Environmental social science: human–environment interactions and sustainability

Studies that address the human dimensions of global environmental change face the stark reality that the target of research – overlapping social and ecological processes – cannot be tidily packaged. Environmental Social Science offers a succinct and compelling platform for uniting interdisciplinary research methods for needed work in sustainability science. The structure of Emilio Moran’s book reveals something of its aims. It begins by introducing the problematique of research on human–environment interactions, with particular attention to global environmental challenges (Chapter 1). Next it surveys theories and concepts from the social and biological sciences and the dimensions of the human–environment relationship that each has methods for addressing (Chapters 2–4). This sets up a transition into methodological approaches that are spatially explicit. The spatial turn (detailed further below) provides context for methodological approaches that are multiscale, multitemporal and which may link social and ecological systems analysis to the agency of decision-makers (Chapters 5 and 6). The book concludes by focusing on how institutional analysis of collective action problems is pivotal for understanding human dimensions of global environmental change (Chapter 7). It concludes by outlining future directions for the emerging field of sustainability science (Chapter 8). A key contribution of Moran’s work turns on the utility and suitability of using spatial analysis to integrate multiple research domains. Spatial analysis is defined by Moran (p. 72) as ‘... a set of methods whose results are not invariant under changes in the locations of the objects of analysis.’ In context, this definition seeks to unite several dimensions of social science (i.e. place and custom) with those of physical science (i.e. land-cover change and biocomplexity). Thought of spatially, a critical methodological component of sustainability science is an ability to characterize the nature and extent of observable change and to link those ‘objects of analysis’ to human agency. The link can be thought of in two ways. One is historical, where landscape patterns observed over time are connected to livelihood strategies, political economy, or ecological events (i.e. drought). The other is speculative, where forecasts are generated using agent-based models – with agents in the model behaving according to rules that feed back into subsequent decisions – that provide a planning support tool for estimating the likely effects of different policy paths. While the spatial emphasis is designed to capture change across systems, the heavy methodological lifting in Moran’s work is accomplished by approaches that allow for comparisons of human–environment interaction across scales and over time. With respect to both multiscale and multitemporal research, Moran emphasizes the methodological tools of geographic information systems/science and International Journal of Social Research Methodology Vol. 15, No. 5, September 2012, 445–450