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Paper long abstract:

Future Earth is a 10-year international research initiative on global environmental change (GEC) for sustainability that was launched in June 2012, merging several existing international GEC research programmes. Key features planned for its fully operational phase (from early 2015) include: an emphasis on integrated research across disciplines spanning natural and social science, the humanities and engineering; the co-design and co-production of research with stakeholder groups including funders, policy makers, civil society, and the media; and the initiative's global scope.

In its work towards institutional and disciplinary integration, Future Earth exemplifies (calls for) shifts in knowledge production and research communities towards overarching programmatic themes and 'anti-silo' collaboration across boundaries. But how Future Earth's role as a global, integrated, unified platform might be reconciled with, enable, or foreclose multiplicities of everyday and particular forms of knowledge and research practices, visions and pathways for the future remains to be seen.

Based on initial results of a qualitative case study of Future Earth (using documentary analysis, in depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation), this paper will explore how GEC and sustainability research futures are articulated and performed at research governance and project levels in Future Earth; the role of practices and devices such as research agenda-setting exercises and their outputs; the forms of inclusion and exclusion enacted in attempts to define and engage the Future Earth community; and the role of STS ideas on science and society in these processes and developments.