Steve Connelly

Mapping Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept

Abstract Despite the continuing salience of sustainable development as a norm for planning and policymaking, there is still no consensus over the societal goals that would count as sustainable development. This paper builds on a longstanding, though always minority, tradition that sees this conceptual ambiguity and ensuing contestation as inevitable and explicable. Where many representations and analyses of sustainable development obscure this complexity, the purpose here is to provide analysts and practitioners alike with a way of exposing and analysing it, in order to avoid the pitfalls of conflating opposing positions that are cloaked within the comforting rhetoric of sustainable development. The paper sets out a way to map contesting interpretations of sustainable development in relation to each other and wider political debates, and thus provides a visual representation of sustainable development as an essentially contested concept that may counter the rhetorically powerful organizing representations that support the dominant yet over-simplified analyses—the familiar three overlapping circles and weak–strong sustainability spectrum.

Constructing Legitimacy in the New Community Governance

What is the legitimacy of new forms of governance at community level? This paper addresses the important yet little understood issue of how this is established, developing a constructivist approach to the concept of ‘legitimacy’ and presenting an analysis of how the legitimacy of community-based organisations is understood and constructed in a northern English city. This shows how their legitimacy draws on a range of pre-existing norms as well as new ones, only some of which are recognisably democratic, and is more a product of informal practices than formal structures. It is consequently fragile and open to challenge, and weak according to the norms of legitimacy derived from the representative democratic tradition or the standpoint of modern deliberative democracy. What could appropriately replace such norms remains unclear, although it is suggested that a way forward may be through reintroducing the value of activism as an acceptable grounding for political legitimacy.

Studying water: reflections on the problems and possibilities of interdisciplinary working

Abstract Some of the barriers to interdisciplinary working are not between natural and social scientists, but are philosophical rather than disciplinary. In this essay we explore the implications of this for the production of knowledge intended to support effective human intervention in a field such as the study of water catchments, and tentatively propose four strategies for addressing these barriers. These are: (1) avoidance, through researchers with different philosophies working alongside each other without integrating their knowledge; (2) working in multidisciplinary but single-paradigm teams; (3) adopting common philosophical ground, in which context we suggest critical realism as a potentially valuable candidate; or (4) for researchers to develop common criteria for assessing the quality of their work, even where they differ over philosophical fundamentals. Of these the last seems likely to be most fruitful, and would require an interdisciplinary team to examine explicitly their understanding and criteria for validity, to recognise similarities in their approaches to generating well-grounded knowledge, and to be open-minded in their acceptance of difference.

Everyday stories of impact: interpreting knowledge exchange in the contemporary university

Research into the barriers of getting evidence produced by academics into policymaking processes has often highlighted the lack of research on academics and what they do, as compared to what policymakers do. This was most recently highlighted in a systematic review of the literature (Oliver et al, 2014). This paper reports on research carried out with academics who were tasked with producing evidence reviews for the UK Department for Communities and Local Government based on research funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Using a novel co-produced methodology the academics were interviewed by an academic and a UK civil servant, with the analysis carried out by both. Using an interpretive approach, the findings identify specific meaning-making stories or practices that were enablers or barriers to producing evidence suitable for policymakers. The paper identifies three areas that affect academic behaviour at the nexus with policymaking: career biographies; disciplinary background; and the contradictory institutional pressures on academics. We conclude by arguing for a more collaborative approach between academics and policymakers. The co-produced approach also allowed us to identify the need for policymakers and civil servants to learn more about the different drivers of academics and the ways in which they work.

The craft of evaluative practice: Negotiating legitimate methodologies within complex interventions

Evaluations of complex interventions are likely to encounter tensions between different methodological principles, and between the inherent causal rationality of evaluation and the messy complexity of real institutional contexts. Conceptualizing evaluation as producing putatively authoritative evidence, we show how ‘legitimacy’ is a useful concept for unpacking evaluation design in practice. A case study of service integration shows how different approaches may have unpredictable levels of legitimacy, based in contrasting assessments of their methodological acceptability and actual utility. Through showing how practitioners resolved the tensions, we suggest that crafting a patchwork of different methodologies may be legitimate and effective, and can be seen as underpinned by its own pragmatic rationality. However, we also conclude that the explanatory power of theory-driven evaluation can be embedded in such an approach, both in elements of the patchwork and as an overarching guiding principle for the crafting process.

Destabilizing Environmentalism: Epiphanal Change and the Emergence of Pro-Nuclear Environmentalism

ABSTRACT George Monbiot, the prominent British radical journalist and environmentalist, shocked his readers and contemporaries by responding to the nuclear power station accident at Fukushima in March 2011 by becoming actively supportive of nuclear energy. In this paper we present a discourse analysis of Monbiots published articles which document this epiphanal transformation in his identity from orthodox to pro-nuclear environmentalist. Using a narrative theoretical approach which draws on Charles Taylors conceptualization of identity as arising from the telling of (moral) stories, we show how an individual can actively draw on the complexity of existing discourses in a given field to create new discourses and so recreate their own, and potentially others’, identities. Monbiots story matters because of his role, as an environmental ‘movement intellectual’, in shaping environmental discourse to a greater degree than most individuals, as well as being an example of how any individual can make new sense of even deeply held convictions. We suggest that a new environmentalism is developing, painfully born from and through conflicts within the orthodoxy, embodied in and shaped by the personal struggles of the movements own intellectuals.