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The Omnipresent Role of Technology in Social-Ecological Systems

Ontological Discussion and Updated Integrated Framework

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Research Challenges in Information Science: Information Science and the Connected World (RCIS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 476))

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Abstract

Technology-driven development is one of the main causes of the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, yet it is also an important factor in the potential mitigation of and adaptation to these crises. In spite of its omnipresence, technology is often overlooked in the discourses of social and environmental sustainability, while in practice sustainability initiatives often draw criticism for favouring technical solutions or oversimplifying the relationships between society, environment and technology. This article extends our RCIS 2022 publication “Conceptual integration for social-ecological systems: an ontological approach” with an ontological examination of technology in two prominent social-ecological systems paradigms, social-ecological system framework (SESF) and ecosystem services (ESs) cascade. We ground the ontological analysis of technology on analytical and postphenomenlogical philosophical literature and effect several re-designs to the initially proposed integrated framework. The main aim of this work is to provide a clearer and theoretically founded semantics of technology within SESF and ESs to improve knowledge representation and facilitate comparability of results in support of decision-making for sustainability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The paper of Guizzardi at al. [22] refers to agents, for the purpose of this work we consider actor and agent as interchangeable.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Basque Government IKUR program Supercomputing and Artificial Intelligence (HPC/AI), the María de Maeztu Excellence Unit 2023-2027 (CEX2021-001201-M) funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033, and the RCIS community for their valuable insights that helped develop this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. BC3 - Basque Centre for Climate Change, Leioa, Spain

    Greta Adamo & Max Willis

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  1. Greta Adamo
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  2. Max Willis
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Correspondence to Greta Adamo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  2. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Andreas L. Opdahl

  3. University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Haralambos Mouratidis

  4. Ionian University, Corfu, Greece

    Aggeliki Tsohou

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Adamo, G., Willis, M. (2023). The Omnipresent Role of Technology in Social-Ecological Systems. In: Nurcan, S., Opdahl, A.L., Mouratidis, H., Tsohou, A. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science: Information Science and the Connected World. RCIS 2023. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 476. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33080-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33080-3_6

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