By Joern Fischer
Sometimes we reach a point where things simply aren’t moving. We keep trying to do the same thing, over and over, but we’re not making progress. We all know this from our personal lives – and unfortunately, we also know it from our experience as researchers on sustainability issues.
From Fazey et al. 2018: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629617304413
In our personal lives, we might know this situation of things just not moving from relationship crises. We get stuck, and nothing we do seems to work. This can even happen when everyone involved really wants to solve the situation – but somehow, things are stuck. How can such problems be resolved? – I’m sure there are a million answers, but somehow, often what is required is two things: a fresh perspective, and some tangible progress. Combined with a fresh perspective and some tangible “action items”, it is then possible to get apparently hopeless situations unstuck again. By contrast, if we insist on the same old perspective, and if we refuse to change anything tangible… probably we remain stuck.
Arguably, the same is true in a sustainability context. In the above, I reproduced a figure from a new paper by Ioan Fazey and colleagues. In the paper, they recommend ten essential action items for researchers working on climate change – with the goal to give climate change research a push in a direction that actually fosters social change, rather than describing our demise in ever greater detail.
The paper – as summarized in the above figure – proposes ten key action items. Just knowing more, and incrementally improving the performance of existing systems is seen as insufficient. Rather, the authors argue for a more fundamental overhaul of how science is conducted, so that it engages with society, and has the potential to facilitate transformative change that actually transcends existing problems. Engaging with normative questions of what matters, understanding science as part of social learning, and boldly striving for transformative change are among the key recommendations.
And so, funnily enough … just like in a personal relationship that is stuck in a crisis, what is needed for sustainability seems to be a mixture of taking a fresh perspective, and actually doing something tangible, in a different way. This new paper gives a valuable set of ideas for how to start getting unstuck. Worth a read, and certainly useful beyond the specific problem of climate change!
Ideas for Sustainability 