Using resources sparingly and protecting the environment is often more difficult in practice than in theory. The "Dilemmas of sustainability" project investigates the areas of tension that exist.
Research programmes and projects are rarely the subject of scientific research themselves. For Sophie Berg and Ann-Kristin Müller, however, calls for proposals and proposals are an important treasure trove: the economist and the educational scientist have combed through hundreds of pages as part of their doctorates, searching for terms and developing categories. Their aim: to find out how the term "sustainability" is understood in scientific funding programmes - whether it is only about scientific and technological issues, for example, or whether social science or political aspects are also included. "Sustainability has a multi-layered meaning, but is often viewed in a rather one-dimensional way," says Berg, who is a research associate in the Ecological Economics working group at the University of Oldenburg.
The work of the two doctoral students is part of the "Dilemmas of Sustainability" project, which is coordinated by Oldenburg sustainability expert Prof Dr Bernd Siebenhüner. The Ministry of Science of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation have been funding the joint project since the beginning of 2019. In the project, researchers from the Universities of Oldenburg, Braunschweig, Passau and the Institute for Social-Ecological Research in Frankfurt are jointly investigating the areas of tension that arise in the discussion about sustainability and its scientific investigation.
"Our aim is to find meta-criteria to make transparent how projects, programmes and initiatives deal with the concept and the dilemmas it poses - and whether different evaluation criteria will be needed in the future," explains Siebenhüner. The project team is made up of interdisciplinary members in order to capture and reflect on the various dimensions of the concept of sustainability. The researchers come from the fields of education, political science, economics, sociology and philosophy of science. Oldenburg educational scientist Prof Dr Karsten Speck is also involved.
How do research programmes define sustainability?
Siebenhüner explains that the basic idea of sustainability is based on the maxim that we should not live today at the expense of future generations or at the expense of people in other regions of the world. Humanity must therefore use its resources more sparingly and differently. In practice, difficulties often arise when it comes to organising economic activity in a sustainable way. Many people are familiar with the "petrol tank or plate problem", for example: biofuels are considered sustainable because they replace fossil fuels. At the same time, their cultivation takes up land that could otherwise be used to grow food.
Such dilemmas are at the centre of the project. The team from the University of Oldenburg has taken on the empirical part: Sophie Berg and Ann-Kristin Müller are searching research programmes for evidence of different understandings of economics, for example, and working out what strategies research funders are pursuing. The doctoral students are proceeding according to what is known as "grounded theory". This social science method is suitable for qualitatively developing a theory from documents in several steps. In this case, the researchers determined how the programmes define sustainability as a research objective. Sophie Berg also pays particular attention to dilemmas relating to gender and gender equality, while Ann-Kristin Müller includes the aspect of education.
Considering topics such as gender equality from the outset
Today, these issues are also often considered an important part of sustainable development and are included as points in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example. In practice, however, they are often pushed into the background, according to an initial result of the analyses: In their analysis of the programme lines, Berg and Müller found that gender equality has not yet been an essential component in the calls for proposals, and education for sustainable development has hardly played a role either. Instead, most research funding organisations continued to refer to the original, more technologically oriented definition of sustainability. One possible reason for the fact that social issues have so far only been given secondary consideration: "Taking these issues into account often seems to make solving problems even more difficult," reports Berg. Nevertheless, in her view, they should also be considered from the outset. The economist is convinced that this leads to possible solutions being better anchored in society
As a next step, the two scientists conducted a series of guided interviews with managers and employees from a total of 18 research projects. They want to find out whether tensions or contradictions become apparent between the participants in the transdisciplinary projects, for example because they have different levels of knowledge or different ideas of what sustainability actually is.
At the end of the project, the team wants to provide points of reference and food for thought for future funding programmes and research projects. "In science, too, we should think about sustainability in larger systemic contexts," says Berg. Siebenhüner also believes that awareness of the need to consider the social dimensions of sustainability as well as the technical ones has grown recently. "When producing knowledge, however, we should strive not only to refer to findings from research, but also to integrate everyday knowledge and develop concrete problem-solving approaches," he emphasises. The criteria developed in the project can help to achieve these goals.
