Download Futures Studies in the Field of the Environment

What does the future hold?
Assessing the meaning of the long term in strategic and environmental
research since the 1970s
Erik Westholm and Jenny Andersson
[email protected]
Purpose and aims
“The future” is today a key concept in the social sciences. Politics for knowledge production
as well as research strategies, calls and programs from funding agencies refer to the future as
a central starting point. The reasons for this concern with the future are linked to the grand
challenges of our time; the globalization of politics and economics, the environmental
challenges of climate change, the needed energy transition etc. – all of which are understood
as fundamental challenges of the long term. The future is increasingly understood as a
category of action and as a temporal domain in which things can happen and in which
previous actions have consequences. The future is also an imperative – in the name of it,
crucial things must be done. But who speaks in the name of which future, how, and why?
The purpose of our project is to investigate what is meant by the category of future, or long
term, in the wide field of research policy and strategic and environmental research. We
propose that while the long term is often used as a motivation for intervention, action or
concern, it is rarely made clear exactly what this long term refers to, nor the particular
normative and epistemological problems that studying the long term carries with it. We also
propose that such lack of clarity is oftentimes purposeful, a kind of conspicuous silence, since
the long term is in actual fact not just a temporal category, but a sphere of battling interests
and conflicts, between different societal actors, between different scientific perspectives, and
between various and potentially conflicting societal objectives – growth, preservation,
sustainability. Such battles have been manifest in the field of the future since the emergence
of the long term as a specific scientific and political category in the early 1970s - and led at
the time to a fundamental debate in social science about the possibility to study the long term
(Andersson 2006, 2012).
In the last decade, large research programs and calls have been constructed explicitly around a
central concept of “the future”, at MISTRA (the Foundation for Strategic Environmental
Research) the Swedish Research Council (VR) and Formas (the Swedish Research Council
for the Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning). A glimpse into these calls
and programs reveals that “the future” as a concept and phenomenon is generally taken for
granted with little theoretical or conceptual considerations. Fundamental concerns related to
what and how we can know about the future and how long term changes challenge prevailing
notions of facticity, objectivity and experience often remain to be addressed. Nonetheless,
more or less implicit assumptions concerning the future are made in all steps from the framing
of the problem to methodology and conclusions drawn. The future is highly present but rarely
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discussed. We argue that there is the need for a careful study of the ways that the future is
defined and addressed, and of the way that contemporary research into the long term deals
with fundamental normative and epistemological questions pertaining to the future.
We plan to analyse the field of Swedish environmental social research, which dates from the
1970s when cross sector environmental problems were discovered and when also the specific
areas of futures studies – framtidsstudier- and long term research – långsiktig forskning - were
established as scientific fields. A key research task is to understand how approaches to the
future in the environmental social sciences have changed over time, not only in the very
conception of the long term as a set of promises or problems, but also in terms of theoretical
and methodological principles. The project aim is therefore to analyze the way that the future
is mobilized in the strategic field of environmental social research, and the way that this field
constructs long term challenges, produces future scenarios and attempts to structure action
for the long term.
We plan to take two routes:
a) a longitudinal and historically oriented study of the evolution of the key future concepts
and theoretical and methodological strategies projecting the long term in strategic social
science research since the 1970. The aim is to develop a conceptual framework for how
futures are addressed and explore how the future notions underpinning long term research
have changed since the 1970s onwards.
b) an analysis of the contemporary future motivations, objectives and strategies of
environmental research in Sweden. The aim is to critically analyze the way that the future is
mobilized in the strategic field of environmental social research, and the ways in which this
field actively participates in contemporary social constructions of long term challenges.
Survey of the field
From progress to risk – a shifting future regime
In recent years, the social science interest in issues to do with futures, the long term, and
uncertainty has virtually exploded. The future is in fact emerging as a central problem in areas
as different as environmental history, geography, anthropology and sociology. It is difficult to
do justice to this emerging field in a number of short paragraphs and it is also not easy to see a
clear orientation emerging from these different perspectives, but we point in the following
paragraphs to a number of relevant perspectives that are beginning to lay the contours of a set
of theoretical orientations to address societal futures.
Much of this literature follows on from the publication of the risk society thesis by Ulrich
Beck, which argued that fundamental social conflict is no longer characterized by the
organization of welfare, the redistribution of resources or the provision of insurances against
predictable forms of risks but by the rise of unpredictable risks as the consequence of
technologies that fundamentally change social organisations (nuclear energy, etc) (Beck
1993). Preparing for and dealing with such risk becomes the basis for social organization.
During the 1990s, Ulrich Beck (1992) and Giddens (1994) elaborated on the Risk society as a
new form of modernity. The risk concept aims to capture the transition from the industrial
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society and its ideas on mastering the nature, to a reflexive modernity increasingly occupied
with handling the negative consequences of the industrial society. Giddens (1999) points at
risk society as increasingly preoccupied with the future. The future is here understood as a
question of risk and safety, far from the understandings of welfare, progress, or growth of the
post war period.
As pointed out by the anthropologist Andrew Lakoff, (2007) the risk society thesis implies a
different future horizon or future rationality, one that is no longer about planning for security
and welfare, but about preparedness for potentially catastrophic and unpredictable futures.
This can be understood as a fundamental shift in future horizon and in temporal regime. We
refer here to the growing discussion in history of temporal horizons or regimes d’historicite
(Hartog 2003 , Koselleck, 1985) which proposes that societies over time have different
perceptions of time, of the relationship between past, present and future. The rise of the idea
of the future as something that had to be actively handled, studied, and controlled in the post
war period can in itself be interpreted as such a fundamental shift (Andersson 2012).
Time sociology and the sociology of anticipations
A different take on the risk society thesis has been advanced by researchers such as Bruno
Latour, who proposes, rather, that modernity is fundamentally characterized by the distinction
between society and nature, and pleads, currently, for a fundamental rethinking of this
division (Latour 2000, 2005). For Latour, the future is an actual being, an existence that is
understood as capable of independent agency, and Latour therefore separates, in his most
recent work, between futur, as the social construction of futures, and avenir, as what is
actually coming. An alternative view comes from the time sociologist Barbara Adam. Adam
sees futures as constructed not only by fundamental processes in social structures including
the orientation and objectives of social science. She proposes that in pre-industrial societies,
knowledge about the future was developed mainly on the basis of repeated cycles in the
nature (Adam/Groves 2007). These futures were embedded in place- and time-specific
conditions: localized and culturally rooted. Knowledge about them could be transferred
between generations in the local society. They were essentially based on caring for finite
natural resources. In the early phase of industrialization, perceptions in relation to the future
started to change: “At issue is no longer the contextual, embodied future, but a future emptied
of content and divorced from context, a future that can be calculated anywhere at any time
and exploited for any circumstance” (Adam /Groves 2007 p. 10). Futures separated in such a
manner from their social context were in a sense a prerequisite for 20th century ideas of
economic progress and calculation. This future however, based on endless resources to be
exploited, is now highly contested, by an increasing awareness of the need to take huge steps
to avoid devastating environmental and climatic effects. Also this problem is discussed by
Adam, in the form of a separation of actions bearing on the future from our knowledge of
long term consequences which have in turn been separated from the consequences as such.
They propose that reintegrating this triangle, by providing systematic knowledge production
of unfolding futures and the possible consequences of present actions with an ethical
reflection on the normative basis of desirable vs undesirable futures, is a way of developing
more future responsible social structures. While this is a large and programmatic statement for
research, we propose that Adam’s time sociological perspective is relevant because it allows
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for the systematic analysis of how societies think, project and create futures and how
prevailing future notions in science are linked to ideas of ethics, responsibility and action.
Such notions of human responsibility were indeed key in the emergence of ideas of the long
term as something that had to be studied and handled in the 1970s – but seem somehow,
paradoxically, to have lost in importance at least as scientific imperatives. Normative
questions such as the possibility of distinguishing between good and bad futures, or the
fundamental normative dilemmas that arise from studying the long term – a field that per
definition does not yet have an objective existence but is necessarily also about our
projections, hopes and fears – tend to be evacuated from the research process.
Adams perspective on the active construction of futures has been taken up by a strand of
sociology, sociology of anticipation. This research field has focused in particular on
innovation policy and the way that the technological innovation process is structured by a set
of promised and anticipations on expected outcome. In short, the idea of a technological
innovation, nano technology for instance, is a fundamental impetus on the bringing about of
that very technology as different social actors cluster around its promises. While our field of
study is different, there are important insights here on the role of anticipation and future
visions for social actors, and it could be argued that also the research process functions around
such future promises or anticipations. Meanwhile, our study will permit us to bring out the
many different anticipations and promises that seem to co-exist in long term research, and the
basis on which such coexistence between manifest contradictory future promises is feasible
and socially legitimate. Why is it, for instance, that the complicated issues of the
responsibility and consequences of the present seem to fall into the backseat as ‘future’ is
often understood, for example, as a question of finding innovative technological solutions to
environmental problems but not as a question of challenging prevailing social trends such as
innovation and growth? In recent years, a number of big research programmes have addressed
questions of the future of fundamental natural resources – forest, agriculture, the arctic – but
have only dealt to a small extent with the questions of how visions of possible developments
in these fields are also guided by the existence of a number of actors and interests who push
for certain future visions rather than others.
Environmental social sciences
Environmental social research has gone some way in laying out the different ideas of futures
that guide in fact present day debates on environmental challenges in social science. For
instance, Lindahl/Westholm’s studies in the Future Forest program have shown how strategies
in relation to environmental futures can be grouped into two discursive pathways (Beland
Lindahl/Westholm 2011). One is that there is an abundance of natural resources globally and
that environmental problems and resource shortages can be solved by technological solutions.
This approach is mainly framed as a trust in continuous growth and a prosperous future. The
other view is related to an expected long term scarcity resulting from the finite character of
natural resources. Generally, the futures linked to this idea call for a radical transformation of
production and consumption systems. This view is marked by worries and urgency for the
future. The two views can, in turn, be traced to dialogues on the future that have taken place
since the 2nd world war in western societies and in which “the future” seems to have been an
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organizing concept for debates on development and modernity and has reflected visions and
dystopias varying over time (Andersson 2012).
A central approach in environmental social science is the idea of eco-modernization which
largely suggests that environmental problems may be resolved within the “growth paradigm”.
As argued by Baker (2007), the strategy of ecological modernization attempts to pre-empt any
fundamental ideological conflicts over modernity unlike stronger models of sustainable
development and radical environmentalism. Eckerberg (2004) stressed that ecological
modernization rests on a trust in the future and in social engineering as ways to tackle
environmental problems. Although much disputed, the idea has been a widely accepted
political solution to the dilemma of economic growth and resource depletion, for instance
within the EU Lisbon Strategy and in the Europe 2020 strategy (Westholm 2009).
Lundkvist/Carlsson demonstrate (2004) that in Sweden, the political parties collaborated in
transforming the idea of ecological modernization to a political strategy, only disputing on
implementation and practicalities.
However, methodological developments are now transforming the fundaments of
environmental studies. In research agendas dominated by social and natural systems
interactions, the nature stands out as reactive and unpredictable. Flooding, storms, droughts
and diminishing bio-diversity as well as worrying data on global warming are making their
imprints. New research institutions are established on the basis of increasingly complex
human/nature interactions and a new terminology indicates the development of ascending
interdisciplinary research fields; Social Systems Transition Theory (Scoones et al 2007),
System flips (SEAC 2007), Planetary boundaries (Rockström et al 2009), Ecological
footprints (Ewing, B et al 2001), Soft collapse (Hornborg 2009), Third natures
(Sassken/Dotan, 2011) are all concepts that aims to capture the dynamic character of
environmental studies. Uncertainty and unexpected transitions are common themes.
The “eco-scarcity” futures are typically marked by long term perspectives in the analytical
framework while policy implications propose immediate urgency. In the “eco-modernisation”
approach, the future is differently scaled. Eco-modern futures seems to be divided into limited
changes that can be handled within today´s political and economic order, while changes that
may threaten current social and economic order, are externalized beyond the time horizons of
today’s decisions. In reality, these two ideas are mixed and interact in environmental research.
For instance, research calls may recognise scarcity, uncertainty and risks while proposed
solutions are suggested to be part of eco-modernistic approach, such as innovations and green
growth solutions. Even more important is that the two fields are becoming merged. The
expected disorder that the eco-scarcity approach aims to capture is already integrated in the
economy and in certain ways a part of the eco-modernist approach. Pellizoni (2011), for
instance, argue that neo-liberal governance operates through, rather than despite disorder.
The two perspectives of eco-scarcity and eco-modernisation are linked with certain ways to
structure action in relation to the future and with certain temporal scales that are used for
problems and proposed solutions. In our research of these connections we will be able to
develop a more nuanced and complete terminology, able to give a clear picture of anticipated
futures; the normative assumptions made, the ways they recognise drivers and processes, the
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“good” and “bad” ascribed to certain futures, the ways they deal with central problems such
as uncertainty, choice and the room for maneuver in relation to preferred futures. We believe
that the important task would be to develop a conceptualization of the way that environmental
research deals with the long term, which trends and elements that are constructed as
objectively known and recognized, where normative considerations of desirability and social
choice enter into future representations, and how fundamental issues of social risk and social
conflict are addressed.
Project description
We posit as our research aim, to analyze the way that the future is mobilized in the strategic
field of environmental social research and the way that this field constructs long term
challenges, produces future scenarios and attempts to structure action for the long term.
In addition, we are interested in understanding how approaches to the future in social science
have changed over time, both in the very conception of promises and problems of the long
term and in terms of theoretical and methodological principles that underpin research. We
pose a number of key questions, that we propose as crucial for understanding how the long
term is addressed and constructed in social science research,
- Which assumptions are made concerning knowability, in other words what it is actually
possible to know about the future? How do studies that focus on long term challenges address
crucial issues of uncertainty, and what is meant by uncertainty?
- Which assumptions are made concerning governability, the scope for action? Which futures
are understood as within respective beyond the reach of human influence?
- What are the relevant temporal horizons and categories? This means analyzing
understandings of speed and duration of changes, the scaling and re-scaling of variables, and
the time horizons used for various phenomena including from where such temporal categories
are derived
- What normative anticipations are made in calls and programs concerning drivers and
processes of change? What are good and bad in expected changes? How, and by whom (the
individual researchers, science policy, enlightened publics?) are such desirable and
undesirable futures determined? How are normative issues to be addressed in research?
- Is, and then how so, is the future addressed as a social process – in other words how does
long term research address issues of democratic influence and choice, of participation and
communication?
- How do social research deal with the possibility of conflicts of interests in strategic research
areas, for instance concerning the use of key natural resources?
We propose to answer these questions through two individual studies,
Component study 1. A longitudinal and historically oriented study of the evolution of the
key future concepts and theoretical and methodological strategies projecting the long term
since the 1970s. The intention of this component study is to trace the creation and
development of long term strategic research, including the field known as futures studies, in
Sweden since the initial debates in the late 1960s, including key debates in
Forskningsberedningen and the subsequent research councils following a number of
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reorganisations in the 1980s and 1990s. This study draws partly on a previously conducted
study by Andersson on the creation of the Secretariat for futures studies in 1972 (Andersson
2006). The relevance of the proposed study would be to probe the question of the
transformation of ideas of the long term in key research political debates since the 1970s. The
Club of Rome report (Meadows et al 1972) highlighted expected pressures related to a critical
demand growth on natural resources globally. It triggered a global discussion on the future of
demography and economic growth, and generated a debate on the role of futures studies in
Sweden and other countries. This process is now being addressed by historical research
(Andersson 2006, 2012, Vieille Blanchard, 2011, Sorlin and Warde forthcoming). But this
breakthrough, in a sense, in social science on a large scale of the idea that futures had to be
addressed seems to have been followed by processes that undermined its relevance. Futures
studies, the brainchild of the 1970s, never seems to have become a fundamental influence on
social science, and the theoretical and methodological challenges that it posed seem also to
have weakened over time. Indeed what happened to 1970s ideas that the long term had to be
incorporated as a key consideration of social science? What impact did futures studies
actually have on the social sciences, on research policy, and why did they disappear from the
research political agenda? As the idea of the future has made a return in Sweden in the last
decade with a number of initiatives in strategic environmental research to focus on the long
term specifically (see also below component study 2) how have ideas of the future, how to
research it, what can be known and not, evolved? The study will be based on research policy
documents, archival materials and interviews, as well as on the analysis of major
organizational transformations of the research landscape in the period from the 1970s to the
present.
Component study 2 is an indepth study of the future motivations, objectives and strategies
underpinning contemporary environmental research. The study will apply textual analysis of
relevant calls, complemented by interviews and participatory observations of ongoing
research projects, focusing mainly on programs at VR, MISTRA and FORMAS between 2000
and 2011. These are the main funding agencies in the field. The research questions are
extracted from the analytical framework in the beginning of this section.
The main documentation and sources pertaining to the study are: governmental bills setting
out the direction of research (forskningspolitiska propositioner), for instance, Governmental
Bill 2004/05:80: Research for a better life for Governmental and Innovation 2008/09:50: A
boost to Research and Innovation), also general annual instructions and directives from the
ministries to the funding agencies, Appropriation Directives from the Ministries in which
tasks are set which the Government entrust to the funding agencies, Reports on the progress
of work on these tasks that are continually submitted to the government in the form of
evalutations, state of the art, research strategies and research programs, Annual reports from
the funding agencies Mistra, Formas and Swedish Research Council (for instance (För svensk
framgång inom forskning/innovation 2013-2016) - Evaluations of strategic research
programmes. A small number – two to three – major research programs will be selected for
indepth study, interviews and when possible, participatory observation of the ongoing
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research process. The following research programmes have been identified as particularly
relevant for our study (the final selection will be made depending on accessibility):
Vetenskapsrådet Linnestöd: LUCID, Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of
Social and natural Dimensions of Sustainability. Main Scholar orientation: human ecology,
political science, natural geography. Project time: 2008-2013. Grant: 45 milj SEK.
Formas Strong research environments: Human Corporation to Manage Natural Resources.
2010-2012. Gothenburg University. Main scholar orientation: Political Science and
Economics. Project time: Grant. SEK.
Formas Strong research environments: Resilience and Sustainable Development: integrated
research on social – ecological systems. 2005-2009.Stockholm University. Main scholar
orientation: Economics, terrestrial ecology, limnic ecology. Grant: 25 milj. SEK.
Mistra Arctic futures. 2011-2013. Main scholar orientation: geography, history, economics
Collecting critical social-science research on the Arctic. Grant: 38 milj SEK.
Mistra Future forest – sustainable strategies under uncertainty and risk. 2009-2012. Main
scholar orientation; natural science and forest economics, political science, forest history,
geography. Grant: 55 milj SEK from Mistra.
Mistra Urban futures 2010-2015. Multidisciplinary effort. Grant: 105 milj SEK
The project is carried out by prof. Erik Westholm SLU, and Jenny Andersson, Science Po, Paris, both with long
experiences from futures studies/ research politics in the EU and Sweden. Westholm, Geography prof, was
Research Dir at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm 2001-2011, responsible for methodology of futures
studies 2009-2011. Westholm member of the Mistra Program Future Forest 2009-2012 and now director for the
strategic platform Future Agriculture at the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences. Westholm was the
author of Formas rural research strategy 2006 and engaged in the EU Foresight Methodology, Cost action. He
also initiated the standing Stockholm Futures Seminar..
Andersson, (docent) in Economic History, senior researcher with the French research council CNRS and the
Center for European Studies, CEE, at Sciences po in Paris. She is the principal investigator of the ERC funded
project Futurepol - A political history of the future. Knowledge production and future governance 1945-2010.
Andersson has held a number of visiting fellowships and post docs internationally. She has been actively
researching the global history of futures studies for a couple of years with a series of emerging publications
(Andersson 2006, Andersson 2012, Andersson-Keizer in review). Andersson has 70 percent as PI of the 5
researchers in the Futurepol project. Westholm and Andersson jointly organized the international Stockholm
Futures Conference in 2010 with support from Formas and VR.
International collaborations
The study is a collaboration between Dept for Urban and Rural Dev. Swedish University of
Agriculture (SLU) and CNRS (Comite national de la recherche scientifique) and Center for
European studies, CEE, at Sciences Po in Paris. The project will draw on our collaborative
experiences in a wider field of European environmental research and futures studies, i.e. at
IDRI at Sciences Po in Paris, the Politique de la Terre programme of IFRIS in the Paris region
and IIASA (Inst. for Applied Systems Analysis) in Vienna, Austria.
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