Abstract
Recent world summits on sustainable development or climate change have been considered as failures, with greenhouse emissions rising and sustainable development much talked about yet hardly seen. In this chapter, I argue that global environmental change programmes and their understanding of interdisciplinary research are part and parcel of this problem, having turned science into an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1994). I illustrate this argument with sketches from two ethnographic case studies in Portugal and northern Germany, comparing them to the globalising approach of international research programmes. Rather than the ‘science is settled’ approach, I argue that the open dialogue about knowledge production and collaboration based on ethnographic research leads to a shift in perspective and helps to bring issues such as climate change into the world and science back into democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, twenty years after the first summit in Rio, 1992.
- 2.
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
For more details, see Krauss (2007).
- 6.
For more detail, see Krauss (2009).
- 7.
For more information about the regional history of the “Energiewende” and the social life of things such as wind turbines, see Krauss (2010).
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Krauss, W. (2015). Anthropology in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Interdisciplinary Research. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_4
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