Enhancing Science Impact: Bridging Research, Policy and Practice for Sustainability

By Peat Leith, Kevin O'Toole, Marcus Haward and Brian Coffey

Sustainability challenges blur the boundaries between academic disciplines, between research, policy and practice, and between states, markets and society. What do exemplary scientists and organisations do to bridge the gaps between these groups and help their research to make the greatest impact? How do they do it? And how can their best practices be adapted for a diverse range of specific sustainability challenges?

Enhancing Science Impact: Bridging Research, Policy and Practice for Sustainability addresses these questions in an accessible and engaging way. It provides principles explaining how research programs can work more effectively across the boundaries between science, society and decision-making by building social and institutional networks. The book suggests useful ways of thinking about a diverse range of problems and then offers five approaches to help embed science in sustainability governance. It will be an indispensable guide for researcher leaders, science program managers and science policy advisers interested in ensuring that applied research can meaningfully contribute to sustainability outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781486305360

Book preview

1

Introduction

Two protocols, many problems

¹

When negotiators from around the world came to Kyoto in 1992 to thrash out a new deal for climate change mitigation, many were looking backwards rather than ahead. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in essence, was a technical formulation.

This approach had worked before. In Montreal, only a few years earlier (in 1987), a binding deal had been struck. Scientists had established the problem: stratospheric ozone was being depleted, leading to greater penetration of ultraviolet radiation into the lower atmosphere. Increasing rates of sunburn and skin cancer were just a couple of the results. The culprits were increasing concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other gases in the atmosphere. These chemicals, used in refrigerators and as propellants in spray cans, were rapidly phased out and the problem thus managed.

At first glance, the problem of climate change might appear to be essentially the same. Humans, through their actions, had changed the chemistry of the atmosphere. Through inadvertent geoengineering, the world is warming. The science was conclusive that this trend was not going to let up. Something needed to be done. There was consensus among the technical experts that a warmer world would be bad news. More storms, rising sea-levels eroding the coasts where so many of us live, diseases spreading, species extinctions. The list of consequences was long (even if it didn’t include skin cancer).

Governments clearly needed to take action. Only this time, at Kyoto, the main culprit was carbon dioxide. As history attests, climate change was and remains an altogether different class of problem from ozone depletion. The clues as to why are embedded in the responses to the two protocols, from the then Presidents of the US (as quoted in Sunstein 2007, p. 2):

I am pleased to sign the instrument of ratification for the Montreal protocol [governing] substances that deplete the ozone layer. The protocol marks an important milestone for the future quality of the global environment and for the health and wellbeing of all peoples of the world. Unanimous approval of the protocol by the Senate on March 14th demonstrated to the world community this country’s willingness to act promptly and decisively in carrying out its commitments to protect the stratospheric ozone layer … (Ronald Reagan).

I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it … would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy. The Senate’s vote, 95–0, shows that there is a clear consensus that the Kyoto Protocol is an unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns (George W. Bush).

In Montreal, the rhetoric around commitment to the global environment was supported first by public concern about such corporeal risks as skin cancer and second by clear technical solutions. Consumers were turning away from aerosol sprays in droves. But replacements for the culprit chemicals could be found; they provided new markets and opportunities for business. This happy coincidence of business benefits and a clear environmental outcome made diplomacy relatively straightforward. It was a win–win situation. ‘Unanimous approval’ of a technical solution was possible.

Everyone recognised that a global deal on climate change was never going to be so easy. Interests in the continuing use of cheap fossil fuels were numerous and powerful. The whole of modern society had been constructed around these sources of energy and we trusted their efficacy deeply (Lucas et al. 2015). Those with a large immediate stake – miners, petroleum giants and the automotive industry – would vehemently defend an unspoken consensus on the cost-free disposal of CO2 into the atmosphere, a global commons.

The economic, social and cultural issues associated with the push to wean ourselves off fossil fuels remain manifold. Yet in an almost surreal theatre of international politics, the UNFCCC solution (setting binding targets for reducing carbon emissions) remains the only substantial policy option being kicked around the multilateral field. So prominent is this option in national and international policy debates, that those who oppose it often conflate their opposition of this policy option with disbelief of the scientific definition of the problem itself (anthropogenic climate change). That is, people who are committed to unrestricted use of carbon-based energy tend to deny the scientific consensus that links carbon emissions to climate change, rather than debating the policy options in play.

Almost every reader will disagree with something in the paragraph above. As Mike Hulme (2009) eloquently maps out in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, climate change is a constellation of diverse issues, which concern different people in various ways and for differing reasons. Many sustainability problems are like this. When people argue about climate change, they are often talking about completely different issues, concerns, values and beliefs – all at the same time. It has thus become a touchstone of complexity among the numerous complex challenges we face. These challenges are typified by trade-offs between benefits and risks, between the present and future, between the haves and the have-nots, between local and global, between humans and other species, and environments.

Because there are winners and losers associated with climate change (however defined) and the approaches to managing them (however contrived), such matters are intensely political. Because of the complexity of the parts and the dynamics of their interaction, such problems are also insanely difficult to understand even through detailed synthesis of our collective knowledge in the biophysical and social sciences and in humanities, and across our diverse cultures.

The lenses through which climate change is examined are not given by nature. They are selected by people in terms of preferences and values – they are deeply social. They reflect the way we think of ourselves, our communities and our futures. Such complexity, so clearly present in debates about climate change, makes issues like ozone depletion appear surprisingly tractable, with clear means to address complicated technical concerns with effective solutions that create many more wins than losses.

What’s at stake, for whom?

The two examples sketched above are archetypes of large-scale problems. Yet they bear the distinctive markings of numerous local and regional sustainability challenges. Across these challenges there are various degrees and forms of certainty and uncertainty. But what really animates such problems is whether we agree or disagree about goals or the consequences of policy options. The consideration of these goals and consequences is fundamentally political – it is about what is at stake, and for whom. In complex environmental issues, different people have different things at stake. These stakes may range from lives, security, liberty and livelihoods to financial risk and property rights, a sense of autonomy, self-efficacy and belonging. In some sustainability issues, such as loss of low-lying islands to rising seas associated with climate change, fundamental human rights or necessities for life are at stake. For others, stakes relate to strongly held human values, ideologies or beliefs. While stakes are associated with issues, they are always tempered by culture, stories and myths, such as the narratives we use to identify with each other and with places, communities and ways of living and being. In this sense, as we explore in Chapters 3 and 4, an emerging issue may create stakes for a group and any response may create new issues and new stakes for the same or other groups. Consider a species of deer that becomes listed as rare and a ban on hunting is enforced – hunters have part of their identity or recreation at stake, indigenous people may have their cultural practices and even livelihoods on the line. These groups may unite and claim that the population counts are wrong, that the government scientists are biased or that fluctuations like this are normal. Each claim raises a new issue and potentially new stakes (Fig. 1.1).

Clearly, in the above example, as in many sustainability issues, scientists and their organisations have a stake in problems and the way they are addressed. And, like other stakeholders, they can use only a limited range of very human, social and political processes to shape the way a problem is approached, discussed and understood. This is not to argue that scientists are just another stakeholder. We are convinced that sciences can, and should, have an important place in addressing sustainability challenges, especially where environmental and natural resource management are central issues. But where goals are controversial and there is substantial uncertainty about the effectiveness of policy options for achieving them, defining the most useful or effective way for scientists to engage is not straightforward. Attempts to be the final arbiter of reality or truth invariably fail. When scientists try to single-handedly represent nature or evaluate policy options they are often distrusted (Wynne 1992; Leach et al. 2005). However, more inclusive forms of knowledge production that link science with citizens and stakeholders have shown promise in problems that have proved intractable to more top-down, bureaucratic or science-driven approaches (Innes and Booher 2010; Moser 2016). They have done so, in short, by enabling different relevant communities to learn together, often by systematically articulating the issues and stakes. Science in this setting is part of larger collective efforts to facilitating gradual iterative learning and trust-building, sometimes it helps to test policy options, to explore trade-offs between the winners and losers, or to enable informed debate and dialogue about the many facets of problems and related risks and uncertainties. It is a big ask to do such work. It requires fundamental changes to some of the norms, rules and social practices of sciences (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Nowotny et al. 2001; McNie et al. 2016). Such difficult, time-consuming and expensive work will be necessary in some situations, but not always.

Fig. 1.1.   Stakes and issues create each other.

How can we know what kind of engaged research is most likely to be useful? How can we design these elements of research efficiently and effectively? How can we avoid the pitfalls of trying to ‘engage all the stakeholders’ and the piecemeal approaches to doing so which often end up doing more harm than good? One common way that science contributes to outcomes in complex problems is via the tacit knowledge or know-how of particularly effective researchers or organisations that operate in exemplary ways on the boundaries between science, society and decision-making.

This book draws on a large body of research into what such exemplary practitioners and organisations do, how they do it, and how these practices and arrangements relate to the situations or contexts in which they work. We draw on such learning from our own and others’ analyses to suggest elements of research program and project design that are more or less likely to be applicable to different types of problems.

While there are undoubtedly some generic principles of practice that run through the book, we focus on tailoring the design of programs and projects for specific situations or contexts. This design is not concerned with research methods, but rather focuses on the social and institutional infrastructure which connects science, society and decision-making. It can be preliminarily defined as a combination of what people do through their relationships and networks, and with objects (such as computers, maps and graphs), within a specific institutional setting. Institutional settings are composed of dynamics of power and knowledge that are often the subject of conversation among scientists but are rarely systematically unpacked or critically examined. They include media and political framing of problems, the creation and perpetuation of myths and assumptions, and the rules and norms that govern behaviour.

In the first chapters of the book we go about unpacking these factors, providing some useful approaches to thinking about how sustainability problems are created and resolved. We argue that sustainability challenges create an imperative for building social and institutional infrastructure into science programs and projects. But like Leo Tolstoy’s description of unhappy families in Anna Karenina – ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – each project will be different in different ways. The social and institutional infrastructure necessary for research projects to contribute to outcomes will vary from one situation to the next. This book is about better understanding and assessing those situations, and considering the options in order to design and build the social and institutional infrastructure appropriate to the many contexts of science projects and programs that aim to contribute to sustainability.

Sustainability and sustainability science

We start from a broadly accepted and straightforward premise: that the governance of sustainability issues, and thus for relevant sciences, is invariably human, social and thus political. There may sometimes be win–win answers to these problems, but they are more often typified by trade-offs. Decisions lead to a redistribution of benefits, costs and risks across communities, between human and natural systems, and between the present and future. This acknowledgement of redistribution was apparent when the term ‘sustainable development’ first came to prominence. The landmark Brundtland Report definition (World Commission on Economic Development 1987, p. 47) presented sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since that time, sustainability has become a contested term in politics, used by different people for different ends (see Box 1.1). Michael Jacobs has labelled sustainability as ‘essentially contested’, where ‘disagreements over the meaning of sustainable development are not semantic disputations, but are the substantive political arguments over which the term is concerned’ (Jacobs 1999, p. 26).

In sustainability problems, it is often very difficult or impossible to separate the issues that comprise a problem into those that are social, economic or political and those that are purely biophysical, scientific and technical. It is also rarely helpful. For example, it is as much a political as a scientific decision whether, as a society, we prioritise scientific assessment of animal populations or investigate their behavioural ecology. Such decisions are political because they can change the status of an animal under existing regulations from rare to endangered, or vice versa, and thus have consequences for the animals and others with a stake. Relatedly, our ability as a society to have a well-informed debate, or even to define what one would look like, is as much affected by our technologies and media as it is by more social and cultural norms and practices. So, human action can modify both ecological and political aspects of problems, just as it is changed by technologies.

Box 1.1: A working definition of sustainability

Since the redefinition of the term ‘sustainability’ by Brundtland, its use, abuse and misuse have been phenomenal. One way to operationalise a definition of environmental sustainability is to acknowledge the interrelationship between the human and the ecological worlds. Morelli (2011, p. 6) offers an extension of the Brundtland definition:

… as a condition of balance, resilience, and interconnectedness that allows human society to satisfy its needs while neither exceeding the capacity of its supporting ecosystems to continue to regenerate the services necessary to meet those needs nor by our actions diminishing biological diversity.

Like all simple definitions, this one is limited but it does emphasise the interdependence of human society and ecological systems. Sustainability encompasses ecological, economic, social, cultural and other related disciplines, and the actions of decision-makers, practitioners and communities. Brewer encapsulates a major sticking-point for such partnership working: ‘the world has problems but universities have departments’ (Brewer 1999, p. 328). Governments are similar in that they divide policy-making into discrete units without much regard for the whole system (Robertson and Choi 2010). Consequently, there has been a substantial rethinking of responsibilities and approaches to sustainability research and policy, with the recognition that these are no longer environmental and natural resource management problems.

Our ability to understand any given sustainability problem will always depend on context – its histories, priorities, personalities, researcher biases. Academia, for example, has a long history of individualism, which understandably prioritises the thinking of established professors and luminaries over young innovators in a field. As Thomas Kuhn (1962) observed, paradigms and research agendas often end up being oriented by individuals with specific ideas about progress in a field – they are anything but objective. While this is not necessarily problematic, it does present a social influence on the production of knowledge for sustainability which modifies sustainability agendas and politics, in ways that are often ignored or considered only minimally.

In recognition of these interactions, particularly between politics and science, the idea of sustainability science has gained substantial traction as a means of linking knowledge with action and learning. In their seminal framing of sustainability science, Kates et al. (2001) define its three central concerns as:

1understanding interactions between nature and society;

2designing and implementing sustainable trajectories for these interactions;

3advancing policy and social learning to ensure these trajectories are adaptive and truly sustainable.

The challenge of addressing the last two of these concerns together, specifically through interventions at the level of research projects and programs, is exactly what this book is about. As Miller et al. (2014) argue, to date the focus has been largely on the first category – the arena that biophysical science tends to be good at. For instance, we are fairly adept at defining human impacts on ecological systems, or those system dynamics and trends. Miller and his colleagues (p. 240) argue that, to fully contend with the challenge posed by sustainability science, we ‘must link research on problem structures with a solutions-oriented approach that seeks to understand, conceptualize and foster experiments for how socio-technical innovations for sustainability develop, diffuse and scale up’. Or ‘a critical research priority for sustainability science must be to foster … social and institutional learning and experimentation, advancing knowledge on how learning by doing occurs and how to make it more effective in order to build institutional capacity for sustainable development’ (p. 243). This book suggests a means of designing ways of learning together that are fit-for-purpose. Doing so, requires substantial attention to what that purpose might be.

Research projects and programs as boundary infrastructure to enable ‘impact’

Researchers from many disciplinary backgrounds have a crucial role to play in sustainability. But such contribution requires more than producing prodigious quantities of better information. It also requires more than ensuring experts, panels and committees ‘speak truth’ to policy processes. Though these can be substantial contributions to sustainability, our focus in this book is on work that occurs through research projects and programs.

The ‘project’ is often proffered as means of finding solutions to distinct and well-defined policy problems. Unlike agencies of governments, or statutory organisations, that are set up to manage complex issues over long periods of time, research projects and programs are time-bound and often intensive efforts, and tend to be very focused on component parts of larger societal issues. Yet there is a growing trend for western democracies to govern through setting up more and more competitively organised ‘projects’ (O’Toole et al. 2013). A significant issue for sustainability is that these short-term partnerships often end up as shelved reports or memories for the groups involved. No one has carriage of their legacy, other than the networks in which they were embedded. The trend to ‘projectise’ has been critiqued as aligning more with political timeframes and ‘announceables’ than with the achievement of societal outcomes (Bell and Morse 2005), and as encouraging a set-and-forget approach to research (Pearson 2012). Nevertheless, this characteristic of contemporary settings through which sustainability must progress creates an imperative for research programs and projects to effectively engage with problems and the networks of people who must contend with them.

The approach we develop in this book is potentially applicable at various scales: among nation states for global problems or between policy agencies