Pub Date : 2022-04-23DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2068224
Amanda Bertana, Brett Clark, T. Benney, Cameron Quackenbush
ABSTRACT Around the world adaptation projects are being implemented, with the hope of essentially climate proofing communities. While there is an abundance of failed adaptation schemes in developing and developed countries alike, there has been little scholarship on this problem. Through interviews with twenty-two climate change adaptation practitioners, we identify four structural challenges that contribute to maladaptation: the focus on technological fixes versus holistic approaches; the difficultly of distinguishing between adaptation and development; the problem of quantifying non-quantifiable variables; and the existence of competing problems given that failure to mainstream climate change adaptation. Addressing these maladaptation dynamics is necessary to enhance successful adaptation processes.
{"title":"Beyond maladaptation: structural barriers to successful adaptation","authors":"Amanda Bertana, Brett Clark, T. Benney, Cameron Quackenbush","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2068224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2068224","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Around the world adaptation projects are being implemented, with the hope of essentially climate proofing communities. While there is an abundance of failed adaptation schemes in developing and developed countries alike, there has been little scholarship on this problem. Through interviews with twenty-two climate change adaptation practitioners, we identify four structural challenges that contribute to maladaptation: the focus on technological fixes versus holistic approaches; the difficultly of distinguishing between adaptation and development; the problem of quantifying non-quantifiable variables; and the existence of competing problems given that failure to mainstream climate change adaptation. Addressing these maladaptation dynamics is necessary to enhance successful adaptation processes.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"448 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41406501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-19DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2065428
Andrew Hargrove, J. Sommer
ABSTRACT Gender mainstreaming is the push in international governance and development to use women’s empowerment, inclusion and labor to be more inclusive and help solve development issues. Research has found that when women are involved in projects, environmental outcomes are more likely to succeed. Over the past 30 years, environmental bilateral development aid has been increasing. Extant research has theorized the relationship between environmental aid, women’s empowerment and forest loss. However, results have been mixed, with some finding that female-focused environmental aid reduces forest loss, while others find that it increases forest loss. To add to this debate, we argue that bilateral aid may be moderated by quality of the receiving nation’s governance. Using high-quality satellite forest loss data, we use ordinary least-squares regression with robust standard errors for a sample of 85 low- and middle-income nations from 2000 to assess if nations with high levels of governance facilitate bilateral aid effectiveness that focuses simultaneously on gender equality and environmental protection. We find that in nations with high levels of governance, bilateral environmental gender aid is significantly associated with reduced levels of forest loss.
{"title":"Gender-mainstreaming, governance, and the environment: an analysis of forest loss","authors":"Andrew Hargrove, J. Sommer","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2065428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2065428","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Gender mainstreaming is the push in international governance and development to use women’s empowerment, inclusion and labor to be more inclusive and help solve development issues. Research has found that when women are involved in projects, environmental outcomes are more likely to succeed. Over the past 30 years, environmental bilateral development aid has been increasing. Extant research has theorized the relationship between environmental aid, women’s empowerment and forest loss. However, results have been mixed, with some finding that female-focused environmental aid reduces forest loss, while others find that it increases forest loss. To add to this debate, we argue that bilateral aid may be moderated by quality of the receiving nation’s governance. Using high-quality satellite forest loss data, we use ordinary least-squares regression with robust standard errors for a sample of 85 low- and middle-income nations from 2000 to assess if nations with high levels of governance facilitate bilateral aid effectiveness that focuses simultaneously on gender equality and environmental protection. We find that in nations with high levels of governance, bilateral environmental gender aid is significantly associated with reduced levels of forest loss.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"484 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47901614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-12DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2064207
Angelina Letourneau, D. Davidson
ABSTRACT The need for institutional change posed by anthropogenic global warming is now well-recognized, and this is particularly the case for agri-food systems, which are both significant contributors to climate change, and highly vulnerable to its impacts. The importance of identity to institutional change is well-recognized in various areas of scholarship, although in the study of institutional responses to climate change this key driver is less often discussed. In this study, we seek to create space for doing so, by focusing on the identity work of a sample of farmers in Alberta, Canada, as they navigate this moment of sector uncertainty. We show how farmer identities are becoming destabilized as producers attempt to accommodate growing environmental and climatological concerns, with many productivist farmers seeking to deflect sources of identity disconfirmation, while post-productivist farmers engage in active community-building and information seeking to support the formation of a new identity.
{"title":"Farmer identities: facilitating stability and change in agricultural system transitions","authors":"Angelina Letourneau, D. Davidson","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2064207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2064207","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The need for institutional change posed by anthropogenic global warming is now well-recognized, and this is particularly the case for agri-food systems, which are both significant contributors to climate change, and highly vulnerable to its impacts. The importance of identity to institutional change is well-recognized in various areas of scholarship, although in the study of institutional responses to climate change this key driver is less often discussed. In this study, we seek to create space for doing so, by focusing on the identity work of a sample of farmers in Alberta, Canada, as they navigate this moment of sector uncertainty. We show how farmer identities are becoming destabilized as producers attempt to accommodate growing environmental and climatological concerns, with many productivist farmers seeking to deflect sources of identity disconfirmation, while post-productivist farmers engage in active community-building and information seeking to support the formation of a new identity.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"459 - 470"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41448250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2057649
Eunyque Sykes
ABSTRACT Black Americans have historically reported aversive attitudes towards the outdoors. First, cultural meanings of the natural world are shaped by historical legacies of racial violence and racialized slavery. Second, public policies after slavery continued to reproduce the separation of Black Americans from green spaces. Thus, Black Americans have developed preferences for more cultivated green spaces as an adaptation to these structural exclusions. This study explored how Black women participating in outdoor activities in Franklin Park experienced the outdoors. The Black women interviewed reported managing facial and bodily expressions, when they are participating in outdoor activities outside of Franklin Park, in order to negotiate the contradictions of racialized outdoor spaces. To explain this, I developed the concept of racialized emotional labor which is: (1) mediation of structural and/or individual racism: required to participate in dynamics where they are systematically racially objectified, (2) hyperawareness of Blackness: required to participate in the minimization of their racial objectification. This study argues that Black women engage in racialized emotional labor in uncultivated green spaces and rural areas because the areas aren't welcoming towards Black people and do not foster a sense of comfortability and belonging, compared to urban parks with diverse crowds like Franklin Park.
{"title":"Environmental justice beyond physical access: rethinking Black American utilization of urban public green spaces","authors":"Eunyque Sykes","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2057649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2057649","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Black Americans have historically reported aversive attitudes towards the outdoors. First, cultural meanings of the natural world are shaped by historical legacies of racial violence and racialized slavery. Second, public policies after slavery continued to reproduce the separation of Black Americans from green spaces. Thus, Black Americans have developed preferences for more cultivated green spaces as an adaptation to these structural exclusions. This study explored how Black women participating in outdoor activities in Franklin Park experienced the outdoors. The Black women interviewed reported managing facial and bodily expressions, when they are participating in outdoor activities outside of Franklin Park, in order to negotiate the contradictions of racialized outdoor spaces. To explain this, I developed the concept of racialized emotional labor which is: (1) mediation of structural and/or individual racism: required to participate in dynamics where they are systematically racially objectified, (2) hyperawareness of Blackness: required to participate in the minimization of their racial objectification. This study argues that Black women engage in racialized emotional labor in uncultivated green spaces and rural areas because the areas aren't welcoming towards Black people and do not foster a sense of comfortability and belonging, compared to urban parks with diverse crowds like Franklin Park.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"388 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46784259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-23DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2053273
Adam Mayer
ABSTRACT The U.S. energy sector has undergone significant changes in the last few decades with three converging trends – the implosion of the coal industry, the marked increase in domestically produced oil and gas, and the increasing viability of renewables. The implosion of coal has proven to be a contentious political issue, with conservative discourse placing the blame for the industry’s poor fortunes on the administration of former President Obama and federal environmental regulations. Coal occupies a unique space in the cultural imaginaries of the Rural U.S., with significant nostalgia for the industry despite its deleterious legacy. Our study is informed by the concept of community economic identity and recent research on right-wing populism. Using survey data from western Colorado collected in 2019, we evaluate how partisanship and nostalgia are associated with mischaracterizations of the causes of the coal industry’s decline. Republicans are more likely to state that former President Obama and federal environmental regulations are the primary cause of coal’s decline and less likely to state that alternative fuels are the cause. Nostalgia is also associated with naming President Obama and federal environmental regulations. Our results imply that the causes of coal’s collapse may not be well understood.
{"title":"Who is to blame? Nostalgia, Partisanship, and the death of coal","authors":"Adam Mayer","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2053273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2053273","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The U.S. energy sector has undergone significant changes in the last few decades with three converging trends – the implosion of the coal industry, the marked increase in domestically produced oil and gas, and the increasing viability of renewables. The implosion of coal has proven to be a contentious political issue, with conservative discourse placing the blame for the industry’s poor fortunes on the administration of former President Obama and federal environmental regulations. Coal occupies a unique space in the cultural imaginaries of the Rural U.S., with significant nostalgia for the industry despite its deleterious legacy. Our study is informed by the concept of community economic identity and recent research on right-wing populism. Using survey data from western Colorado collected in 2019, we evaluate how partisanship and nostalgia are associated with mischaracterizations of the causes of the coal industry’s decline. Republicans are more likely to state that former President Obama and federal environmental regulations are the primary cause of coal’s decline and less likely to state that alternative fuels are the cause. Nostalgia is also associated with naming President Obama and federal environmental regulations. Our results imply that the causes of coal’s collapse may not be well understood.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"471 - 483"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49241463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2054131
Christopher W. Gibson
ABSTRACT By analyzing the multiple forms of debt used by municipal water supply organizations, I present evidence to argue that the financial structures of contemporary public governance give financial interests undue influence over the management of natural resources. This study uses financial statistics and qualitative data pertaining to the largest provider of drinking water in the US, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), an empirically significant case study. Municipal water agencies collect revenues through traditional sources including water sales and tax collections, but they also raise significant funding with a variety of debt instruments. In this study, I first observe a strong increase in revenue-backed debt, supplanting tax-backed debt, as the primary source of funding. Next, I examine how revenues have shifted since mid-century with water sales growing primary and taxation becoming peripheral. Lastly, I analyze the influence of financial gatekeepers – credit rating agencies – considering the growing reliance on private financial capital. I find that rating agencies push finance-oriented objectives on water managers that include commodifying water to maximize revenue, avoiding expenditures, and flouting climatological realities of scarcity, among others. I propose the notions of financial feedbacks and the financial pathology of institutions as conceptual tools for characterizing these processes.
{"title":"‘How will this affect our credit rating?’: municipal debt and governing the environment","authors":"Christopher W. Gibson","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2054131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2054131","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT By analyzing the multiple forms of debt used by municipal water supply organizations, I present evidence to argue that the financial structures of contemporary public governance give financial interests undue influence over the management of natural resources. This study uses financial statistics and qualitative data pertaining to the largest provider of drinking water in the US, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), an empirically significant case study. Municipal water agencies collect revenues through traditional sources including water sales and tax collections, but they also raise significant funding with a variety of debt instruments. In this study, I first observe a strong increase in revenue-backed debt, supplanting tax-backed debt, as the primary source of funding. Next, I examine how revenues have shifted since mid-century with water sales growing primary and taxation becoming peripheral. Lastly, I analyze the influence of financial gatekeepers – credit rating agencies – considering the growing reliance on private financial capital. I find that rating agencies push finance-oriented objectives on water managers that include commodifying water to maximize revenue, avoiding expenditures, and flouting climatological realities of scarcity, among others. I propose the notions of financial feedbacks and the financial pathology of institutions as conceptual tools for characterizing these processes.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"362 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41429457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-14DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2042888
H. Askland, Barrie Shannon, R. Chiong, Natalie Lockart, A. Maguire, Jane Rich, Justine Groizard
ABSTRACT Scholarship on displacement caused by the effects of climate change generally approaches displacement as the involuntary movement of people. However, in this article, we argue that there are uncertainties surrounding Climate Change Induced Displacement (CCID) that are partly caused by discursive ambiguity around the notion of ‘displacement’ – a concept that remains poorly defined in the context of climate change research – and a conflation between displacement due to quick-onset disaster events and the cumulative pressure of living in an environment marked by a disrupted climate. Reflecting on the impacts of the Australian bushfires in 2019–20, we conceptualise CCID beyond migration as an event and a physical relocation across geographical space. Even fast-onset disaster events, such as the Australian bushfires, can dispossess and displace beyond the immediate threat of the fire front; but this displacement is not necessarily aligned with movement and migration, nor is it evenly proportioned across populations. Based on a review of existing literature on CCID, we identify three key tensions shaping scholarship on CCID: conceptualisation; distribution of risk and impact; and discursive framing. Together, we contend, these tensions highlight the imperative of striving for conceptual clarity and awareness of distributional inequities of risk and vulnerabilities.
{"title":"Beyond migration: a critical review of climate change induced displacement","authors":"H. Askland, Barrie Shannon, R. Chiong, Natalie Lockart, A. Maguire, Jane Rich, Justine Groizard","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2042888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2042888","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Scholarship on displacement caused by the effects of climate change generally approaches displacement as the involuntary movement of people. However, in this article, we argue that there are uncertainties surrounding Climate Change Induced Displacement (CCID) that are partly caused by discursive ambiguity around the notion of ‘displacement’ – a concept that remains poorly defined in the context of climate change research – and a conflation between displacement due to quick-onset disaster events and the cumulative pressure of living in an environment marked by a disrupted climate. Reflecting on the impacts of the Australian bushfires in 2019–20, we conceptualise CCID beyond migration as an event and a physical relocation across geographical space. Even fast-onset disaster events, such as the Australian bushfires, can dispossess and displace beyond the immediate threat of the fire front; but this displacement is not necessarily aligned with movement and migration, nor is it evenly proportioned across populations. Based on a review of existing literature on CCID, we identify three key tensions shaping scholarship on CCID: conceptualisation; distribution of risk and impact; and discursive framing. Together, we contend, these tensions highlight the imperative of striving for conceptual clarity and awareness of distributional inequities of risk and vulnerabilities.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"267 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48204557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-09DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2042887
Elise Largesse
ABSTRACT Environmental sociologists have debated the role of individual versus societal responses to climate change impacts and threats. Some are critical of all individual consumption-driven private responses; others see some value in conscious consumption. One characterization of private threat response is ‘inverted quarantine’: attempting to isolate an individual from a ‘sick’ world by purchasing safe products or spaces. Inverted quarantine scholars theorize this can have unintended consequences such as harm displacement onto the unprotected and redirection of resources toward privilege. Little work, however, has empirically documented the causal relationship between inverted quarantines and unintended consequences, which are typically spatially and temporally distant. This multi-method ethnography of Nantucket Island fills that gap by leveraging characteristics of ‘islandness,’ enabling observation of sequential processes of inverted quarantine, consequences, and responses. The study confirms that harm displacement and resource redirection occur. It also finds an additional, insidious consequence of inverted quarantines: a double bind impeding effective public solutions. Public solutions threaten the private-threat-response industry and therefore the livelihoods of laborers producing inverted quarantines. While creating the conditions for its own eventual failure, inverted quarantines may also guarantee their continued manufacture at the expense of public solutions, by monopolizing the means of economic and social reproduction.
{"title":"Class, climate change, and closed systems: inverted quarantine on Nantucket Island","authors":"Elise Largesse","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2042887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2042887","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Environmental sociologists have debated the role of individual versus societal responses to climate change impacts and threats. Some are critical of all individual consumption-driven private responses; others see some value in conscious consumption. One characterization of private threat response is ‘inverted quarantine’: attempting to isolate an individual from a ‘sick’ world by purchasing safe products or spaces. Inverted quarantine scholars theorize this can have unintended consequences such as harm displacement onto the unprotected and redirection of resources toward privilege. Little work, however, has empirically documented the causal relationship between inverted quarantines and unintended consequences, which are typically spatially and temporally distant. This multi-method ethnography of Nantucket Island fills that gap by leveraging characteristics of ‘islandness,’ enabling observation of sequential processes of inverted quarantine, consequences, and responses. The study confirms that harm displacement and resource redirection occur. It also finds an additional, insidious consequence of inverted quarantines: a double bind impeding effective public solutions. Public solutions threaten the private-threat-response industry and therefore the livelihoods of laborers producing inverted quarantines. While creating the conditions for its own eventual failure, inverted quarantines may also guarantee their continued manufacture at the expense of public solutions, by monopolizing the means of economic and social reproduction.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"331 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45903126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2048237
R. Lidskog, A. Standring, James M. White
ABSTRACT What role should social science play in the work for transforming society towards sustainability? The background for this question is that despite massive investments in environmental research and the accumulation of data on the human impact on the environment, action remains insufficient. The severity of the current situation has led to the conclusion that moderate change is not enough; there is a need for a fundamental transformative change of society. How social science expertise should contribute to this is a fundamental epistemic and normative question and is the point of departure for this paper. This paper aims to develop a theory of social scientific environmental expertise. It first gives a broad account of expertise and its current landscape. It then develops a pluralistic approach, where expertise can take many forms, but should be reflexive, critical, and constructive. Finally, it stresses the crucial role that social science expertise has to play in the work for transformative change, not least to broaden environmental problems and their complexities, so that society is better equipped to undergo sustainable transformation.
{"title":"Environmental expertise for social transformation: roles and responsibilities for social science","authors":"R. Lidskog, A. Standring, James M. White","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2048237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2048237","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What role should social science play in the work for transforming society towards sustainability? The background for this question is that despite massive investments in environmental research and the accumulation of data on the human impact on the environment, action remains insufficient. The severity of the current situation has led to the conclusion that moderate change is not enough; there is a need for a fundamental transformative change of society. How social science expertise should contribute to this is a fundamental epistemic and normative question and is the point of departure for this paper. This paper aims to develop a theory of social scientific environmental expertise. It first gives a broad account of expertise and its current landscape. It then develops a pluralistic approach, where expertise can take many forms, but should be reflexive, critical, and constructive. Finally, it stresses the crucial role that social science expertise has to play in the work for transformative change, not least to broaden environmental problems and their complexities, so that society is better equipped to undergo sustainable transformation.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"255 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45990483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2022.2047325
Martijn Stehouwer, S. Wertheim-Heck, Bas van Vliet
ABSTRACT Wastewater from sanitation contains several scarce resources that can be reused for purposes of energy and food production. Sanitation infrastructures, however, are often overlooked in debates on circular food systems, while the role of sanitation could be pivotal in combatting resource depletion facing agriculture. Transitioning sanitation infrastructures to support circular systems also needs a thorough understanding of the sanitation practices involved, as resource-oriented sanitation systems require a de-routinization in how we make use of toilets and deal with wastewater. Instead, novel sanitation practices are needed for circular developments around sanitation to ensure the reuse potential of wastewater. This research paper focuses on exploring how sanitation practices are shaped and embedded in wider configurations of domestic practices and its implications for the routinization of novel sanitation practices. A mixed-method research design has been adopted studying sanitation practices and infrastructures in three distinct neighborhoods within the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region. First, a survey was conducted that enabled the development of a neighborhood typology. Second, in-depth interviews were conducted to uncover the embeddedness of sanitation practices. Results highlight the importance of normalizing novel sanitation practices when linking sanitation to food systems and list five steppingstones that may help doing so.
{"title":"Normalizing novel sanitation practices in transitioning towards circular food and energy systems","authors":"Martijn Stehouwer, S. Wertheim-Heck, Bas van Vliet","doi":"10.1080/23251042.2022.2047325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2047325","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Wastewater from sanitation contains several scarce resources that can be reused for purposes of energy and food production. Sanitation infrastructures, however, are often overlooked in debates on circular food systems, while the role of sanitation could be pivotal in combatting resource depletion facing agriculture. Transitioning sanitation infrastructures to support circular systems also needs a thorough understanding of the sanitation practices involved, as resource-oriented sanitation systems require a de-routinization in how we make use of toilets and deal with wastewater. Instead, novel sanitation practices are needed for circular developments around sanitation to ensure the reuse potential of wastewater. This research paper focuses on exploring how sanitation practices are shaped and embedded in wider configurations of domestic practices and its implications for the routinization of novel sanitation practices. A mixed-method research design has been adopted studying sanitation practices and infrastructures in three distinct neighborhoods within the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region. First, a survey was conducted that enabled the development of a neighborhood typology. Second, in-depth interviews were conducted to uncover the embeddedness of sanitation practices. Results highlight the importance of normalizing novel sanitation practices when linking sanitation to food systems and list five steppingstones that may help doing so.","PeriodicalId":54173,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Sociology","volume":"8 1","pages":"302 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48771804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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