Abstract
The purpose of this synthesis paper is to present the motivations and conceptual basis for research on socio-technical-ecological systems (STES), addressing the need for interdisciplinary studies targeting the technological mediation of human–environment relationships. The background is the very limited number of collaborations between scholars of social-ecological systems and sociotechnical systems (SES), despite repeated calls for bridging work. The synthesis builds on an in-depth review of previous literature, interdisciplinary exchanges, and empirical examples. The result is arguments for why a sociotechnical understanding of ‘technology’ is of central importance for SES studies, related to how technology: (1) mediates human–environment relationships; (2) brings ambivalence to these relationships; (3) enhances and transforms human agency and provides a source of constitutive power; (4) changes scalar relationships, enabling our interaction with and impact on the natural world across time and space. Furthermore, we present an STES analytical approach which starts from symmetrical attention to technology, society, and environment, specifically targeting interfaces and relationships of critical relevance for SES scholars, and address counterarguments that we have encountered. We conclude that a shift to STES research will enhance our knowledge of system interfaces that are often overlooked, opening further avenues for research and real-world interventions.
Highlights
We are witnessing a number of global environmental trends that are not promising for the future
We reviewed literature, describing and comparing analytical frameworks for studies of social-ecological systems and ‘coupled human–environment systems’, articles on the concept of ‘Anthropocene’, and a number of frameworks used by sociotechnical scholars working on so called ‘sustainability transitions’—a subfield of STS that explicitly tackles prospects for sustainable development and addressing human environmental impacts
When we argue for integration across the SES and STS fields, we have primarily two specific sub-fields in mind: first, the subfield of sustainability transitions (this growing community of scholars meet, for example, at the International Sustainability Transitions (IST) conferences, and has the Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN) https://transitionsnetwork.org) and, second, the social-ecological systems framework that has emerged from the encounter between ecology and political science [8,13,14]
Summary
We are witnessing a number of global environmental trends that are not promising for the future. The general, and possibly provocative, argument is that when scholars are aiming to address complex and interlinked phenomena at the interface of human society and ecosystems, an accurate understanding of causal relationships is only possible if there is understanding of technological mediation of human–environment relationships. We qualify this argument by synthesizing insights from existing literature and developing an in-depth conceptual argument around the motivations for work bridging and combining the SES and STS approaches.
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