Co-learning and co-producing sustainable development: the possibilities of enactive social science

Abstract

Social science for sustainable development is arguably the handmaiden of science. Technologically driven progress for society is enabled through the extension of science to lay publics and the normalising of commodification and investment practices. On another hand social science for sustainable development can be argued to be about the democratisation of knowledge production, enabling participation in science and policy processes. This framing of social science suggests that through adaptive management and action learning, communities are empowered, science is made relevant and conflicts over investments and resource use are reduced. This dissertation provides an additional framing of social science for sustainable development. Doing so a contribution is made to knowledge about how the social relations of the environment are and can be practiced and the consequences of these enactments (Latour, 2004b). To explore rationalities shaping and constraining the knowing-doing of New Zealand (Le Heron, 2007), discourses of social science for sustainable development are named as ‘knowledge for progress’ and secondly as ‘knowledge for change’. A third framing is presented as ‘knowledge enacting possible worlds’ discussed as enactive social science (after Law and Urry, 2004). This framing reconnects understandings of epistemology and ontology commonly separated through use of the previous two frames (Carolan, 2009; Jasanoff, 2004; Law and Urry, 2004; Gibson-Graham, 2011). Accordingly enactive social science contributes to the re-scripting, re-igniting and re-siting of a refreshed social science in New Zealand (Lewis, 2010). The enactive methodology provides a strongly situated account of knowingly-doing social science for sustainable development. Presenting a shift from co-learning to coproducing knowledge the dissertation provides an embodied, experiential and experimental theorising of contingent practices, institutions and discourses of social science for sustainable development (after Larner, Le Heron & Lewis, 2007; Le Heron & Lewis 2011, Le Heron, 2013). Concepts of trajectories, spaces and traces are deployed in order to read and work out from the fast moving everyday complexities of social science practiced through a New Zealand Crown Research Institute, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research Ltd. The test for this situated experimental approach was to gain epistemological and ontological distance from the research projects, management rationalities, and identities such that these governmentalities could be intentionally navigated. Inserting a spatiality and sense of movement to the text enabled the often dichotomised objects of analysis such as the social-natural; urban-rural; objectssubjects; research-practice; science-social science; private-public to be portrayed as in the making, as co-constituted and highly contingent to their settings. Four research projects titled Low impact urban design and development; Governing climate change; How ONAC works and Magnetic South provided laboratories for colearning and co-producing sustainable development knowledge. These projects, the milieu of the dissertation, provided diverse encounters through which conceptions of an enactive social science were able to mature. Sustainable development became textured with the constraints and possibilities of the multiple rationalities through which it was being assembled. For example, a professionalization of community networking was observed. Indigenous carbon was commoditized and then re-acted making new boundaries between commercial and basic research. Science was repositioned in a city and raingardens fostered new imaginaries of social and environmental systems. Social science moved away from representing static values. Calls for integration of disciplines and working with communities in places received nuanced and more discerned responses. Through a co-production lens social science became a collective, situated endeavour, potentially enabling more diverse investment options. The challenge of this dissertation and indeed for an enactive social science in NZ is how to create epistemological distance without losing the ability to contribute and influence the moment and object under observation. This dissertation took a few bold, if at times shambling steps to meet this challenge. Whilst the object, social science, was ever changing, as research projects, people, organisations and discourses changed, so to was the vantage point for analysing this object of analysis. Over the 8 years of research, literature for this field blossomed, the social science political project (Lewis, 2011) in NZ and internationally also changed. Nevertheless a refreshed social science of sustainable development was discernible in the New Zealand context. It is being brought into being through the contested spaces generated when questioning the production of knowledge for public good. This insight is not only important for social science practitioners but also for the management of and investment in social science and sustainable development initiatives. In order to meet the complex social and environmental challenges New Zealand faces the New Zealand science system needs to incorporate a far more diverse suite of experiments with how New Zealanders come to know New Zealand. A plurality of epistemological-ontological experiments needs to be funded. This would support more diverse methodologies, sites, objects of analysis and knowledge producers. Furthermore, amidst the current reworking of academic privilege a refreshed social science could be supported through collaborative arrangements between universities and Crown Research Institutes. Existing mechanisms of co-authored publications, conference presentations, internships and postgraduate supervision could support capabilities for enactive social science. These capabilities would enable intellectual work which is distinctive to New Zealand; they would be a collective enterprise; sited across and above research projects. These humble and hopeful initiatives are required for an engaged intellectualism to be achieved and sustained creating new possibilities for both social science and sustainable development in New Zealand. Key words Sustainable development, environmental politics, post-structural political economy, methodologies, enacting, social science, science, co-production of knowledge, colearning, integrative research, collaboration, situatedness, auto-ethnography, crown research institute, New Zealand, geography.