Journal Assignment

Name : Honey Faye P. Lurranza Journal Article No.
: 5
Student No. : 2301106378 Date ; 02/27/2024
Source (APA)
Olsson, L., & Jerneck, A. (2018). Social fields and natural systems: integrating knowledge about
society and nature. Ecology and Society, 23(3). https://www.jstor.org/stable/26799148
I. Introduction
 This explicit ambition to integrate knowledge—across scales, sectors, and
substance domains, and across the nature-society, science-society, and
knowledge-action divides—implies that sustainability science must inherently
live up to (at least) three things. It must build on several foundational disciplines
and have the capacity for interdisciplinarity; it must embrace theoretical and
methodological pluralism and have the capacity for reflexivity (Isgren et al.
2017); and it must integrate knowledge generated from engaging with different
disciplines, theories, methods, and contexts, and thus aspire to transdisciplinarity.
 The critical ambition is to provide the rationale for a new approach that has the
potential to capture the best available knowledge on social and natural dimensions
of sustainability; we call it social fields and natural systems.
 It proposes that strategic action fields are the structural building blocks of political
and organizational life in civil society, the economy, and the state (Fligstein and
McAdam 2012) and as such they are “the fundamental units of collective action”
(Fligstein and McAdam 2012:9).
II. Theory
 A crucial source of incommensurability between the social sciences and most
natural sciences interested in processes of environmental change, such as
degradation, exploitation, pollution, or rehabilitation, is how society and the social
are understood (see, for example, Rosa 1998, Carolan 2005a).
 According to consensus theory there are core values, informal norms, and hidden
rules in society that serve as a foundational, unifying structure of a stable and
harmonious society, wherein social change is slow and orderly. Norms, rules, and
values are continually reproduced through culture, and stability is the outcome.
This is reflected in the grand social values of functionalism as an aggregate view
of society, as well as in microsociological interaction rituals, although symbolic
interactionism can allow for both change and continuity. Studies based on a
consensus perspective will search for the hidden rules that maintain social
stability (Abbott 2004).
 There is a dividing line between social and nonsocial approaches to human
behavior and social change. Although some believe in “presumed qualities
inherent in individuals” as in individualistic and naturalistic approaches (Jones et
al. 2011:1), others focus their attention on the “social dimension of human
existence” (Jones et al. 2011:5), thereby underlining the importance of
interactions and social relations between individuals, and how these vary between
social settings and situational contexts.
III. Findings
 Climate change adaptation in river basins: The frequency and severity of
climatic extremes have increased in recent years as a result of climate change
(IPCC 2012). Many of these events are associated with huge losses of people,
livelihoods, and property (Olsson et al. 2014), and also with displacement and
sometimes migration (Ionesco et al. 2016). Social responses to climate impacts
are diverse and complex, and do not follow any particular boundaries or simple
cause-effect patterns. Adaptation is a suitable object of study for our suggested
approach, and adaptation studies provide an example of how an understanding
and use of multiple ontologies, fields, and systems, can facilitate and promote the
production of actionable knowledge in response to climate change.
 Geoengineering: an illustration of social fields and natural systems: The
central aim of the Paris Agreement “is to strengthen the global response to the
threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well
below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit
the temperature increase even further to 1.5 °C” (UNFCCC 2015:Article 2). This
ambitious target in the context of insufficient national mitigation commitments
(Rogelj et al. 2016) makes geoengineering seem inevitable (Horton et al. 2016).
IV. CRITIQUE of the THEORY

Through systematic identification and location of strategic action fields and a
theoretically informed analysis of their internal and external interactions, be they
discursive, spatial, or temporal, such research can contribute to generating the best
available knowledge that enables sustainability science to go beyond cultural,
economic, environmental, technical, and other determinism. In practice, it means that
scholars who seek to engage with this will have to be conscious of their own
theoretical and methodological stance; be conscious of the advantages and
disadvantages of theories and methodologies used by others; and be tolerant of this
varied use.

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Name : Honey Faye P. Lurranza Journal Article No.

IV. CRITIQUE of the THEORY

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