Following meetings in Cornell in May 2009 and Glasgow/Cornell in May 2010, the multidisciplinary ‘Pluralism in Crisis’ workshop is now entering its next stage. It will move beyond an examination of different approaches to pluralism in the social and natural sciences to more focused case studies in practical responses to crisis situations. Do contemporary pluralisms provide criteria for achieving justice in normative contests over values? Do they provide effective means with which to address environmental, ecological or systemic conflicts?
The June workshop is structured to move participants towards:
- Collaborative publication, particularly via the medium of the special issue, prioritising journals focused on politics and pluralism and on ecology.
- Developing an international network of scholars, practitioners and policymakers to pursue longer-term research collaborations, with an eye to some participants preparing a grant application in July 2010.
- Materials to be presented at the July conference and in subsequent reporting and other joint activities to inform the work of policy-makers and practitioners and to enhance the impact of participants’ work.
In May, faced with the challenges of working across such a wide range of disciplines and divergent subject areas, workshop participants established a consensus behind distinguishing the fact of plurality and pluralism. Pluralism involves an interpretative or methodological choice, which may be (some would argue will be) implicit in a descriptive pluralism. Pluralistic ways of thinking involve some ability to integrate information about disparate and often conflicting values or phenomena, an integrative complexity which may be measured. Some versions of pluralism will require a respect and understanding for opposing perspectives, a point which, even when accepted, nevertheless inevitably raises both theoretical and practical problems. Pluralistic features may be attributed to an agent, or to a social or ecological system, though this will provoke disagreement across disciplines with regard to the nature of agency and ought properly to be defended accordingly. The workshop concurred on the value of functional comparisons between pluralistic social systems and natural ecologies, particularly in raising paradigms for measuring diversity in systems and in addressing the dynamics of relations between parties to a pluralistic arrangement. There was also a vigorous debate over the value of encompassing the perspectives of scientists and commentators from an indigenous background for whom the distinction between the social and the natural is less distinct than it is in traditional western approaches.
At the June workshop, participants will hear presentations from an international gathering of eminent scholars, policymakers and practitioners addressing contemporary environmental and political, cultural or social crises either with the help of pluralist methods or with an eye on the problems associated with pluralist approaches to crisis management. The workshop will address case studies in the management of ‘wicked’ policy problems, investigating the claims of pluralists to have particular purchase on complex crises, anti-systemic/anti-pluralistic actors, incommensurable clashes between values, issue linkages (particularly by the vehicle of such notions as ‘sustainability’ and ‘security’), the interests of marginal actors (whether migrants, indigenous peoples or endangered species), and the resolution of problems relating to scarcity and surplus.