GEOG30019 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Path Dependence, Closed System
6 Jun 2018
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Department
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Professor
LECTURE 3: FRAMINGS &
COPRODUCTION
• Epistemology: ways of knowing the world
Assumptions and their Impacts
2 main framings of SD debates (economic rationality and collective responsibility) often inaccurate
and poorly representative of the complex debates that animate SD
• SD is at its heart, an economic rationality
• Idea we all live on the same planet - spaceship earth - embedded in SD literature, ignored by
those in power and those in the west
o In it together, collective responsibility
o Closed system - limits to growth
o Fatality rises inversely to your class and gender
• Constructivism: way of making sense of the claim we do no live in the same world
o Confirmation of assumptions as you see information - due to internal framings
• Co-production - understanding of reality helps you to make your reality
• People see the world differently, need to acknowledge that in order to have a constructive
debate
Complex v Complicated
• Complicated: there is an answer, it will be hard to find but it can be found, faith in an answer
• Complexity Theory: flexible ontology based on things and their relationships and make
epistemological claims and how we can learn about systems
o Continuously changing solution that requires to be constantly addressed
o Systems: not explained by their elements, evolution is path dependent, things emerge
o Relations: operate on multiple scales, are unequal
o You cannot view something without looking at the system in which it exists
Emergence
• Something is greater than the some of its parts
• Understanding SD relies on understanding a dialogue of its values - different perspectives of
stakeholders
• Framings: are what individuals/groups use to make, justify, confirm their perspectives as part
of SD dialogue
o Environment, society and economy are dominant framings in the context of SD
Miller's Framings
• "Framing in reference to the perceptual lenses, worldviews or underlying assumptions that
guide communal interpretation and definition of particular issues" - important quote for essay
if you use Miller
• "How does the power to frame an environmental issue in a particular way relate to the
articulation and distribution of power more generally in society?"
• How we see something dictates how we know something
• As a group, we see world together - communal understandings often lead to people following
ideas, and confirming them - reproducing them, without questioning them
