Encountering the Normativity of Methods
Panelists were concerned with scrutinizing sustainability in terms of normative understandings (“What is good for sustainability?”) that concern both the interplay of scientific measurements and sustainability measures (“What and why do we measure?”) and onto-epistemological challenges (“What is enacted as sustainable in different knowledge practices?”). Ben Purvis showed that constructing indicators as quantifying measurements of sustainability is inherently political and normative, be it indicators to measure transitions towards a circular economy or the 232 Indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals. In the construction of indicators, the technical issues and the epistemological challenges produce and constrain each other and ultimately lead to a failure of indicators as useful measurements of sustainable transformations (see also Purvis and Genovese 2023). In their paper on participatory modeling, Krys Unverzagt similarly showed how versions of social order are enacted by both the participatory mappings done with stakeholders, and the more technical processing and aggregation of these maps done by the modelers alone. In the latter, if researchers fail to fully reflect upon their own implicit assumptions, these may ultimately supersede the input of participants. Dženeta Hodžić and Kristiane Fehrs shared their and their colleagues’ experiences with embedded ethnography in a transdisciplinary project on groundwater management (Söller/Hodžić and Lütkemeier 2024). As ethnographers, they positioned themselves as “reservoirs of complexity” – countering the scientific habit to boil issues down to their basic assumptions by stressing relations that embed and complicate those assumptions. This sparked reflexivity between the transdisciplinary partners through ethnographic vignettes that created space to revise and adapt the shared goal of the research project (see also Bieler et al. 2020; Lüder and Müller 2021).
As will come as no surprise to STS researchers: normativities hide everywhere. Together, the presentations showed how (explicitly and implicitly) transformative methods are normative, and laid out different ways we as researchers might better understand and address this quality. The panel concluded with a comment by Jörg Niewöhner, who drew attention to enactments of sustainability and encouraged those present to fail in new exciting ways.
Changing Visions of the Transformative Potentials of Transdisciplinary Research
Catharina Lüder found herself in a comparable position to that of Dženeta Hodžić and Kristiane Fehrs. In a transdisciplinary project on municipal energy transitions she and her colleagues implemented learning workshops as transformative methods to foster knowledge integration between all partners: the research team and the Energieavantgarde Anhalt, a regional NGO that was an important intermediary in the project, as well as participants from several municipalities (Hülle et al. 2023). According to the scientific understanding of Catharina and her colleagues, and the chosen methods, what was supposed to happen was a three-step process of knowledge integration. Their involvement explicitly aimed to enable this process.
The first of the three workshops started with a joint problem definition - as is common in transdisciplinary projects. The outcomes of the first learning workshop, rightly, determined the topics that the participants from municipalities judged as most pressing for their energy transitions at home. The main shared goal was reaching energy sovereignty, and networking between neighboring towns could be a first step in that direction. Consequently, in the second workshop they employed a theory of change process (Serrat 2017) as a method to develop transition pathways together. While the overarching idea was to initiate relations between the participants, who would then continue to work together after the end of the project, the participants instead asked for tangible results that could be useful for them over a longer period of time. While the scientific team saw themselves as facilitators of a mutual learning process, the participants viewed them as providers of facts and solutions. In that way, two different normative assumptions were always present during the project and specifically during the workshops. Firstly, the researchers saw transdisciplinary research as a reciprocal endeavor of shared learning. Secondly, for the participants from municipalities, participation in the research project needed to yield some sort of benefit to present to superiors or the local council. In other words: a focus on process met a focus on outcome, namely hands-on transition measures. Of course, the researchers needed some sort of outcome as well to justify their efforts to their funding agency (in this case the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action). Similar to Dženeta Hodžić and Kristiane Fehrs, however, they acted as “holding a reservoir of complexity”, and aimed to understand processes from within. Eventually, this became a shared position. Through discussions in between the workshops, roles, expectations and needs for outcomes were reflected on, which ultimately transformed the project partners’ aims. In follow-up interviews, the participating mayors expressed that they valued being part of the learning process more than the specific outcomes they had initially demanded. Taking a relational perspective that values the processes and mutual transformations as well as the outcomes of such transdisciplinary projects is not only worthwhile for social scientists, but can also be integrated in practitioners’ ways of doing and thinking sustainability. Equally, the researchers engaged with more outcome oriented publications, like tangible brochures, than were planned in the project plan. Working on those brochures in the transdisciplinary team also helped to understand more fully the research object: municipal energy transitions.
Turning to Relationality opens up Methods for Transformations
In recent years, sustainability researchers have increasingly discussed relational thinking in order to better understand the complexity and intertwinedness of social-ecological phenomena, and to overcome long-standing dichotomies in which social and ecological systems are seen as coupled, e.g. via the extraction of resources or pollutionbut ultimately separate systems (Hertz and Mancialla García 2021, Mancilla García et al. 2020 (under review), West et al. 2020 and 2024). STS insights into the fundamental and normative entanglements of epistemology and ontology, and therefore also research methodologies were and remain central to this turn across disciplines and fields (Barad 2007, Haraway 1988, Latour 1993, Law 2004, Mol 1999).
As an anthropologist, Anja Klein conducted ethnographic fieldwork on knowledge practices in the construction and use of simulation models of social-ecological systems in sustainability research. She was particularly interested in novel approaches to modeling in interdisciplinary research groups. Her research participants in one such research group dedicated a lot of effort to putting process-relational philosophies, such as assemblage thinking, to work to transform modeling methods (Schlüter et al. 2024), and to better understand causation in social-ecological systems (Hertz et al. in review). Given the shared interests, together with colleagues from earth system science and hydrology, they co-authored a contribution to a recent special issue on the relational turn in sustainability research (West et al. 2024). In this paper they madefoundational feminist STS insights on situatedness and performativity (Haraway 1988, Barad 2007) productive for work with simulation models and other models in sustainability research.
This translation of STS thinking in conversation with existing modelling practices offered several principles for a practice of “Situated Modelling” (Klein et al. 2024). The group argued that taking an explicitly relational perspective would not present a panacea in itself, e.g. for sluggish transformations of social-ecological systems or for persistent power imbalances in transdisciplinary research. Process-relational thinking is but a situated perspective in itself, and needs to be extended from the object of research to include and potentially transform the whole process of knowledge production, in our case to modeling practices. The framework explicitly aims to transform modeling practices and to open alternatives for modelers on how to use models, value modelling processes as well as results, and reflect on their everyday work.
Conclusion
A closer look at some concrete examples from sustainability research employing transformative methods showed how they are transforming researchers, stakeholders, their respective goals, frameworks, and finally the methods in themselves. However, systematic reflections on such transformations are not easily incorporated into everyday work, given the pressures researchers face. Work in academia is to a large part governed by project structures and temporary funding, which is not conducive to longer-term engagements and sustained reflexivity, and quantitative research metrics may not reward these, either. These parameters increase pressure on researchers to present certain kinds of findings (e.g. no negative outcomes or reporting on what might be considered failures, or insights that are directly applicable) and to present them quickly. In addition, sustainability research as a field engages in pressing issues from biodiversity decline to climate change and energy transitions that require fundamental social-ecological transformations. A call for transformative methods in addition to actionable outputs may add to these pressures. Therefore, we encourage further attention to the ways un/sustainability is researched, in order to find out more about which practices of engagement work under which conditions, and which futures such practices create, enact, or foreclose in the process.
The authors would like to thank all panelists, the commentator, and the audience for being part of the panel.
Published: 12/23/2024