6.1: Integral Solutions- Designing Cultures of Collaboration

When we speak of the “environment,” what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. Recognizing the reasons why a given area is polluted requires a study of the workings of society, its economy, its behaviour patterns, and the ways it grasps reality. Given the scale of change, it is no longer possible to find a specific, discrete answer for each part of the problem. It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions within natural systems themselves and with social systems. We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.

His Holiness Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, ch.4: 139

Integral ecology

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on climate change, he described the relationship between humans and the natural world as an “integral ecology.” With the word integral, he means to emphasize that human well-being and environmental well-being are inherently intertwined. We cannot speak of one without necessarily implicating the other. Caring about human health and prosperity entails caring about the environment in which all human life takes place. The concept of integral ecology has been used for decades by environmentalists to describe the inherent interdependence of humans and nature, but it has taken on a particular salience and urgency in our era of rapid global warming.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis emphasizes two dimensions of this interdependence between humans and nature. The first relates to the environmental impacts of human action. There is no longer any doubt that human activities—especially the energy consumption and production habits of the wealthy minority across our planet—are rapidly accelerating climate change. There is also no doubt that together we must change these behaviors if warming is to be slowed down. The second dimension relates to the human impacts of climate change. Climate change is inflaming human suffering across the world, particularly among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations, exacerbating poverty, dislocation, disease, and mortality. What this means for Pope Francis is that climate change and poverty must be tackled together, as an integral two-headed beast. He wrote: “Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

The culpability of our planet’s wealthy minority in exacerbating climate change, and in the consequential suffering of the poor and vulnerable majority, raise important issues of climate justice and the imperative for urgent adaptation strategies across the world, which are explored in Chapter 2. Here, we are focused on designing effective strategies to rapidly mitigate climate change, which will alleviate longer-term impacts on us all, rich and poor, born and not yet born.

Tackling a challenge as deep, complex, and urgent as climate change requires new strategies of lateral collaboration across diverse knowledges and capacities. Natural scientists and social sciences need to join forces. Economists, policy experts, and public health researchers must come together with inventors of new technologies and philanthropists who have the capacity to invest in them. But integral thinking requires more than getting experts and elites around a table to share their knowledges and strategies.

Figure 6.1.1 A diagram of the integral climate change solutions proposed in the 2015 Bending the Curve report. From Ramanathan et al. 2016.

Tackling climate change in an integral way also requires vertical collaboration between the politicians and researchers and the grassroots organizations, religious leaders, educators, and cultural producers who are closer to what is happening on the ground. These community leaders are essential partners in designing more effective strategies to transform social attitudes, norms, and behaviors among the young and the old from the bottom up and in cultivating new habits of climate action among the general public. In other words, the “experts” need to figure out how to mobilize and democratize scientific knowledge to inform public opinion.

The University of California’s Bending the Curve report of 2015 was a bold experiment in integral thinking that convened diverse knowledges and capacities in both lateral and vertical ways. Under the leadership of UC San Diego climatologist V. Ramanathan, the report drew upon the scientific, technological, economic, social, and policy innovations that have made the state of California a global environmental leader over the past decades. Bending the Curve summoned 50 researchers from across the University of California system—from the sciences, social sciences, finance, public health, and the humanities—to identify ten integral and scalable solutions to climate change drawn from the California experience (Figure 6.1.1). Bending the Curve marked a powerful moment of unity and vision for the public university. California governor Jerry Brown helped to launch the report, and he carried it with him to COP21—the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris—with the idea that California’s successes could be a model for the world.

COP21 was a historic moment for global cooperation on climate change solutions. The goal of the conference was to create a universal, binding agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions across the planet. On December 12, 2015, the 196 participating countries arrived at a consensus and signed the Paris Agreement, which stipulated that each country agreed to do what was necessary to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming “well below 2 degrees Celsius.” The agreement went into effect on November 4, 2016. Thirteen months later, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, claiming that it was a “bad deal” for America. But the story is not yet over. We still have time to act together on integral solutions to climate change.

Culture of collaboration

Climate change is too big and too complex a problem for any single sector, discipline, or approach to solve alone. Climate change is not just a technological problem or a scientific problem or a medical problem or a finance problem or a policy problem. Pursuing only one dimension of the problem, or failing to understand how multiple dimensions are connected with each other, will not accelerate climate change solutions. We need to work together across all these disciplinary boundaries.

The 2015 Bending the Curve report’s third proposed solution focused on designing a new culture of collaboration around climate change:

Deepen the global culture of climate collaboration. Design venues where stakeholders, community and religious leaders converge around concrete problems with researchers and scholars from all academic disciplines, with the overall goal of initiating collaborative actions to mitigate climate disruption.

But recognizing that we should work together across disciplines is one thing; actually learning how to do so is quite another. Working across disciplines is not something people and institutions innately know how to do. Such cooperation needs to be designed and facilitated. Collaboration is a skill—something we must learn how to do. Therefore we must not only cultivate collaborative opportunities, but also develop the skills and habits of collaboration.

Universities tend to be very siloed institutions, which means that the boundaries we have created between divisions, departments, and majors tend to be thick, with too few opportunities or incentives for movement and cross-disciplinary connection across them. Boundaries are effective tools for organizing complex institutions, but they are largely artificial. They typically don’t reflect the way the real world works, or the need to organize integral solutions to our most challenging social problems.

Universities often talk about the value of “interdisciplinarity,” and there are certainly opportunities for undergraduates to pursue interdisciplinary minors and take courses team-taught by faculty from different areas of the campus. But these opportunities are rare. They are not the norm on most college and university campuses. If we are serious about fostering cultures of collaboration, we must design new spaces for collaborative research, teaching, and learning around deep social challenges like climate change. No one discipline or way of knowing or doing can solve this problem alone. This means that we need to rethink university culture itself, including the way we conduct our research and our teaching.

University of California’s Bending the Curve course provides an excellent model of how universities can create spaces for integral research and education. One of the major benefits of this course is that students come from a great variety of disciplines and together learn how to view the challenges of climate change, and to think about solutions, through multiple lenses. Some students who take this course are required to develop team-based projects on “living laboratories.” Through this exercise, they come to recognize the value of distributing tasks to team members who have diverse skills and varying bodies of knowledge. Additionally, these students learn how to communicate their diverse knowledges and skills to classmates in other fields in clear and accessible ways.

Beyond creating new spaces for collaboration across disciplines within the university, however, researchers also need to rethink how we engage people outside the university, in the so-called real world. Universities too often think of themselves as bearers of knowledge and truth, and of the world as lacking knowledge. Universities, like other institutions of power, often see their relationship to the world in vertical terms, with all knowledge flowing downward. When universities engage other sectors and publics, they too often forget how much knowledge exists outside of formal educational institutions, and how much university researchers can learn from that knowledge. This becomes particularly true and ethically problematic when universities approach disadvantaged communities as empty receptacles waiting to be filled with “our” knowledge. Academic research is often infused with assumptions that “we” know more, that we are “trained experts,” that only we have languages to convey complex ideas—in short, that we enter the world to save it, not to learn from it. However, engagement with worlds of practice reveals that these assumptions are just wrongheaded, that academic researchers do not know everything they think they know, and that they have as much to learn from the world as it does from them— and possibly more.

We need a more horizontal model of collaboration between scientists, designers, and the people who are the intended users of new technologies. There are both pragmatic and ethical reasons for this. Consider the challenges of technology transfer. Technology transfer refers to the processes by which innovative designs in science and technology are translated from concept into practice. What might appear to be a good solution to the scientist or designer in the lab may not actually work in practice. We cannot simply design solutions out of whole cloth, drop them down on the world, and expect that they will work.

Technology transfer needs the bottom-up participation of intended users, both in the design of new technologies and in the social strategies for adopting and integrating new technologies into existing practices. Technology transfer has important ethical dimensions as well. From an ethical perspective, people need to be the stewards of their own destiny and to understand and embrace the technologies that will change the way they live, the way they move from place to place, communicate, cook, and so on. This ethical imperative is most profound when engaging the bottom 3 billion—that is, the 3 billion people who are especially vulnerable because of their reliance on natural resources and are already disproportionately harmed by climate change.

Project Surya, led by UC San Diego professor V. Ramanathan, provides a powerful example. This project is committed to tackling both the impact of short-lived climate pollutants on the Earth’s atmosphere and their more immediate impact on public health, particularly among women and children. Project Surya is an integral intervention—involving scientists, designers, economists, and social scientists—that designs and deploys low-carbon-emission cookstoves in the villages of rural India (Figure 6.1.2).

Figure 6.1.2 Project Surya: women in a rural Indian village discuss the benefits of adopting a cleaner cookstove. Reproduced with permission from Project Surya.

Project Surya is also an ethical intervention because it engages intended recipients of the stoves as participants in designing, using, and distributing the stoves. It does not drop new technology down upon the poor as if they were passive subjects. Respecting the agency and dignity of these women means listening to their accounts of how new cookstove technology will affect their lives and how it might disrupt their current cooking practices, which are typically deeply rooted in cultural norms and practices. The scientist cannot assume that resistance is a manifestation of ignorance. A woman in rural India might not want to use a clean-burning cookstove because it doesn’t work well for her, because it makes her chores more difficult, because her family does not like how the food tastes when she uses it, and so forth.

Ethical technology transfer entails respecting these local responses and integrating them into an iterative design process in which designers take such concerns seriously and continue revising and improving their technologies accordingly. This kind of give-and-take cultivates genuine social receptivity to the new technologies. From the perspective of climate justice, the participation of vulnerable people in designing climate change solutions is essential.

But there are pragmatic considerations as well. Without social acceptance and buy-in from the bottom up, climate mitigation strategies, like the introduction of clean cookstoves, will be less effective. Climate action in sites of scarcity is best achieved through bottom-up climate education and avenues for participatory climate action that stimulate individual and collective agency, capacity, and hope. If the scientist doesn’t take existing cultural practices and constraints into account when designing new technologies and social adoption strategies, levels of adoption may be disappointing. The technology must either accommodate local preferences and practices, or else come with additional incentives that make it attractive to potential users despite any trade-offs.

The conclusion is that researchers, innovators, and climate activists need to be closely attuned to the needs and preferences of intended users for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Collaborating with intended-user communities is an integral and ethical social strategy for designing more effective and sustainable solutions.