Jeffrey Broadbent
University of MinnesotaWhat do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
The social sciences are developing considerable insight into human and social factors that drive global climate
change. The basic cause lies in the human quest for economic and political security, and beyond that, for relative
social status through consumption display. These social factors produce population growth, technological
invention and increasing affluence, the physical drivers of impact on the environment (as noted by the IPAT
formula and its predecessor in population biology, the Kaya Identity). We also know that humans, unless socially
restrained, are prone to dump their waste into unprotected spaces (the environment) without paying for the
negative effects (defined by economists as market externality). Over the past 150 years, as population has grown
and waste increased and become more toxic, we have reached the limits of nature’s absorptive capacity and started
to change the very ecological systems that support life as we know it. These basic principles hold true across
all types of societies and underlie our current climate change dilemma. Most people and societies around the
world want the fruits of growth, and some actors pursue these goods with the most inhumane tactics imaginable.
Whatever the method, though, the industrial system of mass production and consumption has become ironically
self-destructive in its longer term ecological impacts. We know that systems of individualized competition tend
to exacerbate environmental dumping and systems of laws and regulations have sometimes reduced it. But in the
case of climate change, radical reduction in the dumping of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere strikes
at the very heart of contemporary industrial civilization. The human input to the needed geochemical change will
require not only new technology, but massive conservation by high GHG output countries (not all of high per
capita output). This simple fact implies a profound ecological rationalization and reorganization of national and
world economy, politics, social patterns and cultures.
Climate scientists have conclusively demonstrated the geophysical principles of our dilemma. The
European Union has proposed a goal of 50 (percent reduction of global GHG emissions) by 2050. Pragmatic
social actors such as governments, legislatures, businesses and non-governmental organizations have begun
to experiment with new sets of rules (formal institutions, sometimes proposed by political scientists), such
as cap and trade. Despite these attempts, however, our planetary atmosphere presently remains on track for a
disastrous increase in average temperature well beyond the danger line of two degrees Centigrade. For that reason,
concerned researchers are beginning to look beyond market and institutional concepts, turning instead to the
dynamics of interaction among the sectors and actors that produce societal behavior and its governing policies.
This IHDP itself (the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change, under the
auspices of the United Nations) demonstrates this shift. Within it, starting in the mid-1990s, political scientists
created a sub-unit to study the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). But after ten
years, the static concept of institution had outlived its utility. In 2007, the new IDGEC leader announced a change
in analytical paradigm from institutions to the more fluid and dynamic concept of “earth systems governance.”
He described this new concept in terms of dynamic networks and relationships among actors. This shift defines a
whole new research agenda particularly receptive to the distinct ideas and methods of Sociology generated by its
relational perspective.
The social sciences have boiled the social dynamics of our collectively self-destructive behavior down to
a fundamental model known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (aka the Tragedy of the Commons and the Public Goods
problem). We know from social-psychological small group experiments with this model that people tend to defect