Abstract
The ambition of this two-part article is to argue for immanent critique as a research strategy in sustainability studies. We do this by picking up and developing two central, cross-cutting themes in sustainability research, namely interdisciplinarity and normativity. It is widely suggested that the problem-driven and solution-focused orientation in sustainability studies necessitates interdisciplinarity and an engagement with questions of normativity, each creating problems regarding how science is conducted. For interdisciplinarity, questions remain regarding by what scientific procedure rational (i.e., non-arbitrary) interdisciplinarity can be accomplished. For normativity, it is unclear whether normativity can be addressed scientifically, or only politically; in other words, can normativity be objectively incorporated in sustainability research, and if so, how? Ultimately, the paper asks and answers the following questions: when should a researcher move from one discipline to another in sustainability research and, how do we judge the validity of the normative values that are deemed necessary for sustainability? In Part I, we show the silences, gaps, vagueness and inadequacies of how these themes are currently addressed in sustainability science literature, and from this move to propose immanent critique as a potential strategy for dealing with them in a scientific manner. In Part II, we exemplify our strategy by applying it to re-construct the debate over sustainable development, by far the most prominent topical focus in sustainability science research, producing a novel systematized typology of sustainable development approaches in the process. We conclude with reflections on how this paper amounts to an initial contribution to the construction of a Lakatosian research programme in sustainability studies.
Highlights
All around there are strong indications that the concept of sustainability maintains wide currency with government, private industry, civil society and in particular academia, for example the recent introduction of a sustainability-specific branch in the prestigious scientific journal Nature as a platform for sustainability-oriented scholarship [1]
Our attempt is comprised of two basic moves: first, in Part I we take two outstanding problematics of normativity and interdisciplinarity in Sustainability Science (SS) research as our entry point to construct a potential Paradigm; second, in Part II we demonstrate our approach by bringing in the systematic application of the method of immanent critique to a selection of prominent contributions to the debate over Sustainable Development (SD)
In the process of working our way through the typology of SD, we have already pointed to how moving to a new discipline becomes necessary
Summary
All around there are strong indications that the concept of sustainability maintains wide currency with government, private industry, civil society and in particular academia, for example the recent introduction of a sustainability-specific branch in the prestigious scientific journal Nature as a platform for sustainability-oriented scholarship [1]. Over the past several decades, sustainability studies, broadly defined, has commanded the attention of a wide variety of traditional disciplines and novel research fields that have made important contributions to the debates over what sustainability means and how it is best achieved. In this two-part paper, we address two prominent cross-cutting problematics within the diversity of contributions to sustainability studies, namely interdisciplinarity and normativity. In Part I, drawing purposively on canonical contributions from some of the field’s founding authorities (see [3]), we source examples from the SS literature of the way the issues of interdisciplinarity and normativity have been discussed, and what tensions they bring, before moving to advance an alternative scientific strategy, namely immanent critique, which we argue is capable of overcoming these shortcomings
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