Setting New Research Agendas: A Social Scientist’s View

Abstract

While we are primarily speaking to the social science community in this book, we hope it will be read by physical scientists concerned with climate issues as well. Interaction between the two communities is needed on both sides. For the social sciences, this is an era of emergence from “inside” the social system — from that previously self-enclosed social world which treated natural phenomena as inputs to be taken as given. Social scientists have had a lot to deal with lately. Social systems are not what they used to be now that international political debates on the Global Problematique throw such concepts around as the international economic order, the international information order, and the international cultural order. When the international environmental order is added as well, such intrusive concepts as society-nature interactive systems begin disturbing the social science peace of mind. In earlier days economists handled nature by simply tracking resource flows through the social system. Then resources and environments turned interactive with the societies to which they had been inputs, and geography began to take center stage as the discipline ready to handle interactive analysis, having the tools of both the physical and the social sciences within its own discipline. In the climate-society project which gave rise to this book, geographers have played a key role in bridging the gap between physical and social concepts and giving operational meaning to an interactive nature-society feedback system. Understanding the nature-society interface has become an important new agenda item for the social sciences.