Rereading the interdisciplinary mindscape: a response to Redford

Abstract

Kent Redford (2011) offers a reading of the social science discourse on conservation to make a call for greater and better collaboration between social scientists and conservationists. As someone whose initial training as an engineer socialized him into being dismissive about the social sciences, who then struggled to understand and integrate a social science perspective into his work, and who has campaigned for greater interdisciplinarity in environmental research, I find Redford’s description of the evolution of his own thinking refreshingly frank and his call for greater openness and collaboration very encouraging. But fostering greater understanding and collaboration across these boundaries may require greater clarity about the categories, roles and values of the disciplines and people involved. Redford characterizes the problem as one of social scientists being too indifferent towards, or too critical of, conservationists, and argues that some of the criticism is based on misreading the conservation(ist) landscape. I suggest that a better understanding of the indifference and criticisms is provided by a clearer separation of the roles of academics versus activists and a fuller appreciation of the different normative stances across social and conservation activists.