Interdisciplinary dynamics of nature/society epistemic communities: a comparative study of Ecological Economics, Resilience of Social and Ecological Systems and Political Ecology

Résumé 0

From the 1970s onwards, several groups of researchers, including those who founded the journal Natures Sciences Sociétés, launched the idea that it was necessary to cross disciplinary boundaries to address the environmental issue. We propose here to compare three of these interdisciplinary communities, which we qualify as epistemic communities, i.e., ecological economics, the resilience of social and ecological systems and Political Ecology, particularly with regard to their trajectories, the mechanisms that structure them and the understanding of their internal diversity. We show that, while all three more or less follow the same temporal pattern (foundations laid in the 1970s, structuring in the 1980s), they share a diagnosis on the nature of the environmental crisis but apprehend the internal debates on the means of resolving this crisis differently. Our analyses show different ways of ‘doing’ interdisciplinarity: resilience of social and ecological systems constitutes a form of epistemic community that is both flexible and structured, while Political Ecology is riddled with questions about the very usefulness of science and its relationship to politics and criticism. Ecological Economics seems to be torn between several currents, which may be distinguished according to their relationship to economic orthodoxy.