Redrawing the Boundaries of the Social-Ecological System in the Context of Adaptation to a Changing Climate

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - III

Abstract

The ecological concept of the system, in its most recent articulation as the ‘coupled social-ecological system’, dominates current ways of understanding and approaching the challenge of adapting to climate change. In this paper I examine the ways in which the promise of the discourse of the social-ecological system is seen to lie in a logic of the integration of previously distinct entities and perspectives within a unified whole. Positioning the human and the non-human worlds as parts within a nested system no smaller than the entire Earth, this discourse informs the interdisciplinary fields of Earth system science and governance. Within these fields can be heard calls for the participation and integration of a range of actors and perspectives – scientific and lay, Western and traditional, and from the natural and social sciences – to make sense of and respond to the impacts of climate change. In proposing to challenge existing binaries of the social and the natural, the modern and the traditional, and scientific and indigenous knowledges, this integrative logic appears to respond to long-standing critique from STS scholars and other critical voices. Drawing on poststructuralist analysis of discourse of climate change adaptation in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia, I explore how approaches to adaptation that are shaped by the integrative logic of the social-ecological system in fact tend to circumscribe the possibilities for a genuine pluralism of knowledges and practices - redrawing political limits even as they seek to dismantle boundaries.

Author

• Sophie Adams, University of New South Wales