative commitments of the research. By engaging in these topics, this research is one of the first philosophical accounts of sustainability experimentation, contributing both to the knowledge on specific philosophies of science and to the further development of an evidence-based sustainability science through a better understanding of the barriers to more relevant and usable knowledge.

Transformative research for sustainability: characteristics, tensions, and moving forward

“…Beyond co-production, another collaborative knowledge creation process is experimenting with co-produced knowledge (Fazey et al, 2018, see also 4.1). Epistemological attention has recently focused on observing experiments in real-world settings, often conceptualized as real-world laboratories (McCrory et al, 2020; Schäpke et al, 2018b; Stojanovic, 2021). Transformative experiments produce empirical evidence through iterative prototyping, evaluating and learning from outcomes (Caniglia et al, 2017).…”

“…The accountability issue is also tightly connected with perspectives on the roles of values in research (see 4.4). Transformative modes of research explicitly recognize that values play a role in the ethical assumptions underlying research and researchers' epistemic choices (Douglas, 2000; Kincaid et al, 2007), and in the normative scenarios guiding a system's trajectory (Stojanovic, 2021, see also 4.4; Weiland et al, 2017). This stands in radical opposition to the traditional academic adherence to the ideal of scientific objectivity (i.e.…”