Social Science Research Council

The Social Science of Global Warming

An SSRC/DPDF Roundtable Discussion
Saturday, May 19, 2007, 6 – 8 pm
Radisson Hotel, Denver, Co.

Arun Agrawal (Natural Resources and Environment, Michigan)
Krister Par Andersson (Political Science, University of Colorado at Boulder)
Steve Caton (Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard)
Michael Glantz (National Center for Atmospheric Research)
Ben Orlove (Environmental Science and Policy, UC Davis)
Peter Sahlins (SSRC)

Over the last year, media and public attention have rather suddenly fixed on climate change and global warming at a moment when the scientific community is in agreement about the causes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently concluded that "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”  Their potentially disastrous effects -- rising sea levels, severe weather patterns, freshwater shortages, and shifting climatic zones -- have quickly entered public consciousness, even if the question of global warming has largely been answered, at least in the consumer conscious west, by an ethics (and business) of “sustainable consumption.”   Lacking in public debates are the lessons learned from sustained inquiries into the social and political frameworks, effects, and responses to environmental change on a range of scales from the local to the global.

This roundtable seeks to address the ways in which the traditional disciplines of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics) and newer fields of inquiry in the environmental sciences (e.g., political ecology) can and should be part of the public debate about global warming.  The contributions of the social sciences are many and varied, ranging from general modeling of policy responses, to the production of context- and historically specific knowledge about social adaptations to climate change.  More specifically, we propose that the social science engagement with climate change is usefully (but not exclusively) framed by the study of environmental governance – how social groups, political institutions, and market behaviors regulate and structure relations to the environment.  The study of how the environment is governed does not privilege the state above all else.  Social science can help make sense of the new and emerging partnerships among states, markets, NGOs, and communities that work to mitigate and adapt to dramatic shifts in climate as well as to sudden and increasingly frequent “natural” catastrophes. In studying the double processes of mitigation and adaptation from the perspectives of multiple actors and social groups, social scientists can learn, teach, and contribute to the most effective ways to respond, across scales, to global warming. 

This roundtable, bringing together a range of specialists from the social sciences, inaugurates a broader conversation about future programming activities by the Social Science Research Council in the area of environmental governance.  It is held in Denver on the occasion of the workshop on Water Sustainability: Society, Politics Culture, one of five fields of the SSRC’s new Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship.  In a public conversation with students and scholars, we seek to contemplate and offer a set of preliminary answers to the question: “What can the social sciences contribute to public debates about global warming?”