RELU: SCOPE-2CU: Case for Support

SCOPE – 2CU: Sustainable Culture Of Productive Environments –

To Cultivate Utility requires a Common Conceptual Understanding.

Introduction & Context

RELU offers both major opportunities and major challenges to natural and social scientists concerned with the rural environment and rural development. The programme requires interdisciplinary science, integrated perspectives, holistic approaches and synergy, to deliver policy-relevant results. But there are substantial difficulties in generating such major advances in the conventional practices of science. Overcoming these will be critical to the success of the programme as a whole. The dialogues for achieving genuine inter-disciplinarity and of fostering spirits of critical self-reflection are the central focus of this proposal.

Traditional science typically supposes uni-directional relationships between inputs or causes (drivers) and consequences. In addition, science has tended to be reductive, reducing practical issues and problems to questions researchable through a single discipline. This tendency has been especially encouraged through the pursuit of peer-reviewed “high quality” science. In contrast, both the natural and the social systems relevant to RELU are complex and co-evolutionary. Much of their behaviour results from interaction and interconnection. Furthermore, human choice systems, and the values they generate, are critical for the behaviour of these systems.

It is fashionable, especially in some social science circles, to consider that systematic concepts themselves are incurably modern and outmoded – positivist, inhuman and too simplified to capture the essence of (especially) human behaviours. These behaviours are fundamentally context and circumstance specific. Simplification and abstraction to more or less formal representation as models must be artifacts of imagination rather than representations of reality. Diverse perceptions and attributions, associated with differing ‘mind-sets’ or ‘mind-models’ of the world, dependent on particular contexts and circumstances, result in multiple facets of reality. If true, the only sensible approach to examining reality is intensive observation of specific people and their behaviour in situ, which typically reveals a diversity of behaviour that is impossible to model.

This criticism and its implications carry considerable weight. But it is dangerous to draw general conclusions, still less prescriptions for action from intensive in situ study, without some overall framework explaining how these particulars interact with, and relate and respond to each other. The primary focus of this initiative on policy-relevant results requires that there is some common understanding of the relationships between policy inputs and real world consequences – some common mind-set or mind-model of the ways in which our natural and human worlds interact and co-evolve. Previous policy models and decision-support systems have failed, other than through technical and data limitations, because they failed to reflect any common conception, which is a necessary pre-condition for the development of useful policy models. The Treasury model of the macro-economy is accepted (not as being right, but as being useful) precisely because those involved accept the underlying concepts of the workings of the macro-economy as being reliable, even if the estimates are contestable.

This project seeks to establish a common conceptual understanding (2CU), relating possible policy inputs to desired outcomes for rural development and land use. We need a conception which is sufficiently flexible and potentially all-embracing to cater for all reasonable tastes and perceptions, yet which is still capable of discriminating between the more true and less true, and sorting the better from the worse. None of the serious problems associated with effective policies for land use and rural economies can be properly addressed without re-examining our largely single disciplinary paradigms and seeking genuine integration between them.

There are two ways of testing these common conceptions (other than actual experiment). Either we construct and operationalise them into (computer) simulation models – as extensions of our mind-models of the ways in which our world work – and test these conceptions for their validity and veracity against observed data and for their own internal consistency.[1] Or we debate our differing conceptions in order to identify and develop a common understanding of the systems we are dealing with. This requires a common language (grammar, syntax and story), a common discourse. This project pursues the second approach. Eventually, both approaches will be necessary, but the development of computable simulation models must adopt a commonly accepted conception to be useful.

Methods

  • Conception: Conceptual development is the province of academics rather than practitioners in the first instance. We will, firstly, convene a number of invited workshops, with representative experts from all relevant branches of natural and social science, with the purpose of identifying and outlining the features of a common conceptual understanding (2CU).
  • Specification: Secondly, we will begin to identify the specification and structure of conceptual model systems to represent the elements of the emerging common understandings of the social and natural systems of RELU brief. This specification needs to be expressed in lay terms, to be understandable by non-experts and practitioners.
  • Credibility: Thirdly, we will seek to integrate these concepts with rural development and environmental managers and policy makers’ practice, again through a series of workshops designed to explore these ideas with practitioners. The aim is to establish credibility and extend the understandings to practitioners, and to modify the conceptual structures accordingly.
  • Practice: The potential use of any simulation model system depends critically on how such models might fit with actual decision-making and implementation procedures. Hence, we will use these workshops to begin development of alternative management and policy-making practices that could make better use of the common conceptual understandings of these systems.
  • Reporting: Progress and workshops will be reported through a dedicated web site, which will invite contributions from other researchers and practitioners, thus extending the scope of the live workshops beyond those able to attend. This web site will also report on the progress made with conceptual identification and specification and on any initial model appraisals and developments (the subject of a companion scoping study proposal).

Outputs

The key output of this Capacity Building project will be a conceptual model framework providing a systematic explanation of the interactions within and between the natural and social sciences. This framework will incorporate the concerns and values of the human systems that use and depend on the land and natural environment, and form a major plank in the foundations for future modeling and integrated policy appraisal research.

However, if this proves impossible, the outcome will identify the principle sources and reasons for incompatibilities between competing conceptions, and hence a research agenda for the eventual resolution of these conflicts.

Inputs& Resources

The dialogue necessary to develop the common conceptual understanding necessarily involves as wide a group of people as possible. However, the organization and promotion of the dialogue needs to be driven forward by a small committed and unified team, as here proposed.

Identification and consideration of possible starting points for the development of a common framework is a first priority for this project. The PI is already working on this (1, 2). Two examples (both associated with the natural environment) also suggest themselves: a) the major international effort to reach consensus amongst social scientists for the social framing of environmental change (3); b) a useful identification and classification of the various and diverse discourses and dialogues which deal with human-environment interactions and issues (4).

The proposers already have extensive experience of developing models of natural and social systems, and of analysis and research concerning the conceptual bases of such representations (5 - 9). They are linked, both through an extensive consortium, and through local research groups and centers, to others with particular relevant expertise and experience for this project (CSLM, CRE, CURDS and CREAM at Newcastle, (12), as well as through a consortium including CEH, CAS at Reading, and others expert and interested in modeling approaches. The proposers also have extensive experience of the failures of past attempts to construct decision support systems that can be used effectively to assist in the complex decisions associated with rural land use (e.g. 10, 11), and will apply the lessons of these experiences to this project.

References

  1. Harvey, D. R., 2001, “Academic Rigour or Policy Relevance: Towards a reconciliation”, Tomorrow’s Agricultures, ed. Peters, G.H. & Pingali, P., Ashgate, p 565 – 582.
  2. Harvey, D. R., 2004 (forthcoming) AES Presidential Address, Journal of Agric. Econ.
  3. Rayner, S. and Malone, E.L., (eds.), 1998, Human Choice & Climate Change (4 volumes); Battelle Press, Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, USA
  4. Dryzek, J. S., 1997, The Politics of the Earth: environmental discourses, Oxford University Press.
  5. Harvey, D.R., 1990 "Agricultural Sector Modelling for Policy Development", in Systems Theory Applied to Agriculture and the Food Chain, Lectures in honour of Prof. C. Speeding, Elsevier.
  6. Harvey, D.R. and White, B., 1995, “Regional Economics Approach: Quantitative Models in Integrated Scenario Studies”, Chapter 2.2, (pp55 - 74) Scenario Studies for the Rural Environment, Schoute, J.F.Th., Finke, P.A., Veeneklaas, F.R., and Wolfert, H.P. (eds), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht and London.
  7. Oglethorpe, D. R. and Cattaneo, C (2002) Participative modelling of cultural, ecological & economic priorities: the case for wine-making in Cinque Terre national park, forthcoming Ecological Economics
  8. Oglethorpe, D. R., Sanderson, R. A. (1999) An Ecological-Economic Model for Agri-Environmental Policy Analysis, Ecological Economics28: 245-266.
  9. Oglethorpe, D. R., Sanderson, R. A. (1999) Farm Characteristics and the Vegetative Diversity of Grasslands in the North of England: A Policy Perspective, Biodiversity and Conservation7, 1333-1347.
  10. O’Callaghan, J (ed.) Land Use: The Interactions of economics, ecology and hydrology, Chapman & Hall, 1996
  11. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 38, 1, 1995, NELUP Special Issue.

David Harvey, SAFRD, Newcastle.Page 125/1/19

[1]Our companion scoping study proposal deals with the potential to use existing models and to develop new model systems of land use to provide practical simulations of the real world that can be used effectively in the policy process.