The “Three Cultures” Problem in Global Change Research

Has academic life become notably less balkanized since C. P. Snow delivered his famous “two cultures” lecture in 1959? Apparently not. In this week’s issue of Science (6 March 2015) appears an article extolling the virtues of the humanities. It argues that scientists too often define research problems narrowly, leading to technical “solutions” that address only symptoms (not causes) or even make the problems worse for those in society affected by them. Kevin Boehnke, the author, commends historians, philosophers, literary critics, and anthropologists to his readers—who are mostly physicists, chemists, engineers, and the like. Humanists’ focus on the intricacies of peoples’ identities, relations, values, and disputes, Boehnke argues, can allow scientists to better link their work to the wider world it so often alters (by accident or design). Nearly sixty years after Snow’s lecture, Boehnke’s article suggests that academic specialization cuts deep—so deep that the editors of Science have seen fit to let him reprise rather old arguments about the need for better links between STEM researchers and those who study the rich tapestry of “the social.”

Even so, one should not be too downhearted. Recent developments in international geoscience suggest that—in this area of science at least—there’s a real appetite for engagement with ethicists, human geographers, ecological economists, and many others besides. For example, the concepts of “the Anthropocene” and “planetary boundaries” necessarily raise big questions about the human causes of and responses to global environmental change (GEC). Answering these questions demands insight not only from the full spectrum of social scientists but from humanists as well. This was recognized by the international Anthropocene Project run over two years (2012–2014) by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Various Project events saw geoscientists like Erle Ellis and Jan Zalasiewicz engage with artists, designers, cultural critics, and theologists (among others). The organizers are to be commended for their determination to foster open exchange and mutual learning. Their efforts suggest that a multidisciplinary attempt to better understand GEC—and to address the profound challenges it poses—could soon be fertile ground for overcoming what Jerome Kagan (2009), adapting Snow’s argument, calls the “three cultures” problem besetting academia.

In turn, this will improve the quality of public debates about, and political responses to, GEC. For years research on GEC has been led by various geosciences (and coordinated at the global scale by the Earth System Science Partnership). But the new Future Earth initiative—the successor to three of the four GEC research programs established in the 1980s and ’90s—speaks much more to what Heide Hackmann et al. (2014) call “the social heart of environmental change.” In this light, the sort of experimental encounters fostered by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt might soon find a more formal and focused outlet on the world stage. Significantly, Future Earth’s leadership team is not dominated by geoscientists. Moreover, two of its three themes—namely, “Global sustainable development” and “Transformations towards sustainability”—accent the so-called human dimensions that once (in)famously comprised only a small box in Francis Bretherton’s visioning diagram for global change research (NASA 1986). Meanwhile, leading geoscientists like John Schellnhuber are teaming up with others across the disciplines to call upon decision makers to act “before it’s too late” (Rockstrom et al. 2014). The prospects for a more intellectually inclusive and socially influential form of GEC research thus seem good.

And yet Future Earth’s leadership team may have its work cut out, so too those leading new national level programs designed to foster more interdisciplinary investigations of GEC. The problem is not so much the one evidenced by Science publishing Boehnke’s article: as I’ve said, plenty of geoscientists now see the value of engaging with colleagues on the “other” side of campus. Instead, the problem is two-fold. First, many STEM researchers interested in GEC seem only to recognize the social sciences as directly relevant to their inquiries but not the humanities. Second, many of these researchers only seem to recognize the relevance of those parts of social science that try to study humans using concepts and methods that appear suitably “scientific.” I offer these propositions on a basis of a close and regular reading of peer review articles, commentaries, and program documents issuing from STEM researchers who make positive mention of the “people disciplines.”

Consider the following examples. In a recent Nature Climate Change article, Alessandro Tavoni and Simon Levin (2014) make the case for a multidisciplinary approach to managing the global commons. However, it turns out that their conception of “multidisciplinary inquiry” encompasses only ecology, economics, and psychology, framed by the notion of coupled socio-ecological systems. In the same periodical an editorial argues that more effective policies to tackle climate change must respect the constraints of “the ‘real economy’ rather than being based … on fanciful notions of the imminent demise of capitalism” (2014: 1037). Among other things, this implies that “critical” social science has a limited part to play in helping foster societal change when compared to disciplines (like economics) that are umbilically connected to the present order. In many respects it takes the status quo as a given, forgetting that certain notions are only “fanciful” because they presently lack enough advocates and sufficiently powerful social actors to make them flesh. Several social sciences have a role to play in rectifying this state of affairs. As for the humanities, well, they rarely feature in calls for a new phase of global change science. For instance, in a manifesto for “Science and Society in the Anthropocene,” Roman Seidl and colleagues opine that “the essential natural and social science disciplines [are] … economic geography, industrial and regional economics, business and management sciences, industrial ecology, environmental sciences and regional and economic development planning” (2013: 8). Evidently the humanities have nothing to offer this proclaimed transdisciplinary approach.

Unfortunate as this is (and I could proliferate the examples), it’s made worse by the fact that many environmental social scientists pull their punches in describing that they have to offer the geosciences in the analysis of GEC. For instance, writing in Nature Benjamin Sovacool makes a case for extending energy research beyond the sort of technology-focused inquiries that produce wind farms. However, in identifying the value of social science, he virtually ignores the signature concerns of fields like moral philosophy—as if the energy-society nexus does not have a deep ethical component pertaining to energy systems’ role in determining how we live on this planet. Similarly, when social scientists contribute articles to high-profile journals like Science or Nature, they typically focus on technical issues (e.g., how to make commodity supply chains more “climate smart”: see Levermann 2014; or the limitations of GDP as a measure of wealth: see Costanza et al. 2013). Meanwhile, humanists interested in GEC tend to publish in journals few STEM researchers read and rarely attend meetings where environmental social scientists are present. The result is that key elements of social scientific and humanistic inquiry are screened out, a form of deliberate or unwitting censorship that confirms many geoscientists’ perceptions that only a few “people disciplines” are relevant to multidisciplinary inquiry into GEC.

In sum, despite the appetite for intellectual change in the world of “global change science,” forms of “asymmetrical coproduction” appear to be at work. As Sheila Jasanoff (2004) argued, social order and social change are connected organically to contingent forms of knowledge that make society (and nature) intelligible at any given moment in history. Asymmetrical coproduction in the realm of knowledge occurs when certain epistemological and ontological practices become models for ostensibly “new” intellectual practices. For more symmetrical coproduction to occur, this asymmetry needs not only to be exposed; it also needs to be challenged so that what Lövbrand (2011: 226) calls “prescriptive coproduction” sets the new agenda. In the present case, we can ask what global change research would (will) look like if the critical social sciences and the wider humanities were central to its “integrated” and “actionable” intellectual ambitions. What would the modus operandi of GEC science (and technology) be if everything from cultural anthropology to eco-art was an equal partner in designing projects and disseminating research outputs? And what sort of social orders would be called into existence if asymmetrical coproduction did not define the means and ends of initiatives like Future Earth?

Let me end on a practical note. If I’m right that a rather conservative concept of change is abroad at a key moment in the evolution of global change research, then some strategic actions need to be taken. We need people to step forward with arguments, examples, and visions that will persuade STEM experts that GEC is a phenomena calling for truly “post-normal” research. Future Earth’s leadership team has a big role to play here, but so too do social scientists and humanists who have so far observed from the sidelines. The “three cultures” divide that’s enabling a rather thin form of interdisciplinarity to emerge in global change science needs capable critics and champions to show that something wider and deeper can emerge instead.

Noel Castree is a Professor of Geography at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and the University of Manchester, England. His current research focuses on the politics of knowledge among various epistemic communities analyzing global environmental change.

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References

Boehnke, Kevin. 2015. “Oh the humanities!” Science 347, no. 6226: 1166.

Costanza, Robert, et al. 2014. “Time to leave GDP behind.” Nature 505, no. 7483: 283–285.

Hackmann, Heide, Susanne C. Moser, and Asuncion Lera St. Clair. 2014. “The Social Heart of Global Environmental Change.” Nature Climate Change 4: 653–655.

Kagan, Jerome. 2009. The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. “The Idiom of Co-production.” Pp. 1-12 in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order, ed. Shelia Jasanoff. New York: Routledge.

Levermann, Anders. 2014. “Make Supply Chains Climate-smart.” Nature 506, no. 7486: 27–29.

Lövbrand, Eva. 2011. “Co-producing European Climate Science and Policy.” Science and Public Policy 38, no. 3: 225–236.

NASA Advisory Council. 1986. Earth System Science: A Closer View. Washington, D.C.: NASA.

Nature Climate Change. 2014. “Editorial: Window of Opportunity.” Nature Climate Change 4: 1037.

Rockstrom, Johan, et al., 2014. “Climate Change: The Necessary, the Possible and the Desirable.” Earth’s Future 2, no. 12: 606–611.

Seidl, Roman, et al. 2013. “Science with Society in the Anthropocene.” Ambio 42: 5–12.

Sovacool, Benjamin K. 2014. “Energy Studies Needs Social Science.” Nature 511, no. 7511: 529–530.

Tavoni, Alessandro, and Simon Levin. 2014. “Managing the Climate Commons at the Nexus of Ecology, Behavior and Economics.” Nature Climate Change 4: 1057–1063.

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