Collaborative Proposal: Constituting Nature and Society in the Global Environment

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The emergence of the global environment as a site for scientific and social action is one of the transformative events marking the turn of the 21st century. In scientific terms, the global framing has altered the scales at which, and the methods by which, we seek to understand natural and social influences on the environment, as well as interactions between them. In social and political terms, environmental globalization has given rise to new concepts, institutions, actor coalitions, political strategies, and norms that transcend or compete with the politics of nation-states. Using theories in science and technology studies, about globalization and environmental governance and about co-production, this project will explore the implications of these coupled changes for emerging structures of global governance, focusing specifically on new institutional arrangements around global environmental science, politics, and policy. Globalization is seen for purposes of this project as dynamic, interacting with processes of localization and requiring diverse accommodations between global and local institutions, norms, practices, and technologies. To understand environmental globalization, it is therefore necessary to examine processes operating below the global levels. Co-production is the joint production of natural and social order, or knowledge and forms of life. This framework is particularly useful for studying emergent phenomena such as environmental globalism, and for understanding persistent differences in societal approaches to studying and managing the natural world. The study design is comparative, across nation-states (U.S., Germany, India) and across non-state sectors (science, corporations, civil society). In each research site, the project will focus on three anchoring concepts that are both policy-relevant and theoretically interesting: sustainability, vulnerability, precaution. The objective will be to uncover how natural knowledge and social response are being co-produced through attempts to define and implement these concepts. Methodologically, the project will incorporate qualitative approaches (including case and country studies) from science studies, law, anthropology, history of science, and comparative politics. The project will generate new knowledge, research methods, and institutional insights relevant to the organization of global environmental science and public policy. Research results will illuminate means of enhancing relations among the institutions of global environmental governance and a global citizenry. Outputs will include recommendations for: (1) the design of global environmental research programs, especially approaches to integrating social and natural science research (e.g., modeling, collaborative teams, interdisciplinary training programs); (2) proposals to strengthen linkages between science and policy, especially evaluations of assessment methods (e.g., intergovernmental, multi-stakeholder, consensus conferences) and their varying receptivity across political cultures; and (3) identification of governance arrangements that appropriately recognize and take into account cross-national variation in global environmental science and policy. The project will train graduate and postdoctoral researchers and will strengthen collaborative networks in environmental research and science and technology studies between the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.