Mission
Our mission is to co-design tools and strategies that empower both critical social scientists (CSS) in teaching societal power dynamics and Transdisciplinary Transformative Change Initiatives (TTCIs) in integrating these concepts into their solutions. By creating a central, open-access platform, we aim to distribute these tools widely, fostering deeper engagement with critical social science.
Vision
We envision a world where critical social science (CSS) is better integrated into transformative change initiatives.
Our goals are to:
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Create awareness around alternative ways of framing the problem
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Improve understandings of CSS's role in promoting better synchronicity among research, policy, and practice
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Make CSS more accessible
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Boost understandings of how to bridge the gap between critical social theory and practice
About the Project
Fundamental societal change is urgently needed to address the global crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, political instability, and growing social inequality. Many initiatives have attempted to spark this change, but most miss a key ingredient: a critical perspective on the power relations that drive the interrelated crises.
Our research project aims to fill this critical gap by providing a platform that facilitates a better understanding and integration of critical social theory into transdisciplinary transformative change initiatives.
In this project, we take two Swiss-based biodiversity and global change initiatives as our starting point. Building on the lessons learned from (not) dealing with structural power dynamics in these initiatives, we are co-developing tools to assist with understanding and integrating critical social theory in future initiatives.
Transdisciplinary Transformative Change Initiatives (TTCI)
Transformative Change (TC)
Our understanding of TC is grounded in the definition provided by the IPBES: “A fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” (IPBES, 2019: XVIII)
The Challenge of Transdisciplinary Collaborations*
*those among academic and non-academic stakeholders
Although transformative change is now widely acknowledged as being best supported through transdisciplinary collaborations, TTCIs rarely achieve the paradigmatic effects they aim to deliver.
The Problem: Narrow Problem Framing
A key reason for this failure is a lack of shared understanding of alternative ways to frame the problem. Because collaborators in TTCIs often use different “languages”, they struggle to develop a problem framing that incorporates different perspectives. As a result, the problem is framed too narrowly, leading to incomplete solutions.
As critical social scientists, we understand "framing the problem" as the way a problem is understood and addressed, which can vary as in the following examples:
Is the problem that humans are all inherently selfish and greedy?
Or ... is our socioeconomic system the problem?
Or ... is the problem that societal institutions reward particular types of behavior?
Or ... is the problem due to the loss of an understanding of interconnectedness among humans and the rest of nature?
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The Role of Critical Social Science: A Missing Piece in the Puzzle
While TTCIs have had success in reaching common understandings of the problem among natural scientists (NS) and non-academic partners, the role of social science perspectives continues to elude such initiatives. And while some forms of social science (e.g. psychology, economics = supporting the problem framing of NS) are increasingly successfully integrated, alternative knowledge communities, including critical social scientists (CSS)* continue to find themselves on the outside of TTCIs.
* CSS use critical theoretical perspectives on structural knowledge/power dynamics and their causal links with socio-ecological problems.
Our partner project FIRI explores how TTCI can better address the global polycrises by broadening the problem framings and centring relational socio-ecological perspectives. Bringing together experiences and knowledges of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and practitioners to co-design practical solutions, FIRI co-produces a transformative change approach that places diverse knowledge systems on equal footing.
Learn more about our related project here.