This project draws on Bryan Norton’s philosophical framework for achieving democratically legitimate environmental management. Norton provides an argument for the articulation of “bridge terms” that ensure that the language in which we describe ecological systems is a language that licenses inferences for collective governance. These bridge terms integrate facts and values so that our democratic deliberation about environment decisions is both empirically robust and normatively transparent. Here I consider specific conceptual challenges that arise in social-ecological systems science and other coupled systems approaches, which complicate the articulation of adequate bridge term, and thus our ability to fully consider the stakes of environmental management choices. Using pragmatist and ordinary language methods of conceptual analysis, I consider the adequacy of terminology common in social-ecological systems science for facilitating deliberation that meets these twin ideals of empirical robustness and normative transparency. These methods investigate the “grammar” of concepts, which shows how we use a concept in making a judgment and drawing inferences based on that judgment.
Results/Conclusions
Conceptual analysis and close textual analysis of classic and more recent work in social-ecological systems science reveals that explanations of environmental change are frequently articulated in a structuralist or functionalist grammar that complicate the legitimacy of interventions based on these explanations. For example, we can effectively explain increases or decreases in resilience in terms of “incipient institutions” or “weak institutional structures,” but, beyond knowing the impacts of these conditions on resilience, we cannot evaluate their fuller ethical significance. If managing through a social intervention, transparency about these additional social impacts is necessary for rationally deliberating about appropriate responses. This presents us with two options for articulating bridge terms that can facilitate just and resilient environmental governance: (1) impress upon the public the importance of various social-ecological conditions so that those terms do provide strong reasons for democratic decisions, and/or (2) conduct additional research in terms already rich in normative significance, operationalized to service empirical investigation. I conclude that the language of virtues and vices is uniquely suited to the conceptual orientation of social-ecological systems science, in that virtues append to regularities in human action (institutions) while also connecting inferentially to ethical judgment and legitimate collective action.