Another great STS conference in Graz

I think it is the fourth time I have attended the STS conference in Graz. As I found out, others have come here already for many more years. This was the 23rd edition of the conference. I like this conference, because it is a relatively small event, which makes it easy to connect with the attendees. Furthermore, the conference is always well organized. The organizers are quick to respond to e-mails and are always helpful. So are the technical staff, who are doing their best to make the hybrid conference format work as smoothly as possible. The conference is at a lovely venue in Graz. That it is taking place in Graz is of course an additional plus for me, since I am Austrian. Thus, attending the conference allows me to also see my family. The staff at the conference venue (Hotel Weizer) are lovely and very attentive and the food gets better and better every year. This year, the food was fully vegetarian and vegan. They even had many gluten-free options. They even had vegan and gluten free cake! This lets my heart sing. I am impressed, beyond words. Thus, it is a very well-organized conference and not without reason does the conference close with rounds of applause for the great support and organizing team.

STS (science, technology and society studies) is an interdisciplinary field. Therefore, you meet researchers from many different disciplines, which is a joy. If you work on Science, Technology and Society Study topics, then I can only recommend this conference.

The keynote speeches were just as interesting as the conference sessions and presentations. The first keynote by Kean Birch was on The Rise of a Tech Oligarchy. This is not a topic I deal with in my own research. The topic though, is of course highly timely. The power of technology companies has become more and more obvious in the last years. And with the new US American administration, the influence of big tech has become blatantly obvious. No one can overlook it. While I currently do not work on market power, the keynote very much related to my PhD thesis on market power and sustainability (Biely, 2020; Biely et al., 2018; Biely & van Passel, 2022). While sustainability was not an explicit part of the keynote. We easily see how electric cars connect to sustainability transition narratives. Colonizing Mars or space tourism can also be connected to sustainability topics. Not long ago, the power of a single electric car company was understood to be positive. One man pushing the transformation forward. Where would we be without this man? If we consider the power of this one man we must wonder whether we should neglect or even support market power or not.

Listening to the keynote, I was thinking about what I could do to counter the powerful tech-oligopolies? First, I thought about boycotting. I think about this regularly. I am fed up with Facebook and Instagram. And I am unhappy to support Meta by using WhatsApp. At the same time, I need Facebook to find climbing partners. By now I have at least three other messenger apps on my phone, and I am not delighted about this development either. I want less, not more. The same is true for other software. I do not want to look into 100 different programs to do more or less the same thing. Thus, in some sense, I prefer market dominance here. Hence, in a second step, I thought that if a boycott is not leading to a better situation and if market dominance is somewhat needed, then we have to think of certain soft- and hardware as natural monopolies. If this is the case, then such companies must not follow free market principles but should at least be controlled and overlooked by governments. Now, it is potentially the other way around. Economic power translates to political power, and it feels like politicians are the puppets of those who control capital. This is not what a democracy should look like. Arguably, this has always been the case. But we have to ask whether we want to maintain this situation?

The second keynote, which I was able to attend, by Harald Rohracher was on the scalability of innovations (The limits of experimentation and upscaling in urban climate transitions). I recognized many aspects of what Professor Rohracher presented. For a long time now, I think that the idea of just scaling something up is rather strange. I understand that we want to develop one solution then just roll it out. But isn’t it obvious? What works in one place, might not work somewhere else. We can further connect this to the first keynote. If we scale up one option, we end up with one monopolistic, one dominant option. This makes us less resilient. Resilience is a hot topic right now. If we really want to increase the resilience of our systems, then we must increase diversity. This means that we cannot simply scale up our silver bullet solution. And if we have to, as in the case of natural monopolies, we have to be aware of how vulnerable this will make us. I like to think about nature, when I contemplate such issues. There are certain organs that are natural monopolies. We have one heart, living without it is impossible. There are other structures we can live without. We can live with one kidney, and we survive with a smaller liver; we can even survive brain damage (depending on the location). There are conditions that need to be within certain parameters for us to survive, such as our body temperature. And our body works hard to maintain this within a specific range! There are other conditions that allow more fluctuation, such as eating. We can survive for some time without eating. Less so without water. Our bodies have many buffers in place to increase our resilience. If we did not have them, we would get ill rather quickly. We do not realize the magic of our body until one day after treating our body badly for many years and overstretching the buffers of our body for too long, we get ill. When we think of nature-based solutions, we also have to consider that nature is based on ecological resilience, not on engineering resilience (Gunderson & Holling, 2002).   

Another interesting aspect of the keynote was that because of risk aversion we fall into the trap of conducting less risky and more promising experiments. Thus, living labs and the like are not as experimental, not as radical as they are presented and as they could be. The dynamic that we find is explained in systems thinking. The pattern is called: success to the successful (see e.g., Brzezina et al., 2017). Instead of searching for solutions for tricky problems, we address those issues that are easier to solve. I get it, we are under pressure to prove that our research has a positive result, that we have a positive impact, and that we meet key performance indicators (KPIs). Meeting our KPIs helps us generate funding in the future. This allows us to do more research. More research that focuses on low hanging fruits. It is less convincing to tell funding bodies or clients that we experimented but failed. Failures are still not a result we dare to show, even if we could actually learn much from these failures (Catalano et al., 2019). This can result in a publishing bias, where more positive than negative results are published. It is a recurring debate within academia that we are not publishing enough reports on failures. What might be even more problematic, is being afraid to fail reduces our willingness to take risks. Thus, it can hamper innovation. I have observed this as well. I was supposed to work on high-risk experimental projects. But then when you suggest using alternative ideas, you are pushed back into the confinements of the comfortable. Of what people are used to, of what the other experts are doing, what the leading opinion is, of what is publishable, of what does not make too much noise, of what does not question the mainstream.

We might need more incentive structures to support real experimentation and to provide room for failure.

I also had the chance to follow several interesting sessions. This year I focused my attention to sessions on energy justice as well as participation.

In one session on Advancing Urban and Rural Energy Systems there was a highly interesting talk about the issue of underreported energy poverty of young adults and students, which I had at all considered so far. So that was a real eye-opener. After the presentations we did a back casting activity, which turned out to be highly interesting. We had to envision a sustainable, just energy future and then outline how we get there. We were two groups. The presentation of the visions showed that there are clear commonalities between them. Yet, there were also striking differences. Both visions highlighted the need for diversity. Thus, the future energy system relies on a diversity of resources. Furthermore, the energy systems reflect the resource availability within a respective area. Hence, the energy mix in every region is determined by biophysical reality. While we agreed on this aspect of the future energy system, we disagree on certain technological specifications. One group placed the role of AI in organizing and managing the energy system at the center. The other group abolished AI altogether. The discussion afterwards showed that we agreed on the downsides of AI but that one group was unable to imagine an alternative way to manage a diverse decentralized energy system.

In a session on participation, we also first had the opportunity to learn about projects. Then we could participate in a world caffe. We worked on three tables. Though due to time constraints we could only switch once. One table worked on how participation can be supported, one table worked on challenges of participatory approaches in respect to external factors (funding) and one table worked on the failures of participatory research. I think that the results were not unexpected. This lets me conclude that the challenges we face and the conditions we need for participatory research to work, are well-known. Yet, it remains difficult to provide favorable conditions and counterbalance the challenges. For example, we know that it helps to meet people where they are, compensate them for their time investment or provide services (e.g. childcare) that help them attend participatory research. Yet, we might not have the budget to accommodate for that. In terms of constraints, it was clear that we are again limited by budgets and insufficient time to conduct participatory research. For example, we might need more time to build trust or provide the room for disagreements among stakeholders to be discussed. Yet, projects might not allow us to dedicate enough time to these issues.

On the last day I followed one session on food justice, with several interesting presentations. One presentation was about lab meat. The presentation was quite insightful as it explained that lab meat still involves animal suffering. A fact I was not aware of. Though one of the key points the presenter brought to our attention was that certain aspects (such as the animal suffering) are completely omitted and thus, we miss out on discussing which future we would prefer. To decide how future food systems should look like we need to include all relevant aspects, even (or especially) the uncomfortable ones. There was another interesting presentation on the hot topic of gene editing with a focus on India. The presenter pointed out that the discussion is very similar to the GMO debate with gene editing proponents making similar promises. Thus, the topic of food sovereignty remains. For example, similar to the GMO situation, the presenter indicated that gene editing disadvantages small-scale farmers and the control they have over their own production. The presenter also highlighted that malnourishment and starvation are not because of insufficient food production but because of access to food. Gene editing will not solve this problem.

In the session on Exploring Fuel Futures and Circularities, I especially enjoyed the presentation on energy orientalism. A concept in reference to the work of Eward Said. I liked how the presenter translated Said’s work to understand dynamics of domination in energy transition contexts. I thought that this is a relevant contribution to discuss issues of just energy transitions.

Before the closing of the conference, I had the pleasure to chair a session and also give a presentation. The title of the presentation was At the intersection of action research, systems thinking and transition studies creating spaces for transformative change. We had a diverse mix of presentations in the session. First Philip Engelbutzeder presented his work on Advancing Sustainability Transformations: Applying Action Research to Shift from Scarcity and Surplus to Abundance. He draws from his interesting and rich experience as activist to conduct action research. I would argue that in my own journey to adopt action research, there are for sure insights I can learn from. Then Claus Seibt talked about Artistic (ArtSci) research creating spaces for transformative change. He illustrated how art can be used to as a tool within action research. An interesting concept that he will explore in an upcoming project is system sensing, a concept that goes beyond systems thinking. I am looking forward to learning more about this concept and how it is implemented through art in the future. Markus Rogall presented his work on Co-creating systemic knowledge about energy infrastructure acceptance. He explained how he used causal loop diagrams in his project and which limitations he had to face. These limitations in part related to the method and in part to limitations of stakeholder engagement. I think it is always valuable to outline the challenges we face in our research. Of course he also outlined how they broke down complex systems maps to make them more digestible for stakeholders. The Social Learning Promise: A Critical Look at Participative Workshops in Sustainability Science, was the title of the presentation by Jakub Mácha. He presented a topic that I was also grappling with in the past; how to evaluate whether social learning occurred in a stakeholder interaction (e.g. a workshop). He described the difficulties of this endeavor and suggested to take pedagogical approach. Thus, researchers should first define wished learning goals to then design the workshop and learning evaluation accordingly. Though, he also indicated that this can be problematic as we then predetermine what we want people to learn. In any case, assessing learning is difficult as it is challenging to anticipate what people would learn and thus develop the assessment accordingly. This is even more so for social learning as it is not only about the learning of individuals but also about the learning of the group overall. My presentation on A Nexus Approach: Connecting Action research, systems thinking and transition theory, closed the session. With this presentation I outlined how the Nexus team characteristically approaches its research. As the title states, we combine action research, systems thinking and transition thinking. I illustrated this using two cases my colleagues were or are still working on. The Nexus approach is in part new terrain for me. I am familiar with transition thinking and systems thinking. However, action research was completely new to me. I am only at the beginning of learning about this specific approach to research and I hope to write more about it in the future. I think sharing more about action research and the Nexus approach overall is valuable. For example, I think that other researchers could profit from insights into action research. As I learned aiming for (societal) change and using systems thinking are not only natural partners of action research but also intrinsic part of it.

Overall the conference was a great experience and I am glad I could contribute to it, meet familiar faces and make new connections.

References

Biely, K. (2020). Market Power and Sustainability: A Novel Approach Hasselt Universtiy]. http://hdl.handle.net/1942/32473

Biely, K., Maes, D., & Van Passel, S. (2018). Market Power Extended: From Foucault to Meadows. Sustainability, 10(8), 2843. https://doi.org/ARTN 2843 10.3390/su10082843

Biely, K., & van Passel, S. (2022). Market power and sustainability: a new research agenda. Discover Sustainability, 3(1), 5. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-022-00073-y

Brzezina, N., Biely, K., Helfgott, A., Kopainsky, B., Vervoort, J., & Mathijs, E. (2017). Development of Organic Farming in Europe at the Crossroads: Looking for the Way Forward through System Archetypes Lenses. Sustainability, 9(5), 821. https://doi.org/ARTN 821 10.3390/su9050821

Catalano, A. S., Lyons-White, J., Mills, M. M., & Knight, A. T. (2019). Learning from published project failures in conservation. Biological Conservation, 238, 108223. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108223

Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.

View from Schlossberg in Graz