“We Need Social Scientists!” The Allure and Assumptions of Economistic Optimization in Applied Environmental Science

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks, without implicating, Razvan Amironesei, Alex V. Barnard, Martin Eiermann, Marion Fourcade, Thomas Krendl Gilbert, Jeff Gordon, Katherine Hood, Calvin Morrill, Alex Roehrkasse, Mary Shi, the participants of the 2017 Genial and Ephemeral Meeting of Sociologists and the Qualitative Field and Observational Methods Seminar at UC Berkeley for their helpful comments on previous versions of this work. The editors of this forum, Kean Birch and Les Levidow, offered many valuable insights that are reflected in the final version of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Caleb Scoville http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2797-0018

Notes

1 Environmental scientists are of course actively engaged in ethical debates, and different fields and approaches are partially defined by implicit or explicit ethical commitments (e.g. Soulé, 1985; Wilson, 1992; Young, 2000). However, there is no univocal consensus on the relevant ethical criteria for evaluating environmental questions (cf. Light and Rolston, 2012) like there is in nearly all corners of the discipline of economics (and fields that adopt and extend economic models like policy analysis and political science). Economics, therefore, provides an attractive moral compass for a field defined with reference to concrete policy problems, but often without a decisive means of measuring the relative worth of competing solutions.

2 A growing field of “valuation studies” focuses on the social pragmatics of valuation (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013). On tensions related to the economic valuation of “nature,” and how they are resolved and/or contested in practice, see: Espeland (1998), MacKenzie (2009), Fourcade (2011), Foale Dyer, and Kinch (2016), and Rea (2017).

3 Glaser and Laudel (2016) have taken up this theme in part with their recent review of scholarship on the relationship between science policy (or “governance”) and the content of scientific research.