Pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would facilitate integrated sustainability research.

Relational value (RV) has recently been introduced as a third class of values for understanding values of nature and are thought to sit alongside more familiar axiological categories such as instrumental and intrinsic value. The concept has quickly gained ground in and promises to better capture how people and collectives perceive of their wellbeing and make choices that involve the natural world. While the idea of relational value is not without merits, its initial and current conceptualization raises questions about how it relates to existing value concepts. Here, we start from an interdisciplinary perspective and delineate how the concept can contribute to addressing problems in three fields that deal with environmental values in different ways: environmental ethics; ecosystem services valuation; and environmental psychology. We provide an overview of value concepts in each field and show how relational value has been described or applied. Our analysis shows that value concepts are used to solve different problems in the three fields, and these differences have implications for how relational value can be framed and situated in values theory. These differences involve e.g., the descriptive question of how people value nature versus the normative questions of why nature should be valued. We show how the concept can be seen as solving the problem of narrow conceptualizations of intrinsic and instrumental value in ecosystem services valuation and suggest that RV can be conceived of as an epistemological framing rather than a values concept. The concept also has potential to function as a ‘boundary object’ to provide cross-fertilization of disciplinary perspectives.

In sustainability research and elsewhere, the notion of resilience is attracting growing interest and causing heated debate. Those focusing on resilience often emphasize its potential to bridge, integrate, and unify disciplines. This article attempts to evaluate these claims. Resilience is investigated as it appears in several fields, including materials science, psychology, ecology, and sustainability science. It is argued that two different concepts of resilience are in play: one local, the other global. The former refers to the ability to return to some reference state after a disturbance, the latter the maintenance of some property during a disturbance. An implication of this analysis is that the various uses of the resilience concept are more closely related than has been previously been suggested. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a preference towards using highly abstract versions of the concept. This explains the apparent context insensitivity of the concept, but presents a problem for those hoping to establish a research programme based on it.

Traditionally, interdisciplinarity has been taken to require conceptual or theoretical integration. However, in the emerging field of sustainability science this kind of integration is often lacking. Indeed sometimes it is regarded as an obstacle to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on examples from sustainability science, we show that problem-feeding, i.e. the transfer of problems, is a common and fruitful-looking way of connecting disparate disciplines and establishing interdisciplinarity. We identify two species of problem-feeding: unilateral and bilateral. Which of these is at issue depends on whether solutions to the problem are fed back to the discipline in which the problem originated. We suggest that there is an interesting difference between the problem-feeding approach to interdisciplinarity and the traditional integrative perspective suggested by among others Erich Jantsch and his colleagues. The interdisciplinarity resulting from problem-feeding between researchers can be local and temporary and does not require collaboration between proximate disciplines. By contrast, to make good sense of traditional integrative interdisciplinarity we must arguably associate it with a longer-term, global form of close, interdisciplinary collaboration.

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged.

Persson, J., A. Hornborg, L. Olsson, and H. Thorén. 2018. Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences. Ecology and Society 23(4):14. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10498-230414