Re-configuring relationships and practice for sustainable change

• In Event: TRANS-disciplinary Research Through STS Practice

Abstract

Transdisciplinary approaches explicitly orient science to support ‘real-world’ challenges and change for sustainability. Yet, globally and locally, the scale and impacts of the ‘wicked problems’ confronting us continue to increase. In practice, success can be limited and fraught with challenges arising from power relations and values embedded in western science-policy settings. For example, whilst project teams may embrace a transdisciplinary orientation, the wider institutional settings for science, policy, community engagement and environmental education tend to harbour linear and instrumentalist trajectories. Knowledge uptake, new technological fixes, economic rationalism, consumer choice and behaviour change models remain as latent but firm defaults.
This paper examines strategies for social scientists to negotiate the challenges of building transformative change at the intersection of old and new science research paradigms. Our insights from ongoing transdisciplinary research to reduce the impacts of human-generated waste on the environment highlight the centrality of indigenous partners and worldviews in anchoring conversations and building trajectories for sustainable change. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s post-Treaty settlement socio-political landscape offers very different power-bases from which to galvanise change, as well as strong dialogic processes for knowledge building, sharing and collective learning. Multi-stakeholder planning, systems thinking, systemic intervention, STS and social practice theory are useful transdisciplinary tools for co-inquiry and knowledge co-creation. Negotiated within indigenous partnerships, these collaborative planning approaches help coalesce tactical alliances, shared goals, values and priorities for multi-scaled, multi-pronged sustainable solutions. Importantly indigenous partnerships, processes and understandings are fundamental in anchoring deeper reflective practice and re-working paradigms and possibilities for meaningful sustainable change.

Authors

• Virginia Baker, ESR Institute of Environmental Science & Research Ltd

• James Ataria, NZ