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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.

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.