Accountability and the academy: producing knowledge about the human dimensions of climate change

Abstract

Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real‐world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro‐American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.

Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands

“…The interventions launched by farmers’ collectives in Munshiganj are grounded responses to ecological change that cast populations neither as hapless victims of, nor stoic resistors to, climate injustice (Castree et al. ; Hall and Sanders ). Instead, they highlight a parallel terrain of experimentation based on radically different, and strikingly prosaic, understandings of ecological change.…”

Ecosystem approaches to health and knowledge-to-action: towards a political ecology of applied health-environment knowledge

“…Implications of this trend for ecohealth knowledge production are suggested by the observation that pressures for researchers to generate high volumes of policy-relevant research outputs in the neoliberal era of university accountability (6) limit time-consuming engagement with political economic inequities. One illustrative example is the dominance of depoliticized and neo-colonial depictions of Indigenous peoples in transdisciplinary community-engaged climate change research -a field with considerable similarities to, and even overlap with, ecohealth (Hall and Sanders 2015). Thus one hypothetical relationship between levels in the PEK framework involves the mutual interaction of complex systems theories (on level 3) with Institutions and Macroscopic institutions such as university accountability (6) and neoliberal ideology (7).…”

An anthropological perspective on the climate change and violence relationship

“…These harmful social arrangements may discriminate based on economic status, gender, age, race/ethnicity, caste, disability, or other personal characteristics. While many recognize that climate change can exacerbate inequalities, these pre-existing inequalities often have a greater than expected effect [7,47]. Structural violence can place people in the path of direct climate harm, such as siting low income housing in areas that flood regularly.…”

“…Investigation of violence characteristics in response to different types of climate changes, as shown in the East Africa research, is also important [72,73]. In contemporary studies, long distance connections through global markets and international governance structures should also be considered [8,47]. Framing climate change-violence research as a spectrum of behaviors from conflict to cooperation would also help pinpoint specifics about conditions leading to cooperation, or at least non-violent situations, as well as violence [8][9][10][11]57].…”