ABSTRACT
The last three or four generations are causing and/or enduring unprecedented rates of global environmental change (GEC), a human-induced phenomenon linked to the globalization of capitalist modernity. However, academic and policy arenas tend to formulate and represent it as a geophysical, chemical and bioecological (natural) event with a ³human dimension² (see for instance: Committee on Global Change Research, 1999; Munn, 2002). Such representations acknowledge that GEC requires policy and market responses, but these responses are not necessarily related to the socio-political phenomena that traditionally concern social sciences (e.g., power, space, inequality, coloniality, identity).This “human dimension” perspective both deters, and is a consequence of social scientists’ persistent disengagement from GEC research (Lever-Tracy, 2008; Shove, 2010). This situation is starting to change as calls, proposals, and efforts to bring society (and social sciences) into the core of GEC analysis are rapidly multiplying. For more than two decades, research on society’s role on GEC has been institutionally channeled through the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), which nurtures a loose interdisciplinary community heavily inspired by complexity, systems thinking and disaster risk analysis. A crucial task for the “IHDP community” is to articulate relational/ ecological concepts and grammars to bridge (ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically) entrenched human-environment divisions. The involvement of social scientists in this bridging endeavor, and the incorporation of insights from mainstream social theories, will be crucial as well as exceedingly challenging.
