Seeking Consilience for Sustainability Science: Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and the New Economics

Abstract

Abstract:The human system, driven largely by economic decisions, has profoundly affected planetary ecosystems as well as the energy supplies and natural resources essential to economic production. The challenge of sustainability is to understand and manage the complex interactions between human systems and the rest of nature. This conceptual article makes the case that meeting this challenge requires consilience between the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, which is to say that their basic assumptions must be mutually reinforcing and consistent. This article reviews the extent to which economics is pursuing consilience with the sciences of human behavior, physics and ecology, and the impact full consilience would have on the field. The science of human behavior would force economists to redefine what is desirable, while physics and ecology redefine what is possible. The challenges posed by ecological degradation can be modeled as prisoner's dilemmas, best solved through cooperation, not competition. Fortunately, science reveals that humans may be among the most cooperative of all species. While much of the mainstream economic theory that still dominates academic and the policy discourse continues to ignore important findings from other sciences, several sub-fields of economics have made impressive strides towards consilience in recent decades, and these are likely to change mainstream theory eventually. The question is whether these changes can proceed rapidly enough to solve the most serious problems we currently face.

Enabling Transformative Research: Lessons from the Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1999–2015)

“…To break its dominance and unlock transformative potentials, sustainability advocates have begun to reclaim the emancipatory power inherent in the original conceptualizations of development in their respective disciplines and practical domains. Taking systems approaches, they strive for epistemological and practical grounding as well as for further clarification of the interfaces between diverse development concepts (see, for example, [9][10][11]19,[31][32][33][34]). …”

“…It replaces unspecific interaction between science and society by integrating actors, knowledge, and value systems in joint learning processes, and supports the fundamentally novel understanding of knowledge and innovation applied in sustainability science. It enables sustainabilityoriented actors from all scientific and practical fields to seek consilience [34], and synchronize their development agendas and research frameworks on behalf of societal co-production of knowledge and innovation.…”

Challenges in Sustainability: Another Brick in the Wall

“…A variety of quality research articles, editorials and notes have been published on a range of themes and topics, including sustainability governance [1], improved cookstoves [2,3], the potentials of 3-D printing in the global South [4], and the need for consiliences between the natural and social sciences and the humanities [5], to name just a few. Furthermore, despite the journal's short history, we are pleased with its high visibility, where numerous articles have been viewed or downloaded over 1200 times since publication.…”