Environmental Knowledge and Public Policy Needs: On Humanising the Research Agenda

Environmental Knowledge and Public Policy Needs: On Humanising the Research Agenda

What sorts of new knowledge does the world need these days? How can the research community, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, contribute best, in the bewildering circumstances in which societies like ours now find themselves?

Behind such questions lies a more specific, and still more contentious issue: are the presently dominant forms of academic research in countries like Britain able to generate insights of the kind society now needs in order to help address environmental problems and enhance social equity, in a period of immense turbulence in many parts of an ever more industrialised world? This chapter argues that new approaches to research may now be necessary in the public domain.

With different emphases, the various contributors to the present volume have pointed to the range and depth of new cultural configurations affecting late twentieth century industrial societies – characteristically involving tensions in the domain of the citizen's relations with ‘the state’. In response to the fact of ever-ramifying technological change and specialisation, of intensifying globalisation of trade and competition, and of the insistence of governments that the continuation of such ratcheting processes is an inescapable necessary condition for increased human welfare, unfamiliar cultural tensions and new imbalances of power and authority are now being generated in countries like Britain. Not simply individuals, but also governments the world over, are struggling to cope with the implications of these processes of change for social stability.

The strains are such that it is small wonder the credibility of politicians and political institutions in the Western world has been shrinking. Numerous recent polls and surveys suggest that, even in historically stable countries like Britain, there is mounting fatalism and cynicism about the capacity of institutions which formerly commanded public identification (Parliament, political parties, trades unions, churches, even local ‘communities’), to shield us from the increasingly unsettling impacts of [Page 270]continuing processes of change. To the strong, such new uncertainties may be bracing, even exhilarating. To the less fortunate – amongst whom more and more of us are now to be counted – they are disturbing, indeed hugely unsettling.

This has significance for the machinery of politics itself. There are few clues as to how its erosion of public respect and authority might be remedied. Yet whatever the inadequacies, or even the mounting irrelevance, of governing elites in the public mind, the need for institutions of government is still indisputable. In ‘risk society’, there is still a need – indeed, a greater need than ever – for processes of communal public decision, for the definition and making of choices about the deployment of public resources, for the updating and sustaining of common frameworks of regulation and law, for advancing the welfare of the disadvantaged, and for maintaining common infrastructures (networks of communication, defence, and the like).

However, most of the analyses in this book imply that some of the most important implications of the whirligig economic forces now transforming societies around the world are poorly appreciated by our public institutions. For example, Beck and Adam (both this volume) argue that the unfamiliar character of such changes is now making them increasingly impossible for our institutions to control, or even to anticipate; whilst Maguire and Berking (both this volume) suggest that the transformations are now such as to reach into – indeed directly to challenge – people's very sense of their own identities, at the most personal levels. Yet for the most part, governments, with their armies of subordinate regulators and bureaucracies reaching into every nook and cranny of contemporary life, appear to be driving blind, when it comes to understanding such novel cultural dynamics, now being produced in the circumstances of (let us call it) ‘late modernity’.

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