New Initiative Seeks Common Factors in Sustainability Research
UMaine’s Tim Waring is a lead investigator on a newly funded initiative that seeks to better understand the common factors that underlie widely ranging studies in sustainability science. The aim is to find guiding principles that will help shape and expand the scope of research in the discipline.
Waring, an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics and the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, will work with colleagues from universities across the country in an effort to coax common factors from the research by leveraging how culture and cooperation have evolved. It’s known as ‘cultural evolutionary theory’.
“Sustainability science has a very big problem with generalization, currently,” Waring said. “We study many separate systems, and work on solutions in many isolated cases, but often with very little ability to draw on previous work that may be relevant from other contexts. What, for example, does a forestry operation have in common with a small-scale cooperative fishery?”
Thus far, Waring says, such connectivity has been elusive. Evolutionary models may be the way in.
He added: “when most people hear the term evolution, they think of genetic evolution, but that’s not what we are studying here. We are examining the evolution of culture, or learned behavior. Sustainability scientists have a lot to gain from incorporating these models and methods. It’s a way to better answer the question: when and how do sustainable behaviors, institutions and societies arise and persist?”
The grant, from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis (SESYNC), provides funding for 18 months. Waring says the goal is to develop sustainability theory that would be useful in developing improved scientific models, research protocols, methods, and templates. Such developments could expand a project’s predictive capacity and create connectivity between diverse types of research. Individual researchers would benefit from a new set of tools that could help in the design of policies and interventions for social and ecological sustainability.
Waring’s co-investigator is Jeremy Brooks, Assistant Professor, School of Environment and Natural Resources Environmental and Social Sustainability Lab at The Ohio State University.