Open Letter to Oran Young, IHDP Scientific Committee Chair

On the Open Meeting's first evening, a roundtable discussion was held on the question: "Science in the 21^st Century." I penned the following to Oran Young, IHDP's Executive Director which sums my perception of the conversation.

An open letter to Oran Young, Chair, IHDP Scientific Committee

The roundtable session on "Science for the 21^st Century" started off with an important statement -- the "old way of doing things" just wasn't working -- that the IHDP research community wasn't sufficiently organized, nor productive (?), to provide the answers necessary to inform current policy regarding the social dimensions of global environmental change. The question was posed, "What "new" questions are needed?"

Unfortunately, following this important and interesting beginning, the conversation moved toward the criticisms oft heard before – we lack sufficient funding, our institutions are not structured in ways that support interdisciplinary scholarship, etc. We know these things, so the question remains "now what?"

Before arguing for more funding or institutional change, I would contend that we need to develop coherent statements as to what social science has thus far taught us about the human dimensions and what questions remain. Armed with this information, we can more effectively lobby for the institutional change necessary to realize a larger proportion of research funding and/or work to convince university administrators of the importance of interdisciplinary work. Without such information, our community will continue along its disheveled path.

Audience members commented that the social science community doesn't have an outlet that garners public respect and media attention, much like two key outlets for natural science researchers. Others suggested that existing knowledge isn't sufficiently organized such that it represents a coherent body of knowledge – and that meta-analyses of research results around key questions would clarify gaps.

I suggested the later approach.

To be blunt, I find patently offensive the suggestion that the environmental social science community has not in the past decade or so moved toward some important understanding of the social processes leading to global environmental change – and of particular aspects of the social implications of such change.

Individuals from Santa Cruz to Milan to Johannesburg to Manila are churning away to study their pieces of the human dimensions puzzle. They diligently undertake literature reviews, raise external funding, mentor graduate students, belabor over their regression results and interview data, and publish in myriad peer-reviewed outlets – not all of which will ever reveal themselves in a single bibliographic database. Any question the IHDP community might want answered, it's likely that someone has produced at least early insight – at least the invention of part of that "wheel" might have had a start.

Let's not reinvent from scratch.

Examples arose later in the panel to illustrate my point.

In response to an audience question, someone noted that we need research on aesthetics – in particular, the ways in which aesthetics shape public acceptance (or not) of renewable energy. Although the literature is indeed still emerging, please see ……

Wüstenhagen^, R., M. Wolsink, and M.J. Burer. 2007. "Social acceptance of renewable energy innovation: An introduction to the concept." Energy Policy. 35(5): 2683-2691.

Van der Horst, D., 2007. Nimby or not? Exploring the relevance of location and the politics of voiced opinions in renewable energy siting controversies. Energy Policy 35 (5): 2705-2714.

D. Bell, T. Gray and C. Haggett, The 'Social Gap' in wind farm citing decisions: explanations and policy responses, Environmental Politics 14 (2005), pp. 460–477

IHDP could shape future research down the most productive paths by offering a summary of current knowledge on public perception of renewable energy technologies.

Later, someone noted the importance of developing some research on the science-policy "gap" (although others criticize the use of "gap" as descriptive of the issue). Regardless, there are policy scientists that have spent careers examining the "gap," even "centers" of scholars that study this issue with regard to climate change in particular. Please see the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, where scholars focus specifically on this gap as related to climate research and policy www.sciencepolicy.colorado.edu

My point is that environmental social science is so scattered across disciplines, across journals, across meetings, that there simply is no coherent presentation of 'state of the art' understanding on any of these topics. Further, there are no doubt thousands of environmental social scientists and humanists that do not identify as members of the IHDP community and yet have produced critical research on environmental values, ethics, preferences, human impacts, stakeholder participation in environmental policy making , environmental inequalities, and so on and so on.

Panels such as that at the IHDP may be able to generate a list of important "new" research questions, but please, oh please, don't charge off to undertake "new research" on these questions until we've undertaken a thorough, critical review of the wide variety of projects probably already devoted to that issue. Much like the IPCC mobilized the scientific community to *critically* evaluate state of the art understanding on key questions – it's time the IHDP do the same for the social dimensions. Gaps in our understanding will no doubt emerge, but our understanding of those gaps will at least be informed. Perhaps just as importantly, the research already produced by thousands of talented, hard-working, productive environmental social scientists will each contribute pieces to this critically important puzzle called the human dimensions.