Speaking for the ‘people disciplines’: global change science and its human

dimensionsAbstract: A number of global change scientists have been enjoining their peers to alter their modus operandi. Calls have been issued for more ‘decision relevant’ forms of inquiry more squarely focussed on ‘human dimensions’ as societies enter a ‘no analogue’ planetary situation. This paper analyses the way certain geoscientists who study global change imagine the ‘people disciplines’ to be of relevance to their own endeavours. It reveals a rather narrow understanding of the social sciences to be in play, alongside a largely nominal inclusion of the humanities. The paper suggests reasons for this combination of partiality and omission, and suggests why a much wider and more plural understanding of human dimensions is important. This understanding, it is shown, should rebound on the human dimensions of global change science itself. Some suggestions for new encounters between geoscientists, environmental social scientists and humanists are offered. Around thirty years after the first global change research programmes were created, it is unfortunate that the wider social sciences and humanities are not more visible to, and engaged with, global change scientists. Their relative marginality is a long-run problem. Yet visibility and engagement are vital to avoid ‘science imperialism’ by default in our knowledge of people-planet interactions in the Anthropocene. One hopes that in less than a decade hence, visibility and engagement increase significantly.

Keywords: global change science; epistemology; transdisciplinarity; human dimensions; representation; environmental social science; environmental humanities

Contemporary science is intricately woven into the fabric of modern societies. In the 21st century much of what we think, say and do is affected at some level by scientific concepts, evidence and inventions. This is most obviously true of areas like medical, engineering and computational science. However, in other cases the social implications and ramifications of science are held in check, despite their potential significance. This has been true of climate science this last 30 years, notwithstanding numerous United Nations meetings designed to reduce the degree of anthropogenic atmospheric warming.

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But it’s even more true of a much larger, related field of research: the evolving inter-discipline sometimes known as ‘global change science’ (or simply global change research). Global change science connects the methods and findings of numerous experts who investigate different parts of the Earth system, including but going far beyond the atmosphere. Its practitioners have identified past and present-day causal connections between these components at a range of spatio-temporal scales up to the planetary and long-term, using data from ever improving Earth observation technologies. They also employ sophisticated models, forecasts and scenarios to explore future biophysical outcomes (and thus what sort of Earth we humans may bequeath our descendants). Metaphorically they are weavers who stitch together the threads spun by specialist analysis of global change – or, to rephrase, many are specialists who together weave by way of collaborations with other specialists.Out of this emerges a picture of a ‘planet under pressure’ whose inhabitants are entering a ‘no analogue situation’ where ‘planetary boundaries’ risk being transgressed. Yet global change science does not yet enjoy the public visibility of climate science, which is one of its constituent fields – this despite recent concerted efforts to make the science better known to non-scientists (e.g. Barnosky et al. 2014a; Earth League, 2016). It is only profiled sporadically and partially – as when new research into mass species extinctions or the end of the Holocene makes headline news for a day or two. Furthermore, its significant normative implications for how people across the globe should relate to water, land and air are little known and largely ignored: in that sense, it’s trailing climate science which, at least, has a globally authoritative voice in the form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and associated news coverage).1 1Only recently has biodiversity science got a global advisory body roughly equivalent to IPCC, the IPBES (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). Other areas of Earth surface science, such as oceanography, do not yet have equivalent global bodies. While science informs various aspects of transnational environmental management, like policies

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Understandably, many global change scientists are very frustrated by this state of affairs. They want citizens and their leaders to appreciate that the so-called ‘human dimensions’ of worldwide environmental change are now in need of very serious scrutiny indeed. The impacts of global warming are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. People’s collective actions are taking the Earth away from the Holocene conditions that have allowed homo sapiens to flourish this last 11500 years or so; people will, in turn, be forced to respond (at great cost in many cases); but they also, again collectively, have a chance and responsibility to determine the scale and nature of their future biophysical impacts on as yet unborn humans and other living species. Though mitigating and adapting to the ramified effects of climate change are part of all this, they hardly exhaust the range of debates, decisions and actions that need to occur as we anticipate Earth 2.0 – the one that humans, through a mix of intention and carelessness, are making day-by-day.So how can global change science be made to matter socially? One obvious answer is to turn to those disciplines whose role it is to study human perceptions, beliefs, emotions, habits, decisions, relationships and institutions (‘the people disciplines’). This is exactly what many global change scientists are now doing, including climate scientists. In numerous papers, lectures, blogs and other communicative media they are making claims about the ‘people disciplines’ that are simultaneously claims upon their practitioners to help address the looming planetary crisis. This move reflects a double recognition: first, that it’s ever harder to analyse and predict the behaviour of the planet without incorporating humans as causal agents or affected parties; and, second, that more applied forms of geoscientific knowledge relevant to humans’ combatting desertification, there are currently few genuinely global science advisory organisations, much less ones that are frequently in the public eye. There are high-level panels operating under United Nations auspices but these are not independent bodies staffed exclusively by scientists and nor are they established at arm’s length from political bodies. Likewise, there are global assessments of things like fresh water resources and energy use and future demand but these lack the public visibility or epistemic authority of a body like IPCC.

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changing needs and aspirations are now required. After dominating global change research for over 30 years, many scientists who study Earth surface processes are, it seems, giving overdue recognition to non-STEM subjects.2

In this paper I analyse the way that people in the social sciences and the humanities are ‘interpellated’ by a range of geoscientists who study the Earth’s constituent spheres. How are they imagined to be of service, and who is thought to be of most relevance? I also look at how some practitioners in the social sciences and humanities are speaking back to global change science. What are they saying, who is speaking, and where are they venturing their claims? This dual focus allows us to identify which people are currently representing the social sciences and humanities in respect of global environmental change – one of the defining issues of the decades and centuries ahead. It allows us to highlight shared assumptions, inclusions, omissions, points of difference and missed opportunities for dialogue. In addition, it gives us an evidential basis to venture judgements about the possible consequences of some voices being louder than others.3 2STEM stands, of course, for science, technology, engineering and medicine. It’s not that ‘human dimensions’ have been ignored in global change science until only recently – the sole and joint projects of the International Human Dimensions Program (1996-2014) are clear evidence to the contrary, so too the activities Working Groups II and III of the IPCC. It’s more that those studying large-scale bio-geophysical processes have been largely content to conduct their research without direct reference to these dimensions. Until quite recently, they have left it to a relatively small (though steadily growing) band of people in economics, psychology, planning, anthropology and other disciplines (such as Steve Rayner, co-editor of the classic work Human choice and climate change, 1998). Now, it seems, more global change scientists are seeking more sustained interaction with such people in order to further their own endeavours. This quest builds on a globally smallish number of long-term engagements with social scientists and humanists in past projects such as IHOPE (which stands for Integrated History and Future of People on Earth: http://ihopenet.org/about/; see Constanza et al., 2012).3My analysis, as readers will discover, is based on a close textual engagement with numerous written statements about global change science and about what the ‘people disciplines’ can today contribute to understanding global environmental change. Given the variety of statements I have interrogated, my approach has been to look for recurrent topics, metaphors, key words and assumptions (epistemological and ontological) that animate them. I have also paid attention to where these statements appear, their intended audiences and the professional identities of their various authors. The use of a more

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My conclusion will extend beyond the obvious point: namely, that there are rather particular ‘human dimensions’ to the way that those disciplines studying human dimensions are presented by people who value them in different ways. More specifically, I identify a mixture of partiality, ignorance and non-communication among those speaking about, and for, the people disciplines. Global environmental change ought to foster new dialogues across academia’s ‘three cultures’ (Kagan, 2009), delivering consequent benefits to society and nature. However, as I show, the dialogues are thus far more limited than they could be, such that wide areas of social science and the humanities are (by default) considered irrelevant to global change science. Towards the end of the article I offer reasons why that situation must change, and suggest some practical measures towards achieving a new dispensation. Speaking for the Earth and humanity with authority and legitimacy is an extraordinary privilege and a responsibility that few people enjoy. Together, researchers across the disciplines who investigate anthropogenic environmental change still have some work to do to make the most of their representational capacities.

circumscribed method of discourse analysis was prohibited by the diversity of types of statement, ranging from strategic research programme documents to opinion pieces to peer review papers. However, there is a signal benefit to analysing such a range of texts across different genres of science writing. When patterns of thought emerge from such analysis, despite erstwhile professional differences between authors (e.g. ecologists versus climatologists), one realises that what Ludwig Fleck (1935) called ‘thought collectives’ extend beyond traditional disciplinary specialisms – even where no one is actively corralling the communities to think in the ways they do. A key omission in this analysis is lectures and presentations given at workshops and conferences attended by global change scientists. One reviewer of the original version of this article felt it was a rehash of arguments presented in Castree et al. (2014). Though the aims and arguments overlap, this is a far more detailed analysis of global change science’s ‘human dimensions’ and it says far more about the wider environmental social sciences and the environmental humanities. In addition, the reviewer suggested that the arguments presented here are old news. Even if that were the case, it seems to me important to replay that news to those who may not have heard it and, evidently, I am not alone: see, for instance, Jetzkowitz et al. (2017). Finally, the reviewer felt my interpretations were not supported by sufficient evidence. I would invite them to evidence a counter-interpretation and would be happy to engage in a published debate in these pages or elsewhere.

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Global change science as an agent of change: calls to armsGlobal change research is a complex, multidisciplinary endeavour devoted to describing, explaining, predicting, communicating and (increasingly) altering patterns of anthropogenic environmental change at the planetary scale. It is pursued worldwide, mostly in organisations that are government-funded or perform a public function.4 In significant measure it’s emerged from the four global environmental change research programmes created 25–30 years ago,5 along with related regional and national-level programmes (see Mooney et al., 2013). These initiatives enabled a more global scale, integrated approach to understanding Earth surface change to emerge. Because various geosciences have dominated the enterprise it’s often called ‘global change science’ (hereafter GCS).6 However, it is far from unified and 4Aside from various universities, examples of the latter are the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NASA in the USA, several Max Plank Institutes in Germany, the UK’s Met Office and Australia’s CSIRO.5The programmes are the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, launched in 1987, which followed the World Climate Research Programme, created in 1980. They were followed by the already mentioned International Human Dimensions Program (1990, relaunched in 1996) and DIVERSITAS (launched in 1991 and focusing on global biodiversity and biogeography). An attempt to co-ordinate these occurred under the Earth System Science Partnership for well over a decade (see Ignaciuk et al., 2012 for more on the ESSP). In addition to these initiatives, regional ones such as START (global change SysTem Analysis, Research & Training, est. in 1992 and focused on Africa and the Asia-Pacific region) and the IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, est. 1992) have been important. GCS has benefitted from national and multinational investments in more granular and integrated Earth observation technologies. For instance, among others there is the Global Climate Observing System (est. 1992) and, more recently, GEO (the Group on Earth Observations, est. 2005) – with a new European Union Sentinel satellite system unfolding.6Despite the relative frequency with which this term is used in some circles, no one has troubled to define it (!!). A recent paper is a case in point (see Marguiles et al., 2016): it contains the term in its title yet at no point describes what the term refers to. A further complication is that within GCS are other newish sub-areas of the field, also termed ‘science’, notably land change science (on which see Turner et al., 2007). Added to this ‘Earth system science’ intersects with and overarches GCS, especially in the work of lead IGBP figures like Will Steffen (on which see Castree, 2017). Both are embedded, according to some commentators, in Global Systems Science, which is a grand attempt to offer a planetary scale, coupled comprehension of natural and human systems (http://www.gsdp.eu/nc/news/news/date/2013/10/06/global-system-dynamics-

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best understood as a set of overlapping initiatives driven by teams of geoscientists who share an interest in understanding and responding to anthropogenic environmental change.7 The International Geosphere-Biosphere Program was an especially strong catalyst for cross-disciplinary geoscience through its many sole and joint projects.8 The resulting interdiscipline is not characterised by one overarching scientific method or conceptual matrix; instead it’s marked by a more general conviction that global change is amenable to systematic, impartial, evidence-based inquiry linking between climatology, biogeography, oceanography, and so on. Some practitioners have preferred the term ‘sustainability science’. However, according to some (Mooney et al., 2013) the endeavour so named has largely gained momentum outside the above mentioned research programmes, even as others use it to point to where GCS needs now to go (e.g. Leemans, 2016).9

and-policy-best-practice-guidelines-towards-a-science-of-global-systems/). There will never be hard and fast distinctions between the domains named by these various terms. GCS is, in effect, becoming a short-hand for any putatively ‘scientific’ attempt to comprehend global environmental change but most unambiguously so when led by geoscientists (like Brit Simon Lewis, whose personal professorship is in GCS). By contrast, the term ‘global change research’ enjoys use when a wider spectrum of disciplines are being discussed reaching beyond natural science and the ‘science’ parts of social science.7Though focussed on larger and longer-term spatio-temporal scales, global change science is not fixated on them. Much research is local or regional, seeking to (i) embed specific cases in larger explanatory-causal contexts, and (ii) use specific cases as laboratories to explore commonalities and differences of change across ostensibly diverse situations affected by similar extra-local pressures. For a recent review see Marguiles et al. (2016).8For instance, the Program sponsored nearly 20 cross-disciplinary projects during its lifetime – ranging from integrated modelling of land use change to measuring carbon fluxes and budgets. The Program’s own magazine recently reviewed its contribution to so-called ‘Earth system science’ just prior to Program closure (see IGBP, 2015). Other programmes were similarly fecund of cross-disciplinary global change research, mostly geoscience-led (with the exception of the IHDP, which had far more social science content, albeit not representing the full spectrum of social science disciplines in equal measure). Under the ESSP (est. 2001) these and the other two Programs launched several cross-programme projects.9For instance, in a review of the global change research programmes Harold Mooney and co-authors (2013) treat sustainability science separately. The literature about sustainability science, and that authored by self-described ‘sustainability scientists’ (not always the same thing), is large and growing. Indeed, the field has its own eponymous peer review journal, and a section of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Many sustainability scientists have training as society-environment researchers rather

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Furthermore, some global change researchers do not favour the normative implications of the term ‘sustainability’ because it appears to bring values too directly into the scientific study of Earth surface change. That said, as I intimated in the introduction, they now have reason to want the normative implications of their scientific findings to be taken very seriously in the wider society. There are at least two reasons why.First, equipped with the idea of the ‘Earth system’10, a number of them have adduced evidence of massive and accelerating alterations to the planet that might alter system behaviour qualitatively (see, for instance, Barnosky et al., 2011; Dirzo et al., 2014). Several conceptually charged terms have been used to convey this, such as ‘the Anthropocene’ (e.g. Steffen et al., 2011), ‘The Great Acceleration’ (e.g. Steffen et al., 2015a), a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ (e.g. Steffen et al., 2015b) and global ‘tipping points’ (e.g. Barnosky et al., 2012). In geology, a subject normally concerned with the deep past, there have been well publicised moves afoot to formally test the stratigraphic validity of the Anthropocene proposition (see, for instance, Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). Second, though the evidence and these terms have enjoyed a degree of exposure outside GCS, they have not – as yet – been taken seriously by enough citizens or decision-makers. The fairly timid agreement (as many observers see it) on climate change policy reached in Paris in late 2015 is a synecdoche for the disconnection between GCS (whose insights are increasingly alarming) and

than as pure environmental scientists and so are, as it were, constitutionally alive to human dimensions in one way or another. Also, many have a place-level focus often at odds with the global and regional perspectives taken by the likes of Will Steffen or Johan Rockstrom – both of whom are associated with global change science in various ways. In this paper I deliberately bracket this literature because it is not synonymous with GCS and is voluminous enough to warrant a similar study to the present one. That study must await another day.10This idea is usually said to originate with British mathematician and modeller of ocean and atmosphere dynamics, Francis Bretherton (1985), in a report for NASA (1986). However, it was elaborated by a group of senior scientists on the other side of the Atlantic, partly via IGBP projects. One example is the edited book Earth Systems Analysis for Sustainability (Schellnhuber et al., 2004), which partly emerged from earlier work by Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft.

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the societies it seeks to serve (which, especially in the developed countries, continue to transform nature willy-nilly).11 Likewise, the United Nations Rio+20 meeting (2012) did not break new policy ground. The long-standing ‘sustainability gap’ (Fischer et al., 2007) most definitely remains. To play critically on Naomi Klein’s (2014) words, we might even say that climate science specifically, and GCS more generally, currently change almost nothing rather than everything.Given this context, a fair bit of introspection has characterised GCS in the last few years. It is increasingly clear that providing more information about the scale, scope and magnitude of environmental change will not suffice (Griggs & Kestin, 2011). There have been calls for a new modus operandi issuing from different groups of researchers. For instance, in 2012 Ruth DeFries, Paul Crutzen and others published an article about a ‘new social contract for global change science’ in the journal Bioscience. GCS, they argued, “… must shift from a focus on biophysically-oriented, global-scale analysis of humanity’s negative impact on the Earth system to consider the needs of decision makers …” (2012: 603). The following year another set of commentators put it like this: “[We] … face a clear shift from business-as-usual basic science …” (Mauser et al., 2013: 422). In the words of yet another group, also writing in 2013: “Changing the role of [global change] science is necessary but not sufficient to meet the challenges before us – the practices of [the] science must also change” (Sayre et al., 2013: 339, emphasis added). Then, more recently still, Anthony Barnosky and coauthors have argued that “… no longer is a scientist’s project finished when results are published in a peer reviewed paper, especially with regards to critical global problems such as climate change, extinctions, ecosystem loss, pollution and population overgrowth …” (2014: 168).

11The meeting outcome provoked at least one leading climate scientist to speak-out, not for the first time, about the responsibility of scientists to push policy makers much, much harder: see Anderson (2015).

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As part of such calls to arms, a number of geoscientists have made conscious mention of the various people disciplines. Consider the following. The organizers of the ‘Planet Under Pressure’ science conference held just prior to Rio+20 insisted that “… more emphasis is needed on deep interdisciplinary collaborations between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities …” (Stafford-Smith et al., 2012: 4). Shortly after, in a PNAS review of natural and social science interactions in the four global change research programmes, Harold Mooney and coauthors concluded that “Getting to the root of … global change issues needs the involvement of a wide range of social science disciplines, broader than the present mix that is currently involved” (2013: 3670). More recently, in a paper entitled ‘Avoiding collapse’, Barnosky, Paul Ehrlich and Elizabeth Hadly insist that “scientific and technological breakthroughs will not be enough. Even more critical will be effective collaboration of environmental and physical scientists with social scientists and those in the humanities” (2016: 1). Numerous other global change researchers have echoed these sentiments (see: Chapin et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2015; Lubchenko et al., 2015; Pahl-Wost et al., 2013; Reid et al., 2010; Schlosser & Pfirman, 2012; Mooney et al., 2013). They have done so in a wide range of places, from relatively high-profile ones (like the pages of Nature Geoscience) to rather less well-known ones (such as Earth’s Future which, like this journal, is a fairly new publication devoted to ‘joined-up’ analysis of our ‘human planet’). Even the editors of Nature have added their voices to the chorus, calling for the “…integration of natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities from the outset” (2015: 5, emphasis added). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, those bodies which fund GCS have, alone and together, also foregrounded such epistemic integration as a desiderata. For instance, the ‘Belmont Challenge’ called for “A step-change increase in collaboration across scientific disciplines, especially those between the

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natural and the social sciences …” (Belmont Forum, 2011: 4).12 Meanwhile, America’s Global Change Research Plan, 2012-22 aims to fund research that “achieve[s] a deep understanding of the integrated Earth system – [one] that incorporates physical, chemical, biological and behavioural information” (2012: xiv). At the global level, the clearest sign that the people disciplines will play a more prominent role in global change research is the new Future Earth initiative (see: http://www.futureearth.org/). Unlike most previous global change programs (see footnote 5) none of its three overarching research foci favour geoscience alone (they are: ‘Dynamic planet’, ‘Global sustainable development’ and ‘Transformations towards sustainability’). Moreover, nearly half of its science committee members come from the social sciences and humanities (see: http://www.futureearth.org/science-committee). In part, all this is an attempt to internationally institutionalise a response to the Belmont Challenge. Future Earth will support cross-disciplinary teams, with a particular emphasis on geoscience-social science collaborations.13

In sum, for GCS to make a difference in the world many practitioners (and their funders) now argue that they themselves need to change. As part of this, the people disciplines are seen as pivotal. Unsurprisingly, because the calls mentioned above largely come from geoscientists they do not reveal an in-depth understanding of the social sciences and humanities even as they make claims about (and on) them. As I will show later, that is problematic. But first we can ask: what exact roles are these disciplines thought to play and which disciplines are invoked, explicitly or implicitly? To answer this question we must look both at the manifestos published by groups of global change scientists and

12The challenge was issued by the Belmont Forum, a collection of leading funders of GCS formerly called the International Group of Funding Agencies for Global Change Research (IGFAGCR).13This shift of emphasis away from geoscience extends to the humanities too – at least by implication. I say by implication because the humanities are not much discussed in the existing Future Earth programme documentation.

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a wider set of recent publications concerning GCS and human dimensions. Global change scientists and the people disciplines: making knowledge count in societyThose geoscientists looking to ‘socialise’ GCS have, between them, been focussing on three roles for the people disciplines. None of these roles are at all unusual or unexpected. The roles are as follows (and in each case I will evidence them in an illustrative rather than exhaustive way).The first role is an explanatory one concerning causes. It results from the recognition that people are, via their combined activities, material forces able to variously alter, amplify and stymie Earth surface processes. For instance, writing in Nature Paul Palmer and Matthew Smith (2014) argue for a major push to integrate theory and data about human decision making into improved global climate change models. “Omitting human behaviour”, they note, “is like designing a bridge without accounting for traffic” (p. 365) Relatedly, Lubchenko et al. (2015: 742) assert that “pairing natural and social sciences … can provide understanding of how coupled human-natural systems work and are changing …”. This kind of coupled research is seen as especially important for predicting possible future socio-environmental scenarios. In turn, these scenarios can rebound on the present and influence decision-making about public and private investments in, for instance, infrastructure (see, for instance, Kraucunas et al., 2015). The second role is a diagnostic one related to the potential and actual impacts of environmental change on people. Jan Erisman and colleagues (2015), for instance, call on global change researchers of all stripes to build cutting-edge agent-based models to anticipate levels of human vulnerability to interconnected risks (what they called ‘networked threats’). Relatedly, Paul Stern and co-authors argue for “… an enhanced science of [human] vulnerability, capable of estimating the harm that future climate-related events would bring to

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communities … and their political, ecological and economic systems” (2013: 609). The third role is a practical one: to help GCS become more ‘actionable’, ‘use-inspired’, ‘decision-relevant’ and ‘user-focused’.14 Here the people disciplines are seen as something of a bridge between GCS, policy makers and various real world stakeholders affecting, and affected by, environmental change. This is because various social scientists and humanists study policy processes and institutions, as well as businesses, households and so on. Thus, in their call for ‘science for action to sustain the human-Earth system’, Stuart Chapin and co-authors look to “… social psychologists, sociologists …., political scientists, geographers, economists and others” (2011: 15) for knowledge conducive to Earth stewardship. Echoing this, in a manifesto for ‘practice-relevant adaptation science’, Richard Moss and colleagues present “… a comprehensive, integrated approach to research in social, physical, engineering and other sciences … needed to … identify vulnerabilities, improve foresight about climate risks …, and understand barriers and options for adaptation” (2013: 696). It talks of knowledge coproduction between a wide range of researchers and an equally wide range of societal actors. Finally, Ann Kinzig, Paul Ehrlich and others (Kinzig et al., 2013) argue strongly for more behavioural science in the assessment of which environmental policies work relative to varied and changing social norms and values.15

For all three roles, and in all the cited articles advocating for them, the integration of knowledge is seen as necessitated by the coupled, complex reality being analysed which, therefore,

14This desire to make research usable is hardly new – for instance, it was part of the philosophy underpinning the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, initiated in 2001 (see Reid & Mooney, 2016) – but it’s a desire now seemingly more widespread among global change researchers in the geosciences.15It’s worth noting as well that the new IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee has declared a strong wish to see the Panel move towards a ‘solutions focus’ in the kind of knowledge it presents in its various reports. This connects to ongoing research and advice about so-called ‘climate services’ that has gathered momentum in recent years (on which see Brasseur & Gallardo, 2016).

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requires successful and sustained collaboration between academic specialists. Hearing the call: the people disciplines speak back to global change scienceAs noted, none of these roles are unusual or unexpected. Unsurprisingly, several members of the people disciplines are speaking back to global change scientists in arenas where they are likely to be noticed by their intended audience. Their arguments relate directly to the three roles (as well as to an extra one, to be described below). That is also hardly surprising. However, as we now consider the arguments it is worth pondering who exactly is speaking, which particular disciplines they are speaking for, how they frame those disciplines and their knowledges, and how – therefore – they imagine the roles in question to be ‘properly performed’. Once again, the examples cited below are indicative not exhaustive. A key context for their arguments they present is as follows: economics has been the dominant non-physical science discipline within global change research this last two decades. For instance, economists have long been involved in IPCC Working Groups II and III, in policies to arrest worldwide environmental change (such as ‘cap and trade schemes’ for pollution of the atmospheric commons), and in public debates about how to respond to such change (it’s not for nothing that the likes of Nicholas Stern and Jeffrey Sachs are noted thought-shapers).16 A key reason for economics’ dominance is the 16This said, there has been a modest degree of supplementation to economics’ pre-eminence in the global change field. I am referring to two things. First, consider the role that ecological economics is playing in various attempts to measure ecosystem services. Though some believe that ecological economics has lost its ‘alternative’ identity and has dulled its critical edge (e.g. Spash, 2013), it nonetheless challenges the ‘instrumental reason’ one finds in environmental economics and is more open to issues of human well-being, justice and ethics than this field typically is. Secondly, geographers have done much to explore non-economic dimensions of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. Geography is a remarkably heterodox discipline and something of the plurality and vibrancy therein has been reflected in the work of Karen O’Brien, Jon Barnett, Katrina Brown, Mark Pelling and many others: these global change researchers do not privilege economic reason in their research into things like adaptation, resilience or community vulnerability. This has had some positive effects in arenas like the IPCC where working group III is now less

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capacity of money to serve as a globally recognised language able to powerfully communicate ‘messages’ about all manner of human preferences, wishes and desires. This language operates in the form of taxes, loans, incentives, specialised investment funds and so on. From a GCS perspective, it can be quantified and used in scenario building and integrated assessment models. To begin, there are plenty of calls to either extend (e.g. Burke et al., 2016) or else go beyond economics (e.g. Weaver et al., 2014 ) so as to better comprehend ‘human dimensions’ as drivers of, and impacted by, global environmental change (i.e. new knowledge relevant to the first and second roles itemised above). Some of these take the form of disciplinary manifestos. For instance, Jessica Barnes and others have advertised the possible contribution of anthropology to climate change analysis and management (Barnes et al., 2013). Writing in Nature Climate Change, they present themselves as “ …social scientists [who] analyse … the human systems that generate greenhouse gases, the ways in which different groups perceive and understand climate change, its varying impact on people around the world and the diverse societal mechanisms that drive adaptation and mitigation” (p. 541). More recently, a group of psychologists led by Susan Clayton review the “unique contribution” their field can make: “Psychological research employs rigorous empirical methods … [and] incorporates physiological, cognitive, affective and interpersonal processes, as well as factors in the social, cultural, biophysical and engineered environments of individuals” (Clayton et al.: 2015: 640; see also Carrico et al., 2015).Other contributions focus on developing or instituting novel metrics to measure human drivers of, and responses to, environmental change. Writing in Nature, Edward Barbier (2014) makes the case for costing the depreciation of natural capital as part of a “retooling of our measures of income and wealth …” (p. 32). Noted ecological economist Robert Costanza dominated by economic approaches to human responses.

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has, with others, expressed similar sentiments – again in Nature (2014; see also Agarwala et al., 2014: 520). In the pages of Science, Hoekstra and Wiedmann (2014) call for integrated measures of humans’ environmental footprint across organisations and levels. Existing measures are too one dimensional, they argue. Also in Science, William Pizer et al. (2014) make the case for the ‘social cost of carbon’ as a crucial new tool in measuring the impacts of continued burning of fossil fuels. This tool translates important non-monetary into monetary costs. Metrics such as these can bridge between the second and third roles: they give politicians, business leaders and others tools to inform decisions about policies, strategies, costs, benefits and options.17 This is argued strongly by Eli Fenichel and co-authors in a recent Nature Climate Change article about ‘inclusive wealth’ (2016). This metric connects different gains and losses to different kinds of wealth as the global environment changes (they use fisheries as an example). Political scientist David Victor makes a wider case for ‘decision relevant’ knowledge about climate change. He criticises the IPCC in its current format because it limits social science input to economics and offers “a surfeit of bland statements that have no practical value for policy” (2015: 28). This blandness, in his view, results from governments’ wish to “control statements about social behaviour, which implicate policy” (ibid.) – such statements can be controversial because they often have economic, distributional and ethical implications that invite far reaching societal debate. Victor calls for a parallel process to the IPCC assessment report cycles, one involving a range of social scientists free to explore what climate science’s insights might mean for geopolitical tensions, voting patterns and much more besides.

17For instance, in the case of climate change they can help quantify targets leading to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases, linked to remaining within specified emissions budgets over decadal time scales.

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If all these examples speak to the explanatory, diagnostic and practical roles the people disciplines can play, others speak to a fourth role: that of communicating geoscience to those who stand to be affected by its findings and predictions. For instance, Richard Black (2015) advocates for journalism as a field of systematic study and a professional practice: its insights, he argues, can make climate scientists far more savvy communicators in light of their diverse and often sceptical audiences. Relatedly, Hollin and Pearce (2015) advertise the value of a rigorous approach to analysing how climate scientists communicate uncertainty to non-scientists. On the audience side of things, Myers et al. (2013), in Nature Climate Change, show how longitudinal social data can reveal patterns of non/belief about global warming among the public. In respect of message-receiver links, Adam Corner and Chris Groves (2014) argue that new intermediate institutions between geoscience and society are needed to translate factual matters into the value-based beliefs that motivate people to act (or not, as the case may be). In all these cases, communication experts can help global change scientists like Anthony Barnosky and colleagues (2014a, 2014b), Simon Bushell et al. (2015) or Kevin Anderson (2015), realise their aspirations to be more effective in their messaging. Indeed, there has recently been a degree of consolidation of communicative expertise within environmental social science (see Ballantyne, 2016; Moser, 2016).Framing the people disciplines: visibility and voice in the discourse of ‘human dimensions’In the previous two sections I have described how certain global change scientists ‘interpellate’ their peers on the ‘other’ side of campus; and I have shown how some people in the people disciplines speak back to GCS, focussing on high-profile scientific journals. Let me now try make sense of this emerging conversation between global change scientists and the people disciplines. What is present, and what is absent, in the discourse?

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First, it is clear that a fairly narrow range of people disciplines are thought to be relevant to the roles discussed. Economics and psychology loom large, and for obvious reasons. As noted earlier, the former has so far been the dominant social science approach to human dimensions, while psychology’s ‘scientific’ credentials comport well with the broad methodological epistemological and ontological commitments of GCS. When other disciplines are mentioned, it is typically those that are associated with the production of applied knowledge. For instance, in a manifesto arguing for geoscience ‘with’ society (rather than simply ‘about’ it), Romain Siedl et al. (2013: 8) identify the knowledge domains salient to that endeavour. “The essential natural and social science disciplines”, they assert, “[a]re … economic geography, industrial and regional economics, business and management sciences, industrial ecology, environmental sciences, and regional and economic development planning”. Apparently, disciplines like art history, anthropology, history, philosophy and theology are not ‘essential’. Interestingly, no explanation as to why is offered.Second, even when those who are not economists or psychologists write about ‘human dimensions’ they often do so in ways that seem designed to cater to those in the geosciences. For instance, take the earlier mentioned Barnes et al. article about anthropology. It is peppered with terms like ‘drivers’, ‘mechanisms’, ‘systems’ and ‘resilience’ – words that many environmental anthropologists would be uncomfortable with as literal (or even metaphorical) descriptors (in the same vein see Strauss [2015] and, to a lesser extent, Davidson [2016]). Similarly, in a multi-disciplinary Nature Climate Change review paper about a more joined-up approach to understanding adaption, the governing concept is ‘barriers’ (Eisenack et al., 2014). This metaphor tends to imply that: (i) adaptation must occur globally, regardless, since barriers are universal (albeit not existing in the same combination everywhere); (ii) the process is akin to scaling a wall: with the right knowledge, resources, skills and sufficient will people can

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get over (or go around) the barriers facing them; and (iii) once barriers are overcome adaptation is occurring or has been achieved.18 However, there are other ways to conceive of adaptation that have different analytical, normative and practical implications. For instance, one can think of ‘adaptation pathways’ with ongoing ‘decision points’ (e.g. Fazey et al., 2016) where resources are committed and actions undertaken, leading to assessment, debate and further decisions iteratively (at various spatio-temporal scales); or one can talk of ‘transformative adaptation’ (e.g. Eriksen et al., 2015) where the so-called ‘barriers’ relate not only to how biophysical change impacts upon people but a whole set of socio-economic, political cultural changes caused by international commodity markets, local power relations, weak government institutions, and so on. In each case, ‘barriers’ become: (i) relative to diverse actors’ social locations and future aspirations, (ii) processual, often to a degree that they resemble chains not simply obstacles to be negotiated, and (iii) politically charged in terms of who gets to identify ‘barriers’, with what authority and with what real world effects (see Pelling, 2011). Together these three insights challenge the idea that social scientists and humanists are interrogating objectively existing social systems that are analogous to the biophysical systems of GCS and amenable to one best form of analysis. Third, it is clear that ‘human dimensions’ are presumed to exist ‘out there’ awaiting discovery by suitably trained and motivated experts. In the literature cited above there is much talk of ‘knowledge gaps’ that need to be ‘filled’ – whether they

18I say tends to because I’m not so naïve as to think metaphors impose meaning on readers. But they do dispose readers to interpret messages in certain ways. In the Eisenack et al. piece the careful reader would eventually realise that ‘barriers’ is an empty signifier, usefully open to interpretation cognitively and normatively. But the early use of ‘obstacles’ (p. 867) as a word to define ‘barriers’ tends to reify adaptation as a single destination all actors should be heading towards, if only the various hold-ups they encounter could be eliminated. It also disposes readers to look for ‘factors’ (like cost) that inhibit the implementation of adaptive measures.

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pertain to causes of, impacts of, responses to or communication about environmental change. Typically, epistemological and ontological monism are at work here (largely unthinkingly).19 Take Jianguo Liu, Harold Mooney and others’ plenary article ‘Systems integration for global sustainability’ (2015), published in Science. It talks of the need to escape “disciplinary silos” to handle an increasingly “telecoupled world” (p. 963). It assumes epistemological commensurability across the disciplines, itself vouchsafed by a ‘one world’ ontology that accents complexity, feedbacks and spill-overs between ‘sub-systems’. Here academic labourers can supposedly combine the parts to see the whole. The same can be said of Alessandro Tavoni and Simon Levin’s (2014) recent Nature Climate Change article on the global environmental commons. They refer to a (narrow) range of social science subjects in their argument about the need to better understand “coupled social-ecological systems”: “Progress has been made in bridging the gaps”, they opine, “but collaborations across the sciences need to better identify the drivers of successful commons management” (p. 1058). Fourth, it is clear that when global change scientists make mention of the humanities, they do not usually explore what they are and how they might contribute to any of the roles identified above. Indeed, more generally the humanities are rarely ever discussed in leading science journals in a substantive sense (Boehnke’s [2015] Science article ‘Oh the humanities!’ is one of the exceptions that proves the rule). 19It’s important to distinguish monism from realism. Realism is almost a sine qua non for any form of inquiry: it is the belief that there is a real world of matter (including words, signs, symbols etc. as ‘performative’ entities) amenable to understanding. However, realism is not necessarily synonymous with monism. Monism is the belief that there is one world out there (however complex or stratified) amenable to one ‘best’ epistemological approach. Pluralism, by contrast, presumes there is more than one way to get at ‘the real’, meaning that ontology cannot serve as a neutral ‘court of appeal’ to adjudicate between epistemological approaches. Epistemic and ontological pluralists thus regard the academic division of labour between disciplines as more than a pragmatic or contingent necessity for understanding the real. They challenge the idea that there is one large, complex and dynamic reality that different investigators together specialise in analysing.

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When they are mentioned more than nominally one of two things seems to happen. Either, as in the Barnes et al. case, they are assimilated to ‘social science’ by their erstwhile champions; alternatively, they are advocated for while remaining, paradoxically, under-specified. A manifesto for the ‘environmental humanities’ by historian Sverker Sorlin is illustrative in the latter regard.20 It appeared in the journal BioScience in 2012, and was intended to give ‘biologists interested in the environment … [reason to] take the humanities seriously’ (to quote from its subtitle). Early on, it makes the perfectly valid point that “If humanity is the chief cause of ominous [environmental] change, it must surely be inevitable that research and policy [now] be focused on human societies and their basic functions” (p. 788). It then goes on to list organizations, people and publications associated with the ‘environmental humanities’. However, at no point does it define their remit or specify the questions, methods or findings associated with them! Sorlin’s puzzling inability (or unwillingness) to characterize the humanities he is championing seems also to affect others writing for a geoscience audience – for instance, Steven Hartman’s (2015) charter for ‘integrated environmental humanities’ (published on the Future Earth blog) says precious little about what the humanities are and how (if at all) they differ from the social sciences.21

20The term ‘environmental humanities’ has achieved a certain currency in the last five years. The environmental humanities “engages with fundamental questions of meaning, … responsibility and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating, environmental change” – so argue the editors of the relatively new, eponymous journal (Bird Rose et al., 2012: 1). It is a cross disciplinary field but its component parts are hardly hew. According to Ursula Heise, “The environmental humanities are currently emerging from … research areas that have followed distinct disciplinary trajectories to date: ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, environmental history, … cultural anthropology, cultural geography, political ecology, communication studies and gender studies, among others” (2014, np).21As if to echo the limitations of Hartman’s otherwise well-intentioned intervention, noted climate scientist Michael Mann (2015) – also writing on the Future Earth blog – effectively equates the humanities with the study of ethics, thereby occluding a much wider range of humanistic inquiry germane to global change research.

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Finally, a family of approaches in the social sciences and humanities that are usually described as ‘critical’ seem to get short shrift in the publications I have highlighted in the previous pages. These approaches include Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, post-colonialism and deep ecology, among many others. Some of them have been combined into critically hybrid (or intersectional) fields such as political ecology. They are ‘critical’ because they take issue with aspects of the world as currently constituted, pointing towards forms of change considered to be necessary and desirable (if not always immediately feasible). They thus connect the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ explicitly, and insist that all research is implicated in the very world its aims to make sense of: for critical researchers there is no such thing as epistemological ‘neutrality’ nor a fact-value separation.

While there is no shortage of critical scholarship about the ‘human dimensions’ of global environmental change, it tends not to be visible in locations that most global change scientists frequent. The prestigious interdisciplinary journal Global Environmental Change is a case in point: it is rare for the many ‘critical’ articles it publishes to be cited by these scientists in their writings about the people disciplines or human dimensions.22 The launch of new global change journals such as Earth’s Future and the present one (Anthropocene Review) is largely inspired by the need to get geoscience, social science of all kinds and the humanities rubbing shoulders more frequently with respect to global change. Meanwhile, if high profile science journals are anything to go by, critical social science – its character, its possible relation to GCS and its wider societal influence – is not very evident or well explained. For instance, I earlier mentioned David Victor’s (2015) tantalizing suggestion in Nature that social science is of value because it deals with more than ‘social facts’. But not only does Victor fail to 22According to Scopus, between 2011-15 journal content received approximately 14000 citations. Of these just over one third occurred in science journals, though these only referenced a selection of GEC content and much of the cited content was not overtly ‘critical’ in character. My thanks to Drs. Andrew Plume and Nick Fowler of Elsevier for assistance with the citation analysis.

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elaborate on how different kinds of social scientific knowledge can alter the roles that knowledge can play in society; in a trailer article the previous year (Victor, 2014) he presents social science in an entirely different way. In that earlier paper (appearing in Nature Climate Change) he makes positive mention of both economics and political science as vehicles to understand and alter human behaviour in the wider context of the “cognitive revolution sweeping across the social sciences” (p. 854). No mention of critical social science is made at all, including critical currents within economics and political science – yet it is precisely these currents that open-up the question of what ‘human dimensions’ are and why they matter!23 A recent Nature Climate Change article by Ben Sovacool and others (2015) on the political economy of climate adaptation is, in this light, rather exceptional: it sheds critical light on the ‘barriers’ concept of Eisenack et al. (2014). The need for change: altering the human dimensions of global change scienceI have provided evidence of the way a certain understanding of human dimensions is today trafficking between several global change scientists and certain spokespeople for the people disciplines. I have shown that a narrow slice of social science is being depicted as relevant to GCS (in four ways) and to the human response to global environmental change. Meanwhile, the humanities enjoy a largely nominal presence in the literature reviewed above, while critical social science is mostly invisible – all this despite there being plentiful environmental research in critical social science and the humanities.24 This state of affairs attests to the wider ‘three cultures divide’ that, in Jerome Kagan’s (2009) view, continues to characterise life in Western academia. If my analysis above is broadly accurate we 23And of course mainstream economics has come in for withering criticism from a range of heterodox economists since the financial crisis reputed in 2007-8. 24Evidenced in countless journal articles, specialist journals (like Environmental Humanities) and dozens of books (such as that authored by Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). This proliferation of environmental research by social scientists and humanists contrasts with the period when the IHDP was created – at that time environmental economics was leading the way, though environmental philosophy was also flourishing in the 1970s and 80s.

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might ask two questions: first, why are the framings, inclusions and omissions I have described occurring?; second, why does GCS need a wider engagement with the social sciences and humanities? The answers are not hard to seek.Explaining the ‘missing’ human dimensionsTo begin with, it appears that many global change scientists writing about the people disciplines have a superficial and partial knowledge of them. This presumably reflects their specialized training in various areas of geoscience (to PhD level and beyond). Though many of these specialists have had formative engagements with social scientists and humanists (for instance, in the IGBP PAGES project25), the majority of their peers have not.26 Next, those social scientists who trade in forms of knowledge that are ostensibly ‘scientific’ not only ‘speak the language’ but are also motivated (and able) to publish in high-profile places like Nature and Science where their arguments stand to be noticed by climate scientists and cognate researchers. This is most evident when collaborations across academia’s ‘human-physical’ divide occur. For instance, geoscientist Tim Lenton, a noted theorist of ‘ tipping points’ in the Earth System, has recently worked with economists to put a monetary price on multiple, interacting climatic thresholds (Cai, Lenton & Lontzek, 2016). This kind of collaboration is possible because the human dimension that is ‘economic cost’ is sufficiently general to bear a direct relation to global biophysical changes. It can be incorporated into mathematically-based assessment models in the way other (equally important) human dimensions cannot or only by way of translation between value domains (non-monetary and monetary).

25See http://www.pastglobalchanges.org/science/intro26Even someone who should know better – the biogeographer Erle Ellis, who often works in cross-disciplinary teams to study human impacts – reduces human dimensions to a species-level ‘science question’, as Ninad Bondre (2016) points out. Ellis has been among those geoscientists promoting the idea of the Anthropocene.

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Finally, by comparison with Lenton’s coinvestigators, people in the wider social sciences and humanities evidently find it difficult to write for a geoscience audience. It is apparently much easier to communicate with their disciplinary peers in specialist journals or book series, or to present at conferences and workshops attended by like-minded people. I say this because leading critical social scientists and humanists who write about global environmental change rarely ever publish in places (or write in ways) designed to reach geoscientists like Lenton. This may reflect a lack of confidence; it may reflect the fact that some practitioners highlight a problematic knowledge-power dynamic within GSC itself (e.g. Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), perhaps thereby fearing ridicule or hostility if they try to engage geoscientists directly; and it may also reflect a genuine uncertainty about how critical social science and humanistic inquiry can speak to global change science constructively, in part because it does not hew to the protocols of ‘science’. Even Mike Hulme – a very distinctive figure because he is a former climate scientist-turned-humanist – has arguably struggled to speak back to GCS in ways that might alter scientists’ sense of what knowledges of society matter. For instance, in two recent contributions (Hulme, 2014a, 2014b) he makes a rousing case for moving beyond positivist social science, while attending to the political dangers of geoscience-led environmental policy (he considers the case of atmospheric geoengineering). But one piece appears in a journal that most global scientists would never read or have heard of (Humanities), while the other is a book published by a press (Polity) whose visibility outside social science is questionable.27 Why GCS needs to enrich its own human dimensionsIn respect of my second question, GSC needs wider engagement with social science and the humanities for a number of very compelling reasons. One was implicit in the previous section: not all ‘human dimensions’ are adequately accounted for by economists, psychologists and a few other 27As ever, there are exceptions but these are not sufficient in number or weight to buck the rule.

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social scientists working together with various geoscientists. Global environmental change is sufficiently all-encompassing to touch upon every imaginable dimension of human existence: reason and emotion, body and mind, rights and duties, morals and aesthetics, self-preservation and concern for others (human and non-human). Consequently, to be socially acknowledged and ‘useful’ any future iterations of GCS must ensure that geoscience is somehow reflective of the full range of approaches to understanding these dimensions. This applies to all four roles itemized earlier in this paper. Whether it is causes, impacts, responses or the communication of research, the human dimensions involved are irreducible to things like prices, property rights, revealed preferences or behavioural ‘nudges’. For instance, as the Papal encyclical (2015) emphasized strongly, peoples’ religious beliefs can (and should) play an active role in the way environmental change is registered and reacted to. Though science is, by definition, the other of faith, GCS would benefit from understanding the theological aspects of many peoples’ behaviour towards the environment and, in that context, their attitudes towards the insights and recommendations of science. Secondly, if GCS is not prepared to stretch and pluralise its own human dimensions, then it risks enacting a particular set of political commitments in the guise of responding urgently to biophysical and social ‘realities’ said to be ‘out there’ in the world. As Science and Technology Studies has shown us over the last 40 years, all forms of science are embedded in their host societies rather than somehow detached from them (e.g. see Jasanoff, 2012). They variously internalise, reproduce and challenge certain economics interests, cultural norms and social values – think of biomedicine, plant genetics and computational science which have all generated an avalanche of innovations in recent times, some being ethically contentious (such as germline therapy and ‘gene drive’ techniques). GCS will be no different as (or if) it eventually assumes greater public visibility and political clout with governments. For

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instance, it is already clear that ambitious geoengineering ideas are by no means ‘necessitated’ by the ‘climate emergency’ (Hulme, 2014b); instead, a whole battery of moral and practical arguments need to be made before geoengineering can even be considered in principle to be a viable undertaking. Given this, the wider social sciences and humanities can help global change scientists both openly identify and robustly justify a diversity of options, looking ahead (Blue, 2015). Depending on the human projects GCS allies itself to – there should be many – the forms of evidence and practical solutions that seem most relevant will vary (for an example, see Ford et al., 2016). What should be done in response to global change, and what can be done, are relative to problem definitions – definitions which are themselves contingent on whose definitions count socially.28 Finally, and related to this second point, there has been quite a lot of talk among global change scientists about the need for ‘social transformation’ given the seriousness of humanity’s impact on the Earth. This is most obvious in climate research where a number of leading individuals have spoken out on several occasions (notably Kevin Anderson, Ken Caldeira, James Hansen and Michael Mann).29 Yet, as several commentators have argued (e.g. Machin, 2013; Sarewitz, 2016), science cannot give anyone sufficient reason to transform everything from their travel decisions to their investment choices to their consumption habits. Nor can science alone identify possible or

28By contrast, many global change scientists want to claim ‘neutrality’ even as they point towards the need for new relationships between people and planet. For instance, consider a recent paper on the UN Sustainable Development Goals by David Griggs and others (2014). It focuses on how researchers can provide integrated evidence that will allow assessment of how much the SDGs are being met over time, a worthy and necessary endeavour to be sure. But this move backgrounds how science thereby endorses the goals and how different sorts of evidence might speak to alternative goals, perhaps more radical ones, to do with poverty alleviation and higher environmental standards. 29See Anderson (2015), Caldeira (2015), Hansen’s book Storms of my grandchildren (2009) and Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the climate wars (2012). Meanwhile, working groups II and III of the last IPCC assessment (2014-15) frequently employed the term ‘transformation’ to describe the normative implications for society of climate science.

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desirable transformation pathways. Arguably this also applies to the social sciences that are currently most visible in GCS: they too cannot give sufficient reason (or suggest sufficient mechanisms) for any society to transform itself. A whole set of arguments relating to things like rights, entitlements, justice, inequality, fairness, solidarity, worth, value, charity and care need to be made that tap into people’s practices, aspirations and capacity to instigate (or simply accept) change. These arguments are not all of a piece, of course: they are sufficiently varied to generate disagreement and discursive conflict. Among other places, they reside in the critical social sciences and humanities: the latters’ constituent disciplines are richly productive of such arguments, and associated practical measures. In the absence of colliding normative perspectives, and direct engagement with them, GCS surely cannot play a part in social transformation: it will default to fostering societal evolution, not least because so many power-ful interests are opposed to ‘changing everything’ (Klein, 2014). Paradoxically, global change scientists will thereby become ‘unfree radicals’ (Castree, 2015) whose words and deeds do not align.New conversations for new kinds of analysis and actionI have just presented reasons why GCS currently has a rather narrow grasp of human dimensions, and suggested why a wider spectrum of social science and humanities disciplines need to engage geoscience. These reasons do not, of course, explain how such engagement can actually occur. So how might GCS enrich its own human dimensions so that it can more richly study, and help to shape, human thought and behaviour? There are no easy answers to this question (though we should note that some engagements are already occurring).30 In this final part of the article, I venture a set of proposals, mindful of the 30A good recent example is The Anthropocene Project organised by the House of World Culture in Berlin (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) (http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/anthropozaen/anthropozaen_2013_2014.php). The Project organizers have worked hard to foster interactions between scientists, artists, humanists and social scientists around the shared theme of the Anthropocene and its significance for people and planet. How formative these interactions have been for participants only time will tell.

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fact that enacting these may be very challenging.31 I present them telegraphically: lack of space prevents a more granular analysis. The proposals mostly make claims on researchers in the wider people disciplines, rather than just those in the current GCS community. They are germane to all of the four roles the people disciplines can play in relation to GCS’s interface with society. A key context for these proposals is the earlier mentioned Future Earth initiative. There is no doubt that it aspires to marry geoscientific research into planetary change with research into human dimensions so as to be of use to a wide range of real world actors. With its high-level academic sponsorship by, among others, both the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), Future Earth provides a potentially hospitable environment for wider and deeper engagements with geoscience and the people disciplines.32

What, then, might enable such engagements from hereonin? I suggest the following, in no particular order:

1. Environmental social scientists and humanists should reconsider at least some of their publishing, networking and conference habits – most global change scientists are unaware of the large volume (and diversity) of writing and conference activity in the people disciplines devoted to planetary change. This is because the writing tends to appear in established disciplinary journals (or book series) in fields like sociology, philosophy, literature and history, while the activity too often favours established disciplinary

31Fostering collaborations among academic specialists that are formative and possibly transformative for those concerned is no mean feat – see Felt et al. (2016) for an analysis of some of the barriers.32Importantly, two recent ISSC documents (2013; Hackman & St. Clair, 2012; see also Hackmann et al. 2014) have pointed strongly to the relevance of the full spectrum of social science disciplines (though less so the humanities). They are the World Social Science Report 2013 and the Transformative Cornerstones report. Importantly too, both documents accent the theme of wholesale societal change as a sine qua non, a theme that overarches Future Earth (one of three). Though up-and-running, Future Earth has not yet ‘solidified’ and its multiple hub structure may allow a degree of divergent evolution over time in different parts of the world (van der Held, 2016).

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conferences. As this author knows from long experience, the conferences attended by geoscientists typically have limited social science and humanities content. Likewise, most geoscientists’ journals of choice tend to limit consideration of the full range of human dimensions. New journals like Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and WIRES Climate Change are an incitement to publish and read in new arenas. But, as with changing their conference selections, more environmental social scientists and humanists need to make a positive choice to engage geoscientists as prospective readers. A minority have led the way, hopefully inspiring others to follow.

2. Environmental social scientists and humanists need to make a better case for the value of the people disciplines in respect of global environmental change – most global change scientists are unaware of how the people disciplines can be relevant to their own endeavors. It is important that disciplines beyond economics, psychology and urban planning make a clear, concrete and compelling case for their relevance to GCS and the challenges of planetary change. The case must be made in arenas where (at least some) geoscientists will pay attention. Some recent examples have appeared in Global Environmental Change (Bai et al., 2015; Brondizio et al., 2015; Lövbrand et al., 2015). But it would surely help if the case appeared in world leading science journals like Nature (and various specialist Nature periodicals).33 A precondition for the latter will be the editors of such journals allowing a wider range of content to make it through peer review. Nature Climate Change and Nature

33Recently Poul Holm and others (2015) have published a stirring manifesto for the environmental humanities, arising from the creation of the Humanities for the Environment Observatories created in 2013 (with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). But, as with Mike Hulme’s inspiring essay on virtue (2014a), it is published in a place – the journal Humanities – that many geoscientists who would benefit from reading it are unaware of.

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Energy together suggest that such editorial openness does exist.34

3. A wider range of environmental social scientists and humanists need to work directly with geoscientists on shared questions about planetary change – while some global change scientists have worked alongside the likes of anthropologists and historians, opportunities exist to widen the experience of direct engagement. A number of long-term multi-disciplinary projects associated with one or more of the four global change research programmes have provided arenas for sustained interaction across the ‘physical-human’ divide in academia. The IHOPE (which stands for Integrated History and Future of People on Earth: http://ihopenet.org/about/ and PAGES (which stands for Past Global Changes: http://www.pastglobalchanges.org/) projects are two of several examples. Relatedly, the new Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services suggests that unconventional human dimensions can enjoy high-level recognition.35 That is most encouraging. Looking ahead, Future Earth will provide funded opportunities for new collaborations. Those in the people disciplines who have not thus far engaged geoscience directly may be surprised at how easy it can be to begin conversations. For instance, the Future Earth Australia meeting in Canberra (April 2016) was an entirely open one designed to initiate new research on both physical and human dimensions. The atmosphere was extraordinarily inclusive and egalitarian. More broadly, there are already a number of open minded, senior geoscientists in different countries

34Both journals now-and-then publish articles that introduce critical social science and/or humanities perspectives. An excellent example is the article by Ben Sovacool et al. (2016).35The recently agreed conceptual framework that will govern the Panel’s inquiries and reports gives space to indigenous peoples’ perspectives on the Earth: see Diaz et al. (2015).

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who could be approached to lend support to new forms of ‘transdisciplinary’ inquiry.36

4. Academic societies, research funding bodies and academic managers at all levels need to encourage out of the box thinking about global environmental change – without creating arenas where different researchers can build trust, take risks and break existing habits of mind and practice, new approaches to people-planet relationships are very unlikely to arise. Geographer Karen O’Brien and coauthors (2013) have argued that without an “axial revolution” those who currently investigate global environmental change may be part of the proverbial problem not the solution. Axial revolutions involve deep self-reflection, a willingness to challenge assumed practices, and a capacity for personal and collective reinvention. They can be as painful as they are liberating. Aside from willing participants and skilled facilitators, a key requirement is the space, time and money for non-hierarchical encounters between geoscientists, social scientists and humanists. Such a requirement can be met by the heads of research centres and institutes, by national or global funding bodies, and by professional bodies such as the British Academy. The International Social Science Council offers one example where funding for ‘transformative research’ has been made available. Such research, especially when a number of disciplines are involved, needs to be alive to the different forms that ‘inter- and ‘transdisciplinary’ inquiry can take (Barry & Born, 2012). Out of the box thinking will often need to push beyond the conventional ‘jigsaw’ or ‘balanced’ approach that aims to join expertise and stakeholder knowledge to reveal a supposedly complete picture. It will

36For instance, professors Will Steffen, James Syvitski, and John Dearing have all, on various occasions, stepped well beyond economists and other ‘science minded’ social scientists when collaborating with people on the ‘other side’ of campus. This said, collaborators across the disciplines need to be acutely aware that there is more than one ‘logic’ to conducting multi-investigator research (see Barry & Born, 2012; Klenk & Meehan, 2015).

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take time and money, but the risks of ‘wasting’ both may dispose some to favour projects, centres and institutes that

Conclusion: co-producing alternative futuresThe leading science studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff has argued persuasively that science and social order are ‘coproduced’. “It is impossible to keep apart judgements of how to know the world in order to govern it”, she writes, “from concomitant judgements about how best to govern the world as we know it” (2012: 19). If Jasanoff is correct, then GCS will serve variously to perpetuate, reform or challenge the prevailing social order depending on the kinds of insights its practitioners offer to governments, third sector organisations, businesses and publics. In this paper I have shown that, as it aspires to become a more ‘useful’ inter-discipline more focussed on human dimensions, GCS’s own epistemic dimensions are not as inclusive as they might be. The wider social sciences and humanities have a potentially vital role to play in ensuring that GCS helps to coproduce the realities it analyses (and seeks to affect) in more plural and democratic ways. In playing this role they will need to challenge the rather narrow framing of human dimensions that appears to dominate geoscientific thinking about our ‘human planet’.

But it will not be enough to present the challenge in journals like this one. The key is to make good on it practically through a range of sustained encounters across the disciplines productive of novel findings and proposals. Happily, there are more than a few people in the world of global change research already sowing the seeds of intellectual change. An example is the team behind the ‘Knowledge, Learning and Societal Change: Finding Paths to a Sustainable Future’ project that was launched under the auspices of the IHDP.37 It will be important to ensure such seeds turn into a biodiverse knowledge 37See http://www.ihdp.unu.edu/docs/Publications/KLSC/KLSC%20FINAL%20Science%20Plan%2004.09.11.pdf.

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ecosystem. Otherwise it is likely that ‘epistemological slippage’ will occur: that is, the transfer of analytical authority from one knowledge domain (science) to another without sufficient reason or legitimacy (Hulme, 2011). We may live in an increasingly ‘coupled’ world of socio-environmental systems, but such a world should elicit many human understandings and responses – including ones that refuse the language of systems and the fact-value dualism that scientists still too often assume to be ‘common sense’.Acknowledgement: I am most grateful to Georgina Endfield for her advice, and to two referees whose sometimes pointed criticisms spurred me to double check that the original version of this paper was not a thinly veiled polemic nor an unduly idiosyncratic interpretation of global change science and its human dimensions. Though one referee in particular will remain unhappy with my analysis, I stand by my major claims and conclusions. ReferencesAgarwala, M. et al. (2014) ‘Natural capital accounting and climate change’, Nature Climate

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