ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have summarized a variety of debates relating to the social and political influences on science. Chapter 3 described arguments in Philosophy of Science that claim scientific “laws” are not universally applicable, but instead reflect a variety of social and institutional influences on how inference is made. Chapter 4 drew largely from debates in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge to indicate how supposed scientific “facts” about environment reflect wider social framings and discourses, which have also evolved historically. Now, in Chapter 5, we look at how these themes may be combined to identify how social change and environmental science co-evolve dynamically. The chapter will:
introduce and define the concepts of coproduction and hybridization that describe how environmental knowledge and politics co-evolve dynamically;
demonstrate how environmentalism, as a “new” social movement, helped shape many general beliefs and discourses about environment that have since been used to explain the causes of environmental degradation; and
illustrate how such general beliefs – when used uncritically in new contexts – may fail to acknowledge complex biophysical causes of environmental changes, or alternative framings of environmental change by people not included in the formation of the explanations.
