Socio-ecological research
Social-ecological research is a research direction that has emerged over the past 20 years and has been a funding priority in Germany since 1999 in the framework program “Research for Sustainable Development” (FONA) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the field of sustainability research .
Basics
Social-ecological research aims to develop strategies to solve social sustainability problems. It links social, ecological and economic perspectives. In Germany, social-ecological research has been funded since 1999 by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of sustainability science within the framework of the “Research for Sustainable Developments” (FONA) program.
According to statements of the programmatic documents of the research direction, research with this objective requires an interdisciplinary and problem-oriented collaboration of researchers from different natural and social sciences. The aim is to gain knowledge about the structure and dynamics of social-ecological systems (system knowledge), knowledge about methods and concepts for their goal-oriented change (transformation knowledge) as well as knowledge about undesirable social conditions in the present and a desired future (orientation knowledge). This is intended to scientifically support a sustainable orientation of society or its ecological restructuring without losing sight of social justice and economic concerns.
The socio-ecological approach is based on the assessment that the consequences of technology have given rise to new, complex problems that cannot be solved either by traditional scientific research or by the social sciences alone. The transdisciplinary approach therefore requires knowledge from the natural and social sciences and focuses on the dependencies and interactions between them.
Social-ecological research is carried out with the aim of being transdisciplinary research. It pays special attention to the experiences of practitioners and actors outside of science. The transition to political advice and social strategy development is therefore fluid. It is a research approach that starts with specific social problems and directly strives to solve them. Social actors - e.g. B. consumers , municipalities , companies and NGOs - should therefore be included in the research process. The approach stands in contrast to “classical” basic scientific research, which is at least ideally guided by more abstract research interests . In the case of classical basic research, the solution to the problem should arise indirectly from a deeper insight into reasons and contexts.
Under this name, socio-ecological research was propagated in German-speaking countries, primarily by non-university institutions. The social basis was the “ecologically” motivated citizens' movements of the 1970s and 1980s. In order to support them, institutes and facilities were founded, which should support and promote their concerns with scientific and technical expertise. Intertwined with the protagonists of the time (or in direct continuity with them) are the main carriers of today's socio-ecological research in Germany. Examples would be the Ecolog Institute for Social-Ecological Research and Education (Hanover), the Institute for Social-Ecological Research ISOE (Frankfurt), the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy , or the Eco-Institute for Applied Ecology (Freiburg) .
The Institute for Social Ecology, headed by Rudolf Bahro and located at the Humboldt University in Berlin from 1990 to 1997, represents an attempt to establish socio-ecological research at universities . There have also been efforts in recent times to conduct social-ecological research to bind more closely to the universities.
Actors and providers of social-ecological research come to a large extent from traditionally more cross-sectional social science subjects, v. a. Environmental economics and empirical social research . This can be explained by the fact that the focus of interest is on society and its transformation, whereby technical and ecological approaches and purposes should be taken into account, but they rarely directly represent the approach. The area of climate impact research in particular is more scientifically oriented . There are only a few points of contact with classical ecological research.
See also
- Ecological economy
- Social ecology
- Transdisciplinarity
- Environmental sociology
- World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation
literature
- Rainer Grießhammer , Thomas Jahn , Thomas Korbun , R. Andreas Kraemer, Claus Leggewie , Ortwin Renn , Uwe Schneidewind , Angelika Zahrnt : Understanding - Assessing - Designing. Transdisciplinary knowledge for a sustainable society (PDF; 341 kB). Memorandum on the further development of social-ecological research in Germany, presented to the BMBF agenda conference “Social-ecological research for a sustainable society” (PDF; 42 kB) in Bonn on March 19 and 20, 2012, revised in June 2012. Retrieved on March 21, 2013.
- Ingrid Balzer, Monika Wächter (Hrsg.): Social-ecological research - results of exploratory projects from the BMBF funding priority. Ökom, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-928244-86-8 .
Web links
- Website of the BMBF priority social-ecological research
- BMBF framework program "Research for Sustainable Developments"