The Promises, the Reality, and the Menace of Transdisciplinary Approaches
Some thoughts after attending the sustainable talks from Dr. Dr. h.c Ortwin Renn
My professor Dr. Anke Weidlich likes to hold sustainable talks with people from different backgrounds to give inputs to her engineer students; on 5th of November, by pure chance, she invited one of the most famous German scholars in the corresponding Taiwanese academic sphere: professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Ortwin Renn of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS).
His talk that night on transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability studies was, without doubt, insightful, just like those the Risk Society and Policy Research Center had introduced to scholars in Taiwan.
To summarize his main points, during a transitional phase of the society we would still need the curiosity driven “classical science”, the tradition way of doing research as most people think of it; however, we will also need the problem oriented “strategic science” that unfolds for us the full picture of the transition process, and a third kind of “catalytic science” that makes sure the former two types of science are not disconnected with the society.
The reason for this need of new categories of science is because science itself has become more complex, more uncertain, and more full of field-specific jargons that no one else can understand. This creates a crisis that the public begins to lose trust of the scientific community, and thus the “catalytic science” must kick in to study how to regain the people’s trust.
As one of the real world examples, he provided us some of his thoughts during his involvement in the coal commision: different scientists, representing different positions, give different research results based on different assumptions, without discussing much with each other beforehand. The resulting 2038 deadline was more of a result of bargaining and averaging of the studies plus some conservative political thinking, rather than any sensible scientific based calculation.
However, let us leave his speech like that as for now, and discuss some other things I happened to observe during the event, since they provided conclusive insights on my two year study in Germany that is about to end.
The first was that, although the topic was about transdisciplinary approaches, there was probably only students from sustainable engineering and renewable energy engineering attending the event, which was a very narrow band of population within the university community, even among those who cared about sustainability.
The only exception was a friend from the Umweltreferat, and she told me she did not find anyone she knew apart from me. We then talked about the divestment movements in Taiwan, and my whereabouts in the near future.
Having a discussion like that in a Fraunhofer technical building was to some extent surreal. It reminded me that during my two years of stay in Freiburg, there seemed to have two circles of sustainability in the city: one in which I studied, the other in which I took climate actions with. Both circles seldom interact with one another, as if they exist in two parallel universes.
This is of course no new thing for me; the relationship between self-proclaimed engineers and environmental groups is perhaps a million times more tense in Taiwan, to an extent that some energy transition skeptics claim only people who study social science would support renewable energy!
Nevertheless, I expected this phenomenon would be non-existent in Freiburg when I first came here, only to find that it still exists in a more vague context. The experience during that speech was yet another reminder of the goal I set too large to realize during these two years: to bridge two communities into one (To Miri: this is the “failure” I was referring to).
Secondly, a common feedback I received from the engineer students in REM and SSE was that it was a speech too abstract to follow, or, in one’s own words, too “philosophical”. I got what they were talking about. We as future engineers are used to neglecting the 5000 words in the introduction and literature review, and cut straight into equations, numbers, and figures of a report. Yet professor Renn did not show any graph or statistic during his speech. In fact, he did not prepare any slide to show us! You do not see that very often in our lectures or colloquiums.
It is in the training of an engineer to always look for something concrete, something operable, something precise and well-quantified; consequently words are less valued than numbers in our culture of communication. I think this speech was actually a good way to, like Professor Weidlich said, “ concentrate oneself on the words”.
The last and most personal thing was related to the question I asked: the inconsistency of the public opinions regarding the energy transition policy. This was of course a very “Taiwanese” question, but in general we saw similar trend in the democratic societies around the world (e.g. Brexit).
In a society where “traveling trust” (the term professor Renn used to describe people who did not know who to believe and thus based their opinions on reasons irrelevant of the topic) dominates, public opinion may vary drastically and abruptly. In just eleven months from last November’s landslide election and referenda, we witnessed the rise and fall of the popularity of the conservative Chinese nationalist party in Taiwan; not because that the majority of Taiwanese suddenly accepted gay marriage or completely embraced energy transition, but because of Hong Kong, the Sino-America trade war, and many other political / economical blunders the Chinese government has made lately.
Thus, I asked, what should “strategic scientists” or “catalyst scientists” do, amidst these uncertainty in a highly divided democratic society. The answer, according to Professor Renn, seemed to be putting catalyst scientists into all the political parties and make energy transition a bipartisan / multipartisan consensus. After all, we all knew what the main political parties and electricity utilities in Germany said about renewable energy 20 years ago.
There were two problems I thought of to this solution, however. The first is a technical one; like AfD, many politicians in the Chinese nationalist party actually invest heavily in renewable energy sector. These people bash wind and solar not because they do not believe in the promising future of renewable energy, but rather they do it because either their supporters don’t believe in such future, or they need something to show their opposing position to the government.
The second problem I had in mind was the potential threat to democracy of using “catalyst science”. This is very paradoxical, but I have witnessed it myself in the past 11 months. Many of the supporters of the energy transition in Taiwan were forced to learn this “catalyst science” in the very hard way after the referenda. After studying the preference of the public, it seemed that they concluded that there were only three things important to mention about the energy transition: 1. that the lights will not go out, 2. that the society will benefit economically, and 3. air quality will improve.
All of the three statements above are true, but as you can see, some important aspects of the energy transition are omitted: energy democracy, system change, global solidarity, debate on de-growth, to name a few. In other words, the real sustainable issues were dodged during the last eleven months of campaigning, simply because those are things the public is not interested in or will potentially oppose to.
Of course, one can argue, that this is not how “catalyst science” should have been conducted. But if a group of scientists find out important behavior or psychological patterns of the public, who is there to guarantee that this knowledge would be used to lead the society to a more open and evident-based discussion, and not the exact opposite? To the extreme, in an authoritarian government, wouldn’t “catalyst scientists” just a synocrom for mind-controlling / brainwashing researcher?
If the supporters of the progressive politics can study catalyst science, so will the conservatives; and, as the referenda last year have shown us, sometimes they learn much better in this new field of science. After all, it takes the same approaches to convince a person to believe in something that is true or not true.
This is of course not the reason why supporters of the progressive politics should give up on catalyst science, because even if they do so, the other side will just exploit that realm of science more. For me it is gradually evolving into more of an arm race between two rival powers than an ideal democratic process (if such concept really ever makes sense); even the odds seem to favor the progressive side a little bit now, it is still worrisome, because the support of the people at the age of “traveling trust” come from factors we simply cannot control or even predict. Just as professor Renn said, “if the weather starts to get rainy this year, people might not support Fridays for Future that much”.
And we yet do not have an answer to how to deal with that.
