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What do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global climate change?

The social sciences are developing considerable insight into human and social factors that drive global climate change. The basic cause lies in the human quest for economic and political security, and beyond that, for relative social status through consumption display. These social factors produce population growth, technological invention and increasing affluence, the physical drivers of impact on the environment (as noted by the IPAT formula and its predecessor in population biology, the Kaya Identity). We also know that humans, unless socially restrained, are prone to dump their waste into unprotected spaces (the environment) without paying for the negative effects (defined by economists as market externality). Over the past 150 years, as population has grown and waste increased and become more toxic, we have reached the limits of nature’s absorptive capacity and started to change the very ecological systems that support life as we know it. These basic principles hold true across all types of societies and underlie our current climate change dilemma. Most people and societies around the world want the fruits of growth, and some actors pursue these goods with the most inhumane tactics imaginable. Whatever the method, though, the industrial system of mass production and consumption has become ironically self-destructive in its longer term ecological impacts. We know that systems of individualized competition tend to exacerbate environmental dumping and systems of laws and regulations have sometimes reduced it. But in the case of climate change, radical reduction in the dumping of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere strikes at the very heart of contemporary industrial civilization. The human input to the needed geochemical change will require not only new technology, but massive conservation by high GHG output countries (not all of high per capita output). This simple fact implies a profound ecological rationalization and reorganization of national and world economy, politics, social patterns and cultures.

Climate scientists have conclusively demonstrated the geophysical principles of our dilemma. The European Union has proposed a goal of 50 (percent reduction of global GHG emissions) by 2050. Pragmatic social actors such as governments, legislatures, businesses and non-governmental organizations have begun to experiment with new sets of rules (formal institutions, sometimes proposed by political scientists), such as cap and trade. Despite these attempts, however, our planetary atmosphere presently remains on track for a disastrous increase in average temperature well beyond the danger line of two degrees Centigrade. For that reason, concerned researchers are beginning to look beyond market and institutional concepts, turning instead to the dynamics of interaction among the sectors and actors that produce societal behavior and its governing policies. This IHDP itself (the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change, under the auspices of the United Nations) demonstrates this shift. Within it, starting in the mid-1990s, political scientists created a sub-unit to study the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). But after ten years, the static concept of institution had outlived its utility. In 2007, the new IDGEC leader announced a change in analytical paradigm from institutions to the more fluid and dynamic concept of “earth systems governance.” He described this new concept in terms of dynamic networks and relationships among actors. This shift defines a whole new research agenda particularly receptive to the distinct ideas and methods of Sociology generated by its relational perspective.

The social sciences have boiled the social dynamics of our collectively self-destructive behavior down to a fundamental model known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (aka the Tragedy of the Commons and the Public Goods problem). We know from social-psychological small group experiments with this model that people tend to defect on promises to act in collectively beneficial ways to the extent that their immediate personal incentives to defect are

high and their faith that the other parties will keep the promise is low. If the immediate material incentives to defect are kept stable, experiments show, compliance to the promise will be improved to the extent that actors increase their trust in each other through repeated games in which they both learn the terrible consequences of defection. In other words, moving away from impersonal self-seeking rationality, the actors have to develop relationships with each other that are mediated by trust. While trust may have a rational basis in past experience, at any given moment the pattern of trust among actors exists as a patterned network in society that is not reducible to self-interest. Therefore, as ways to control the self-destructive dynamics of a group, along with reducing the short term material incentives for defection, there also exists the possibility of building and intensifying the networks of trust conducive to cooperation toward the long term among the actors. While we know this much from experiments on small groups, though, we have no sure knowledge about how to apply the same principles to bigger, more diffuse groups, such as nations or global society. The indication of relevance, though, presents us with a fundamental hypothesis to structure research on the dynamics of larger-scale social interaction in general, as in this case as applied to the dilemma of global climate change. At the national and global scale, social dynamics become enormously more complex and difficult to adjudicate, and global climate change does not give us the luxury of repeated games.

What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?

To respond to climate change, we need to know about more than the final binding decisions taken by authorities or the ecological effects of individual and social behavior. We need to probe more deeply, into the social demands and their representation that so strongly condition decisions and behavioral practices. Only by grasping these deeper social processes can we hope to devise ways to channel them in more beneficial directions. Yet, our understanding of them remains fallible at best. Different disciplines see social demand and its political effects through distinct paradigmatic glasses. Where economists and political scientists attribute social and political behavior to rational choices and formal institutions, sociologist see patterns of relationships at work. To explain the emblematic Prisoners’ Dilemma, rational choice and formal institutionalism may suffice for the incentives and rules, but the emergence of trust and cooperation requires the relational perspective of sociology. There lies the distinct contribution of sociology to the study of these social processes. Because of its relational orientation, sociology is well prepared to study the networks and flows of interaction among social actors, sectors and institutions (structural analysis) and social categories of meaning (discourse analysis) as constituent inter-actor processes that construct macro-outcomes. For instance, sociology’s relational

perspective has sparked the study of: 1) large-scale social change; 2) social constructionism; 3) social movements; 4) social networks; 5) power structures (fields 2, 3 and 4 have recently started to spread to political science).

When we look at the problem from this perspective, many lines of inquiry open up. The crucial concern is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of national societies. For this macro problem, two alternative theories present themselves: the Treadmill of Production and Ecological Modernization. The Treadmill argues that a powerful interest bloc of producers, workers and consumers drives continual economic growth and heedless environmental exploitation. In contrast, the Ecological Modernization school argues that even such self-interested actors, when they become aware of the long-term destructive consequences of their behavior, can learn to adopt new sustainable practices. The Treadmill view assumes the primacy of conflict and the imposition of the winner’s goals. But the Modernization view assumes the possibility of social learning through persuasion to cooperate toward collectively beneficial long term goals. Either process could potentially be effective for GHG reductions. The potential conditions of their effectiveness present a number of hypotheses for investigation.

Under a given international climate change regime or set of institutional rules, nations respond differently according to the respective conditions. The key knowledge transmission runs from the IPCC at the international level to receptor organizations in the different national cases, through them into prevalent discourse, participatory forums

and advocacy coalitions, and finally into the content of decisions. The strength of advocacy coalitions (conflict) and the

functionality of participatory forums (persuasion) should determine the effectiveness of this information flow into policy. Contributing to their effect should be a number of impinging social factors: the credibility and capacity of the national scientific community, the strength of civil society, the legitimacy of the national bureaucracy, the reliability of the rule of law, the institutions that aggregate and represent public demands (electoral rules, parties), and the existing patterns of diverse networks (information sharing, political support, mutual aid and authoritative guidance). For instance, one hypothesis is that nations with corporatistic political institutions (Japan, Sweden, Austria, Sweden), because of their participatory policy-making venues, should learn more readily and produce greener environmental decisions than other political systems. In addition, the effect of cultural fields of national discourse with their typical beliefs and judgments about climate change pose additional questions for investigation. For instance, are highly religious as opposed to secular cultures necessarily more resistant to accepting the reality of anthropogenic climate change?

One problem with conducting this type of inquiry has been the inadequacy of our methods. Until recently, the social sciences had no empirical method to study the variety of interactive, relational processes among actors that constitute macro-formations (nation-state bounded societies) and build up into macro-level behavioral outcomes. Over the past several decades, though, sociology has developed that, suitably tweaked, offers this research capacity: policy network analysis. This approach (developed by Laumann, Pappi, Knoke and others) allows the researcher to trace and compare the patterns and effects of different relational patterns and belief fields among actors as they contribute to large-scale decisions and social change. This kind of data permits the comparative testing of the posited hypotheses. The project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (Compon, PI Broadbent) gathers matched empirical data on these patterns and fields in 19 countries and at the international level, as they react to climate change and its international regimes. This empirical study will bring evidence to bear upon the crucial questions enunciated above, while at the same time establishing a global network of research institutes on the social science of climate change and providing an open-use data set for further research on these issues. The Compon project is now collaborating on this effort with Climate Central, a project based at Princeton and Stanford Universities to improve natural science related public education concerning climate change.

Robert D. Bullard