Interdisciplinary analysis of the environment: insights from tropical forest research
Interdisciplinary analysis of the environment: insights from tropical forest research
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DOI：
10.1017/s037689291100018x
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发表时间：
2011-06-01
影响因子：
2.7
通讯作者：
Kurien, Amit
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lele, Sharachchandra;Kurien, Amit
热带森林管理是一个典型的跨学科（ID）问题，跨越社会和自然的鸿沟，并吸引了来自许多学科的学者。本文是一个审查的ID研究热带森林，以了解所面临的挑战，在做ID环境研究的一般和方式，他们可能会被解决。热带森林研究中的两个核心跨学科问题，即热带森林损失和退化的原因及其对社会的影响，研究进行了分析，照亮ID研究人员面临的问题。挑战源于各学科之间隐性价值观、理论和认识论的差异，以及各个学科、ID空间和更广泛的应用研究受众之间的关系。了解森林丧失和退化等术语的价值性质，就可以从多层面和多学科的角度描述森林变化对人类福祉的影响。对变化原因的分析因工业发展研究而得到丰富，其中森林成果明确地以其价值为特征，以与这些价值相关的方式加以衡量，并与适当规模的社会经济变量链相联系。来自不同学科的解释可以在某种程度上通过将每一个都视为局部的，也许具有特定背景的有效性来调和，尽管一些核心的紧张关系，特别是经济学家和人类学家之间的紧张关系，仍然存在。从ID研究的见解已经不均匀地内化在文献中，指出缺乏一个广泛共享的ID空间作为一个结果，个别社会科学学科挪用环境作为一个研究课题。将需要从理论驱动的研究转向问题驱动的研究，并重新自觉地参与这一应用ID空间，以产生更严格和相关的森林ID研究。
Tropical forest management is a quintessential interdisciplinary (ID) problem straddling the social-natural divide, and has attracted scholars from many disciplines. This paper is a review of the ID research on tropical forests with a view to understanding the challenges involved in doing ID environmental research in general and the manner in which they might be addressed. Research on two core interdisciplinary questions in tropical forest research, namely causes of tropical forest loss and degradation and its impacts on society, is analysed to illuminate issues facing ID researchers. The challenges stem from differences in implicit values, theories and epistemologies across disciplines, as well as the relationship between individual disciplines, the ID space and the wider applied research audience. Understanding the value-laden nature of terms such as forest loss and degradation leads to a multidimensional and multidisciplinary characterization of the impact of forest change on human well-being. The analysis of causes of change has been enriched by ID research in which forest outcomes are characterized explicitly in terms of their values, measured in terms relevant to these values and linked to chains of socioeconomic variables at the appropriate scale. Explanations from different disciplines may be reconciled to some extent by seeing each as partial and perhaps having context-specific validity, although some core tensions, especially between economists and anthropologists, remain. Insights from ID research have been unevenly internalized in the literature, pointing to the absence of a broadly shared ID space as a consequence of individual social science disciplines appropriating environment as a subject of study. Shifting from theory-driven to problem-driven research and re-engaging self-consciously in this applied ID space will be required to generate more rigorous and relevant ID research on forests.