In this interview we discuss the research and findings of Tatiana Sokolova’s recently published article in Environmental Politics: Who gets to imagine a fossil-free future? Ontological politics of knowledge-action co-production in the Swedish just transition.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from your research?
Thank you, I am thrilled to see my paper in the journal where I read so many papers which inspired me. For me, the most important takeaway is that sustainability research processes are microcosms of the green transitions, model landscapes replicating their uneven relief. Research is often black boxed. There are myths about knowledge produced in ivory towers, in labs, in distant and exotic places. But co-production of knowledge and action are complex negotiations of conflicting realities, situated in societies where transitions (fail to) occur.
Tell me about ontological politics – what did this concept help you uncover?
I was provoked by a close colleague asking me: When you research the processes of knowledge co-production with diverse actors, do you see their voices as conflicting stories (hermeneutics), or conflicting realities (ontology)? Political ontology gets at the very core of this distinction. Its primary goal is to confront the tendency to dismiss ‘other’ ways of knowing and being as ‘mere stories’. This is an anthropological approach adopted by political ecology, which blends the (critical) realist and constructivist epistemologies and is often used to critique dominant paradigms of ‘development’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘transitions’.
Seeing research as ontological politics opens up to understanding research as more than an epistemic project. It is seen as a sociopolitical practice of negotiating different realities: of ‘green modernity’, ‘planetary boundaries’, and ‘resistance’. It uncovers the irreducibility of these realities to discourses about them. They emerge as agonistic, irreconcilable. This goes against the grain of the co-production and transdisciplinarity as a process which simply integrates different perspectives.
You begin your article with this quote, “‘After three decades of mitigation, why have we not bent the emissions curve?’” What does your article contribute to this question?
My focus is on the role of the researchers in ‘bending the curve’. Researchers and others who see mitigation measures as insufficient are frustrated with the lack of action in the face of ample scientific knowledge on the problem. My task as someone who studies the politics of knowledge is to show the many ways in which ‘speaking truth to power’ doesn’t work as a linear model of knowledge production for sustainability, and the many ways in which researchers navigate this. In this case, engaging in ontological politics – bringing together the multiple ontologies of the transition. It’s not the same as political activism, and it’s not about banning politics from research. It’s a subtler understanding of politics – beyond the political institutions and ideologies.
One of the reasons why the curve is not bent is that there is too little commitment to epistemic and ontological justice in the institutionalised knowledge production practices. In my paper I show that the ontological rifts in a high-modern society are so strong that the researchers have an Augean task of bridging them, if they are to do meaningful co-production.
The context of your article is Sweden – what’s interesting about Sweden’s approach?
Sweden has been an ‘environmental hero’. They are (or used to be) very proud that the first world conference on the environment was held in Stockholm. Sweden has been leading on the environmental performance indices and climate mitigation goals and efforts, green innovation, research etc. Some of its research institutions, like Stockholm Resilience Centre that leads the research programme I analysed, have a notable international reputation on environmental issues. Furthermore, Sweden is interesting, because it has a model of industry-state-labour relationship which is unique to the Nordic North. It has been a very constructive alliance between labour and industry in the presence of a strong welfare state, which propelled Sweden into many decades of economic stability and innovation.
Sweden has enjoyed a very long period of peace, and has avoided many internal conflicts which tormented other European countries in the twentieth century. Sweden is a democratic country with a strong defence of liberal rights and high participation, or better to say, perhaps, ‘incorporation’ of the public and civil society into various governance mechanisms. However, all of this is quite unstable at the moment, as politics is changing in Sweden. And none of it is enough to deliver on the Paris Agreement commitment. Which is a bit of a cold shower. The conflicts presented in the paper have their own dynamics, but they are not dissimilar to a more general green transitions fault lines, and they will play out in Sweden despite the head start.
Finally, what does this article mean for future research? What questions are you answering next?
I am working on the politics of co-production and what it means ‘to speak truth to power when power won’t listen’. I had the privilege to continue with my ‘research anthropology’ and observe how researchers engage with trade union leaders (through an elite training programme) and Swedish citizens (through a national climate assembly organised by researchers). I think that ‘power’ in a democratic state is with the elites and the society at large, there is no single ‘seat’ of power – that is why the politics of ‘speaking the truth’ is very complex. So researchers engage with society in complex ways, walking a very fine line of legitimacy sometimes. What are the appropriate roles for researchers? How can they best enact, embed their knowledge in society? I look at the norms and theories of societal change which play out at the interfaces between knowledge and action for a green transition, and how this normative layer connects our efforts as researchers co-producing knowledge and the macro-level of power-knowledge co-production, where, to quote Sheila Jasanoff, ‘the simultaneous processes through which modern societies form their epistemic and normative understandings of the world‘.
Bio: Tatiana Sokolova is a doctoral student in Environmental Studies at the Department of Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. She studies the interface between knowledge and politics of sustainability transitions and transformations, focusing especially on how power manifests in relationships between different societal actors in co-production of sustainability knowledge, imagination, and action. Her research has involved critical analysis of sustainability and research policies, political ontologies and power dynamics of research programmes, knowledge-action configurations of deliberative democracy, and prefigurative legality of climate litigation. She is developing approaches to exploring socio-ecologically just sustainability transformations and the Anthropocene through creative writing, postmodern theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed. She is affiliated with Research Forum at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEFO/CEMUS) at Uppsala University and the GreenDeal-NET, a research network of the European Green Deal.
