COLLABORATING FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

By

F.C. OWEYEGHA- AFUNADUULA

Website: http://www.afuna.org or http://www.afuna.o-f.com

Email:afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk or afunaduula@afuna.org

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Introduction

Environmental planning and management has become an integral component of environmental training and practice as well as of development. However, communicating between academic environmental planners and managers or with policy makers and the general public about environmental change, strategies, problems, issues and challenges is prone with complexities and pitfalls (Bretherson, 1994). In particular, communication is made problematic by the several distinct and potentially conflicting political agendas. These derive from different views of what the world is or ought to be and the ways in which we, as humans, cope with uncertainty in everyday life (Dovers and Thompson, 1992; Bretherton, 1994; Schwartz and Thompson, 1990). Moreover, our reactions to unfamiliar situations are not always logically consistent or sufficiently informative (Bretherton, 1994).

Faced with incomplete information, different perspectives at the level of information flow colour our attitudes and approaches to a wide variety of environmental issues, problems and challenges. No particular approach is correct or incorrect; they are just different (Bretherton, 1994). The politician's job is to balance such differences. The scientist’s job is to present as clearly as possible the technical implications of each approach devised. And the job of the philosopher is to present the moral and ethical implications of each approach or a combination of them (Bretherton, 1994). The best strategy, however, seems to be collaboration across the natural and social sciences (Miller, 1994) in a transdisciplinary manner.

The issues of collaboration for the environment in view of the question of global environmental change has recently received a lot of attention. This paper reviews the origins, trend and challenges for the future of scientific collaboration in the environmental arena.

Environmental change and Information

Environmental change is only one of the many uncertainties we face as humans. Certainly other living things have to put up eight it all the time. Science is committed to studying environmental change. However, for any programme of study of change to be successful, scientific knowledge must be translated into information that assimilated into practical action to resolve the problems and issues created by the change.

An effective mechanism for such translation must be established by the active involvement of many groups of resource persons such as economists, anthropologists, demographers, water resource specialists, political scientists, industrial engineers, philosophers, etc. Bretherton, 1994). In addition, natural scientists must be writing to reach out to understand how disparate groups of activists are approaching the broader policy issues associated with environmental change and establish communication specific to their concerns (Bretherton, 1994). Experience discourse with new groups of participants will have a profound influence on the established programme, enhancing its content and modifying its priorities. So much has in fact been done, but so much also remains to be done to this end (Bretherton, 1994).

Turner, Meyer and Skole (1994) have slated that much better understanding of the underlying driving forces for the environmental change is badly needed. They note that although many forces have been proposed as significant in explanations of environmental change have proved inadequate. They point to the value of interdisciplinary research agenda as the way-out.
Rosefield (1992) discussed the potential of transdisciplinary research for sustaining and extending linkages between the health sciences and social sciences.

Schneider (1992) was concerned with the role of the University in interdisciplinary global change research. He pointed out the structural constraints imposed by the University’s structure and the potential for change towards interdisciplinary discourse.
Recently, Miller (1994 discussed the subject of interactions and collaboration in global environmental change across the social and natural sciences.

History and present status of global environment change and collaboration

The study of global environmental change has been on since the early 1980s. At the time of writing this article. Such study is just about to complete the second decade (1990-2000). All indications are that there will be more energy, time and money devoted to this kind of study in the next decade (2000-2010). However, real success will educate us unless we are ready to recognise and misuse research on the interactions of physical, biological and anthropological processes in global environmental change.
Historically, there has been no substantive collaboration across the natural and social sciences. This has resulted in the detention of a well-articulated global change research agenda that calls for but does not yet encompass significant interdisciplinary collaboration. (Miller, 1994).

Today only a few models of the kind of successful collaboration that is needed and too little concrete evidence of how it should be attempted. Miller (1994) makes a distinction between co-operative but partitioned multidisciplinary research and collaborative interdisciplinary research. He submits that the latter is the wise choice but that it will only be possible if scientists from collaborating fields begin to alter the way they think and prepare to take time needed to address the problems of environmental change.

Current collaborative effort on global environmental change

Increasingly, global research effort is committed to collaboration between the natural and social sciences. Every major international gathering on global environmental change never concludes without bespirited calls, by some participants, for collaboration across the two sciences.

In fact both natural sciences and social sciences are agreed on the importance of conditioning joint research projects (Turner, Meyer and Skole, 1994). Already, as if to underscore this point, a collaborative research effort has emerged on landuse/land cover under the auspices of the International Global Biological Programme (IGBP) and the Human Dimension’s of Global Environmental Change Programme (HDECP).

Current constraints to collaboration

Collaboration across the natural and social sciences is in fact, not totally new phenomenon. What is new is that the degree to which it is required for understanding global environmental change is unprecedented. Major constraints to progress are that: there are few examples of successful research across disparate fields; and there is very little previous experience to use as a guide in organising and conducting large-scale research activities (Miller, 1994).

To these constraints may be added the mistaken view, during most of the 20th century, among researchers in the natural sciences bad social sciences that they are in fact engaged in fundamentally different types of activities.

The new consensus

Fortunately, as noted earlier in this article, natural scientists and social science are beginning to question the active dichotomy between them. They are beginning to appreciate that interactions between physical, biological and human phenomena are the concern of both, and that they are actually two sides of the same coin or two ends of the same spectrum of science. In particular, there is an increasing realisation that scientific understanding of the physical and biological dimensions of many aspects of global environmental change is directly related to an understanding of human activities (Miller, 1994). Ciesin (1992), Miller (1992) and Moss (1992) have all indicated that data, research and models from the social sciences can no longer be ignored by the natural scientists wishing both to understand the dynamics of natural process of global environmental change and to deal with the social and economic implications of these changes.

Classification of social science-natural science internationals

Miller (1994) has given three categories of research that combines natural and social sciences, namely:
Category A research takes place all the time in disciplines like geography and psychology. This is not surprising. Both tend to span the traditional subject matter of both natural sciences and social sciences. In fact, because of this both disciplines have their professional associations particularly in both the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and the International Social Sciences Council (ISSC).
This is not all. Both psychology and geography have a very long history with original research focusing on physical and biological phenomena, later moving to emphases behavioural and social phenomena (Miller, 1994).

Geography, in particular, has distinctly displayed physical, human resources. There are also geographers whose preoccupation is to examine the interactions between the physical and cultural forces. Recently geography has moved further to preoccupy itself with the so-called geographical information systems (GEMS).
Psychology has sometimes appeared more biological than anything else, emphasising as it does physiological, neurological, cognitive, social and developmental phenomena. However, there is increasing tendency of psychology to examine the interconnections between these phenomena.

Category B human activity involves one discipline appropriating the language or ideas of another. Sometimes the modalities for explanatory is even theoretical purposes are appropriated. Miller (1994) has cited the concept of social Darwinision, which created a framework for British and American social science in the late 19th century, to illustrate this point. Social Darwinism was based on the extension of the Darwinian ideas of ‘Survival of the fittest’ and struggle for existence from biological to sociological phenomena. Society was viewed as an organism, not an aggregate of individuals. However, it is important to note that ideas of co-operation, altruism and restraint of completion common in socio-biology have found their way in political science literature. Recently concepts like eco-politics, socio-ecology, etc. have extended the process of appropriation even further a field into the eco-development and environmental arena.

Table 1: Categories of Research combining Natural and Social Sciences (After Miller, 1994).
Category A Research that involves both natural and social sciences approaches within the confines of a single discipline.
Category B Intellectual Stimulation of Fertilisation of one discipline by another.
Category C Methodological borrowing or collaboration that ultimately influences the substance of a research field.

It must, however, be stressed that just like combining natural and social science approaches within a single discipline, the adoption of metaphors from one discipline to another does not in itself constitute research collaboration (Miller, 1994). All that happens is the enrichment of one discipline by another or at best, a clearer reorganised or even a transformed explanation emerges. Just the language or image of explanation changes; not the substances of the theory of the research field. The research findings remain disciplinary.
In Category C, what is involved is the transfer of new methodological and analytical techniques to the natural sciences or social science. One problem is the automatic assumption that the methodological expertise in one field can be automatically translated into another field (Miller,1994).

The reality of change and interactions in research

Categories A, B, and C of research type interactions between the social sciences and natural sciences can improve and broaden understanding of environmental change. The reality, however, is that none of them, in its own right, provides a good model for the land of collaboration across previously separate and differently focused research traditions for a more complete examination of environmental change.

Collaboration and its challenges

Schneider (1992) has stated that interdisciplinary can be intellectually challenging and more valuable to society than its disciplinary notion ; the real threat to collaboration is likely to be the attitudes and of those who participate it the exercise. Unrealistic or uniformed expectations and the tendency of one field or discipline to dominate the processes of identifying research problems and training research questions, are likely to combine to frustrate collaboration (Miller, 1994; Schneider,1992).
Miller (1994) explores in detail the unrealistic expectations of social scientists, including their dedication to particular social policies and theories; and the tendency for social science to bind its research questions by political and administrative units, dealing with nation-wide phenomena and more of ten focusing research on smaller sub-natural units. He notes the tendency of social science to avoid the larger, global scale research issues because of the legitimate problems of data access and the difficulty of conducting comparative research across cultural groups.

These are serious habitations of studies of environmental change across the natural and social sciences. Social scientists are constrained by the inhabitation so that they are unable to make as rapid a contribution to research on environmental change. Fortunately this is changing. Social scientist are beginning to work within and across their disciplines improve the comparability of environmentally relevant data. From country to country, or from region to region (Miller, 1994). However, they are more concerned about cultural analyses, although they are working collectively to identify both nation-wide and worldwide social science research problems as noted earlier in this article.
Collaboration is also constrained by data and measurement problems both social science and nature; science collect their data and measure quantities differently. Differences in the nature of data and measurement problems in the two sciences have the potential to inhabit collaboration significantly in future. The nagging issue is; how are data especially in the social sciences to be standard, especially when it comes to behavioural studies?

The reality is that behaviour in society is influenced by politics, culture, and economics, which must to take care of in the social sciences. These are traditionally excluded in the natural sciences. How does one reconcile these?
To these challenges of collaboration we may add the prediction problem and the problem of framing research questions.
The truth is that social science predictions are not strictly analogous to physical science predictions (Miller, 1994). This is because of what proper (1957) calls ‘ the complicated interactions between observer and observed, between subjects and object.

Any prediction by a social scientist is about people who can by their conscious action, upset the predictions made and make them illegitimate scientists can neither know nor account for things that are only known by the subjects of their predictions but affect their behaviour. This is why social scientists prefer to project the consequences or current trends rather than to redact future ones. They avoid the problems posed by predictions by instead proposing future scenarios rather than predictions (Miller, 1994).

As if all this is not enough, the projections of social scientist in areas of significant social or economic concern become part of the influence their behaviour. When people hate the resultant policies or pattern of action, they may attempt to change it, thereby making the projection inaccurate by changing the conditions on the basis of which the projecting were made. (Miller, 1994). Therefore Social science projecting predictions are potent and fragile and complicate collaboration.

Conclusion

Future environmental Planning and management will succeed only on the basis of collaboration through interdisciplinary research. This is the same as saying that participating science and participatory scientists across the natural science-social science divide are what we need for the future conservation of our environment. However, we must recognise the constraints to collaboration posed by the different traditions, predictions and projections in the two sciences. The aim should be to emphases more the areas of strong linkages and consciously deal with the weak areas that constrain collaboration.