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- Convenors:
-
Britta Acksel
(Wuppertal Institute for Environment, Climate, and Energy)
Catharina Lüder (Technische Universität Berlin)
Anja Klein (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
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- Discussant:
-
Joerg Niewoehner
(Technical University of Munich)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-02A37
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
Sustainability research is increasingly expected to contribute to transformations. How (focusing on research methods) is this being done, how is research transformed on the way, and which futures are enacted/foreclosed? We want to explore STS-contributions to sustainability transformations.
Long Abstract:
Sustainability research is increasingly expected to contribute to sustainability transformations. Especially inter- and transdisciplinary research is called upon to speed up transformations. For STS scholars this means to look into how sustainability research is being done and transformed in this setting and how STS perspectives are taken up in research on sustainability transformations, eg. in recent evocations of a relational turn. Here, potential spaces for method(ological) experimentation, collaboration or co-laboration are emerging. In this respect, it is important to consider which futures this research creates, enacts, and performs or rather forecloses.
The emphasis lies on (novel) research methods and approaches, such as (but not limited to) Real-World Experiments, Living Labs, Pre-Enactment, Participatory Modelling, VR Scenarios. We invite papers that discuss some of the following questions:
What kind of knowledges do research methods employed in sustainability research produce? What ways of un/knowing do they promote?
What do research methods in sustainability science seek to transform and how are methods themselves transformed on the way?
How do engaged (and/or normative) commitments and/or expectations to enabling sustainability transformations change ways of doing research, e.g. with regards to inter- and transdisciplinarity?
We are looking for papers presenting empirical and/or conceptual work on sustainability research methods, that reflect and discuss specific methods or broader methodological developments and/or that question established combinations of theories and methods.
We invite paper presentations for the first session of our panel. This will be followed by a discussion session, which will include a comment on the papers by Jörg Niewöhner as well as an impulse dialogue between the convenors to kick-off a conversation among all participants. We want to explore collaborative spaces for STS-contributions to and reflections on sustainability transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Ethnographic contributions to sustainability research, in this case sustainable groundwater management, can go beyond providing local know-how. Instead, they can study and shape transdisciplinary processes, provide co-used ethnographic data and interdisciplinarily challenge natural sciences.
Paper long abstract:
As part of the junior research group “regulate – regulation of groundwater in telecoupled social-ecological systems” ethnographic research was set out to contribute by studying local formal and informal institutions of groundwater use ethnographically. Over time, the roles and research lines of ethnography became part of interdisciplinary research and transdisciplinary stakeholder processes addressing sustainable groundwater management. In this contribution, the authors reflect on and discuss the multifaceted ethnographic roles as they unfolded differently in these processes. Ethnographic research lines included: First, ethnographic fieldwork with water utility companies and other relevant organizations and authorities of the water sector in Germany, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, tracing complexities of infrastructuring sustainable groundwater management. Second, ethnographic contributions to interdisciplinary research with physical geography and hydrology, ranging from co-using ethnographic data to generative conceptual tensions. Third, ethnographic contributions to transdisciplinary stakeholder workshop series for developing measures for sustainable groundwater management. These included conceptualizations of workshops from an STS-inspired perspective and formulating these workshops as a fieldwork site for participant observation. Additionally, some of the authors also contributed to collaboratively writing “guiding principles for sustainable groundwater management” with participating stakeholders for the county level and its political representatives. Moreover, we will illustrate how these research dynamics and ethnographic implications contribute to futuring visions for sustainable groundwater management.
This paper contextualizes these ethnographic research lines within the broader discussions on sustainability transformations by examining the ethnographic contributions as methodological experimentation in collaborations and concomitant potentials to generate co-laborative spaces that emerge in research on/for sustainable groundwater management.
Paper short abstract:
To what extent is sustainability assessment fundamentally limited in terms of its transformative potential? This paper seeks to problematise and politicise methods of measurement in the hope of opening space for new ways of doing.
Paper long abstract:
Sustainability assessment presents a vast paradigm of tools, frameworks, indicators, and methodologies for aiding the transition towards a normatively conceived ‘better’ society. To realise change we need to be able to measure transformative progress, to make sure we are going in the right direction, and adjust our trajectory if necessary. This logic is embraced, largely uncritically, across sustainability research. Yet after four decades of sustainability assessment, transformation is not forthcoming. There is no agreement on what sustainability is, let alone how to measure it.
Measurement challenges are well documented within the sustainability assessment literature, from technical challenges such as barriers to data collection, to epistemological questions surrounding the quantification of subjective concepts like happiness. Yet the choice of what gets measured (and consequently what does not) is inherently political, a core observation which is often lost in the minutiae of developing new assessment methods.
Drawing on literature on the history and philosophy of measurement, and reflecting on two empirical attempts to develop sustainability assessment frameworks, this paper presents a provocation: is sustainability assessment necessary? Does it inhibit transformative potential? And does it offer us anything beyond an incrementalist adjustment to the status quo? Can we transform methods of measurement, or is this a futile endeavour?
Paper short abstract:
This contribution builds on an ethnographic study of participatory modelling practices. It discusses how participatory sustainability science might contribute to transformation by paying renewed attention to enactments of social order that occur through seemingly technical research practices.
Paper long abstract:
Researchers interested in enabling sustainability transformations as well as STS scholars increasingly champion participatory research – along with increasing incentives from funding bodies to use participatory methods. Participatory modelling often implies a change in the way in which conceptual models of sustainability issues are constructed. Sometimes, this remaking of research pratices explicitly seeks to empower participants, by making their perspectives known or helping to strengthen exchange networks. Ironically, however, this approach, which outwardly associates a ‘political’ qualifier with sustainability science and broadens models of sustainability to incorporate ‘social’ factors, may inadvertently sustain a conventional separation between knowledge and politics.
Building on an ethnographic inquiry into a particular branch of participatory modelling, this paper outlines some practices central to the approach. It discusses, among other things, in how far a participatory modelling practice that relies on fixed model structures and methods might inadvertently promote a human-centric, closed-ended way of knowing that potentially enacts a version of ‘the good’ which shares ordering principles with conventional perspectives on ethics, such as a meritocratic utilitarian ethics or a contractual ethics, and standard models of democracy. Such distinct versions of ethics might emerge alongside a version of knowledge that emphasises knowing in terms of an indexing of reality to identify an inventory of factors to intervene on given a substantive good-of-the-whole, at the expense of knowing, for example, contextually contingent processes and practices of meaning-making that sustain conceptual links and variables in the models, or different goods and social capabilities.