Research

Steve’s Current and Recent Research

 

The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society, Second Edition is a project recently completed with Seungyun Lee as co-editor.  The handbook provides the most up-to-date social science thinking and research on climate change.  It is to be released late fall 2024 or earlier 2025.  Steve had a chapter on global public opinion and climate change in the 2010 first edition.

Fragile Democracies, Authoritarianism and Climate Change. Co-authored with Seungyun Lee, the essay is in the special edition section of Sociological Forum, December 2023, and explores the various promises of democracy and threats of authoritarianism governing systems during climatic change. The article was the topic of a Presidential Plenary Panel at the 2024 Eastern Sociological Society Meetings in Washington DC, involving Dana Fisher and Fernando Tormos-Aponte. This article has been revised and published as a chapter on climate change governance in the Routledge Handbook.  We are considering a third, more empirically based publication.

The Social, Moral, Political, and Science of Climate Change Technologies.  With Ph.D. candidate Amanda Sie taking the lead, this exciting area of research focuses on the set of serious issues surrounding the rapid development of emergency or supplemental climate-related technologies known as geoengineering or climate engineering. Two suites of technologies exist – Carbon Dioxide Removal, CDR, and Solar Radiation Management, SRM, also known as solar engineering. Questions of moral hazards, governance, social acceptance, and social/environmental impacts are most relevant, especially with SMR technologies. Fred Traylor and Professor Shwom have also engaged this topic. Several papers are far along.

Edward Elgar Publications: The Handbook of Global Public Opinion on Climate Change and the Environment.  This is a new 2024 project (with a long history) involving graduate student Fred Traylor and two scholars from other universities. The aim is to put together a state-of-the-art collection regarding public cross-national opinion on climate change and the environment.

Community and Sustainable Lifestyles as Lived Religion in the farm-to-table movement in Northern Michigan.  This is a long-term, multi-dimensional project involving local informants, local producers, NGO support groups, and Rutgers University students, e.g. Seungyun Lee, among others, as we look at the reinvention of the agricultural systems as the area goes through a major transition from a major fruit growing area of Michigan, particularly the tart cherry industry to small-scale, alternative farming.  Due to globalization and changing weather patterns, the US tart cherry industry is in decline.  Supported by tourism and new wealthy residents to the area, the farm-to-table, local food movement has blossomed with new forms of small-scale sustainable farming business models emerging with close community ties among the key producers and actors as “lived religion.”  Many of these actors are pursuing a sustainability-focused lifestyle that is unlike the models of “Plenitude” or “Simplicity”, but rather something different, which some have called “shared abundance” through the production of local food. A fascinating side question – do “sustainable lifestyles” depend on wealth-based infrastructure to be “sustainable”?  There are critical implications to any answer.

The Social Consequences of Private Climate Finance. Massive financing in the $ trillions over decades will be required to address climate change at a global scale.  Much of the needed new monies will come from private investments and investment firms; public funding is important but too limited.  This research explores the nature and consequences of climate financialization and the effects that will have on our collective welfare and climate justice.  This works is ongoing with papers in the works involving graduate students Brent Hogaland and Seukyoung Lee.  In addition to a series of papers, we are working with Prof. Dorceta Taylor, Yale University, on a Taylor and Francis’ Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice looking at climate finance. Professor Danielle Falzon is involved in this project.

Karl Polanyi’s Environmental Sociology. Steve plans on writing a book-length treatment of Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology. This is most likely a retirement project but has its roots in a 2017 article with Trent Fenner, see https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2017.1355723 .  The larger project would include more of Polanyi’s writings beyond his 1944 opus, The Great Transformation.  Steve is happy to work with incoming graduate students interested in social theory and the environment, especially in exploring Polanyian perspectives.

Sloan Foundation Project, formally titled “A Preliminary Investigation of Preference for Climate Change Responses and the Impact of Different Online Internet Survey Samples.”  With Professor Rachael Shwom in the lead, Ph.D. student Fred Traylor and Steve are wrapping up a sponsored project looking at how different survey sampling approaches affect the results related to public preferences for energy system decarbonization. There are several publications coming out this research.

Collaborative Conservation Governance in Belize and its adjustment to Climate Change Realities.  Started in 2000, this long-term project involving originally University of Michigan graduate students as Steve and they explored the role of civil society organizations in conservation management in Belize, Central America.  Unlike most countries, Belize’s national parks and protected areas are managed by these organizations, not the government.  It has been a very successful model of community-based conservation until oil/gas extraction was pursued by government with abandon in the 2010s, shocking the citizenry and the conservation community given the country’s previous commitment to sustainable tourism as its main economic model.  In the end oil and gas development did not materialize but it highlighted the critical role of government support to maintain the conservation mission and the importance of trust in those relationships. The late 2010s and early 2020s, Steve focused on Belize’s acceptance of climate change as a new economic development strategy.  The project was placed on hold during the pandemic and has yet to restart.

A Weberian Analysis of the Climate Crisis.  This work will build on the efforts of one of Steve’s Michigan Advisors, Patrick C. West, a Weberian scholar, who was working on a book length treatment applying a Weberian analysis, not Marxian, to explain the climate crisis.  Pat’s effort ended with his untimely death during the pandemic. Steve hopes to either complete the book or at least produce an article or chapters from Pat’s writings and notes.

 

Detailed Summary of Steve’s Early Research and Foundations

 

The Sociology of Biodiversity Conservation (People and Parks)

Steve’s interest in what is now known as the sociology of (or social sciences perspective to) biodiversity conservation arose in the 1980s while he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  His original work was in collaboration with one of his major advisors – Patrick C. West – but over the years this research expanded to include a several former graduate students and other collaborators when Steve returned as a faculty member in 1996.  Originally, this body of work drew conceptual inspiration from an early (1936) article in AJS by Robert K. Merton, “The Unintended Social Consequences of Purposeful Action”, from which Merton eventually developed his concept of manifest and latent functions (see Merton 1949). While Steve is far from a full-blooded structural functionalist, he believes there is something to the notion that sometimes-fair-minded purposeful actions (manifest functions) can go sideways and generate unexpected consequences, i.e. social dysfunction (this theme can be seen again in Steve’s interest in complex formal organizations). The sociology of biodiversity conservation builds on the ideas that many would consider as a “good idea” as macro policy, such as developing internationally a collective system of national parks and similar protect areas to conserve nature and biodiversity. Few would have considered these actions as having a serious “down-side.”  Establishing parks and protected areas had significant social consequences for rural and indigenous peoples across the planet.  This has been particularly true in the world’s poorer tropical regions where most of the significant biodiversity exists.  In short, following WWII and the rise of our present international system of governance, of science, and concern over the destruction of biodiversity worldwide gained significant attention in science policy circles and the public’s imagination.  In particular, the work of the international Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN, Gland, Switzerland), building on earlier, more historical efforts in the US and Europe, spearheaded many early efforts to protect nature, particularly through the creation of the various types of protected areas.  In more recent years, these efforts have increased with the rise of several major non-government organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International (among many others). In the 2010s, more that 12% of the world’s terrestrial areas was under some form of protection; marine area protection is rapidly growing but significantly trails terrestrial.  This has been a major accomplishment of international and national policies and actors that should be recognized.  Among types of protected areas, the concept of the national park, created in the US, became the most elite form to promote but requires the removal of people and permanent human activities from within the park’s boundaries. The application of this conservation model as universal policy, however, created enormous social disruption among local peoples and communities throughout the world from indigenous tribes to poor, rural farmers and communities, or the dispossessed as Steve and colleagues have tended to call them, as they were often forcibly removed from their lands and/or restricted access to resources needed to survive solely for the objective of protecting nature.  Establishing tens of thousands of protected areas and the social dislocation generated also ignited major controversies among conservation biologists and social scientists, which has lasted several decades and continues today although at a lower ebb as new generations of conservation scientist have emerged.  In short, traditionally conservation biologists tended to subscribe deeply to a Malthusian (Thomas Malthus) worldview, where human growth in numbers generates an insatiable use of resources would overwhelm nature, species and ecosystems and as a result they would be lost forever.  In short, people were the problem and had to be dealt with forcibly with fences and guns, to protect nature from people.  Social scientists tended to view people very differently.  While accepting the reality of growing human populations and consumption, local people and communities, the site of actual conservation efforts, would have to be a major part of the conservation efforts themselves.  People, especially local people, are essential to the solutions.  Without their acceptance and support most conservation projects would likely be doomed.  There would never be enough guns and fences to adequately do the job as well as ignoring the plight of poor people would be inhumane.

West and Brechin 1991 edited book, Resident People and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation (U of Arizona Press) was a pioneering academic publication. While a few practitioners had raised some of these issues earlier, this book was the first serious academic text to focus on the social consequences of biodiversity conservation internationally. The volume also provided some early thoughts on how one might address this social problem.  It generated considerable interest and helped to spark additional social science research in this area.  This scholarship attempted to accomplish two objectives.  One, it tried to illustrate the problem and generate awareness of this issue among academics and additional practitioners alike. Two, it argued that international biodiversity conservation as both policy and action had to embrace the notion of social justice and human rights into the conservation process to assure its long-term future success.  In addition to these moral arguments, Steve and colleague argued that international biodiversity conservation needed to pursue an approach of enlightened self-interest.  If conservation efforts lost their social legitimacy by the very people upon which it depends, the greater cause would be lost.  In short, the long-term success of the conservation effort could NOT be achieved by building it on the backs of the dispossessed.  Affected local communities needed to be engaged fully and positively in the conservation efforts themselves. They needed to be seen as part of the conservation solution, not as the problem.

Additional publications in this area continued with Wilshusen et al. 2002; Brechin et al. 2002 and Brechin et al. 2023 (note both 2002 articles were reprinted in a two volume set, Key Issues for the Twenty-First Century by Sage, Pretty, 2006).  These more recent writings were inspired by sharp calls by several high profile, hardcore conservation biologist who called for a return to stricter preservationist policies and approaches.  They argued that over several decades stricter socially-engaged conservation had failed to stem biodiversity loss and diverted too much time and resources away from the true mission of conservation – protecting species and habitat.  In these later writings, Steve and colleagues argued again about the importance of people/community-engaged conservation.  They acknowledged that certain efforts to unite development with conservation efforts were often poorly designed and implemented but that should not call for the total abandonment of people-centered approaches.  This return to strict preservation was seen as “reinventing a square wheel” and articulated in more precise dimensions on what was required to move a people-centered approach forward. We also highlighted the fact that biodiversity conservation must be seen as “continuous social and political process.” Simply creating a protected area and having armed guards patrolling the boundaries were insufficient to promote nature protection.  Rather, one needed to see conservation as social and political processes to engage in an ongoing basis by various local, national, and international stakeholders – local communities, governments, non-government organizations in collaboration.  Here the role of policy and especially organized actors become more central. In an independent chapter in their 2003 edited volume, Contested Nature, Brechin et al. 2003, Steve and co-authors outlined the importance of organizational actors in pursuing conservation. Here we argued that organizations need to become a greater research focus as these actors and the institutions that guide them have been ignored for too long.  See too other publications such as Brechin et al. 2007 (Sage Handbook). That piece summarized more recent concerns at the time. More recently, Steve and co-authors contributed a chapter in an edited volume published by Wiley, Conservation Social Sciences, Scales et al. editors, focusing on how sociology as a discipline has contributed to the social science of biodiversity conservation (see Swanson et al 2023). More recent work in the social sciences and conservation has focused on the role of neoliberal economic policies and how the role of markets are reshaping biodiversity conservation efforts now and in the future.

This discussion leads us to Steve’s work in Belize.  For several reasons too complex to explain here, Steve has since 2000 conducted fieldwork related to conservation issues in Belize, Central America.  Belize is a biodiversity hotspot (an area formally identified as having an unusually high concentration of biodiversity) demanding outstanding efforts at nature protection.  In fact, Belize built a growing portion of its economy around nature-based tourism. Steve has used Belize as a laboratory to explore conservation efforts in this small, middle-income country as it is a prime example of community/people-based conservation.  The country faces enormous challenges but also has a robust system of protected areas, largely managed by a network of Belizean NGOs (see Brechin Salas 2011).  However, the relationship of these NGOs with the government of Belize (GOB) became contentious with growing civil society activism when the government unilaterally decided to pursue oil development with abandoned, changing the constitution to make oil exploration easier throughout the country and territorial seas, including in its national parks and protected areas.  In the end, oil was not seriously developed in Belize, but trust between civil society and the government became more problematic. Fieldwork ended with the pandemic and has yet to restart.

 

International Organizations / Organizations & Society

This research theme emerges from classical observations of Max Weber that bureaucracies create authority and capabilities that have consequences – sometimes positive and sometimes negative for others – depending upon characteristics of the organization itself, the tasks to be performed, and context it finds itself. From this foundation Steve drew upon the lifetime work of Phillip Selznick (one of Gayl Ness’ mentors at Berkeley) who saw organizations as carriers of values and as structures that become institutionalized and take on a life of their own, typically beyond the intentions of their creators with capabilities, limitations, and pathologies alike. He was influenced as well by the work of C. Wright Mills, and Charles (Chick) Perrow) who argued that organizational bureaucracies give their owners and/or managers sources of political and economic power, particularly large organizations, which have the resource to shape the reality for many individuals and society at large. Mayer Zald, especially his early work on the political economy of organizations, influenced his thinking largely around the notion that organizations seek to promote their own interest first over the interest of others, along with the notion of mission drift. Of interest too was Zald’s later work with former graduate students on resource mobilization theory, the importance of organizational resources in social movements.

Steve’s specific interest in organizations grew out of questions that arose from empirical observations from the field during his graduate school days.  While exploring organized tree planting efforts in West Africa and Haiti, Steve observed great “successes” as well as complete “failures” in terms of the organizations reaching their technical objectives and in their value for others in society, under the “trees for people” development framework, popular in the 1970s-1990s.  He wanted to understand the variance in organizational behaviors and outcomes.  During these field visits over several years, Steve observed efforts by the United States Agency for International Development, The food an Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (its Forestry Department), The World Bank, and CARE International along with several other NGOs.  He wondered (rather naively at the time he admits) if the nature of the organization themselves and their respective bureaucratic approaches to their work could explain the differences in outcome of their outputs. This became the subject of his dissertation research. In this research, Steve worked with his other major advisor, Gayl D. Ness, who worked on international organizations in development, but Steve’s other advisor, Patrick C. West, had also worked on natural resource bureaucracies in addressing rural poverty in the US.   He had the perfect team to guide his dissertation.  In reviewing the literature on international organizations, Steve found few contributions by sociologists.  Likewise, international relations, international organizations, and development scholars had ignored the contributions of organizational sociology.  The two genres of scholars had ignored each other, revealing a huge gap in the literature. Ness and Brechin (1988) highlighted these observations in a well-received publication in the journal International Organization, “Bridging the Gap: International Organizations as Organizations.” This article sparked new research and thinking about international organizations as organizations that continues today.  In 2013, they published a 25-year anniversary follow up entitled, “Looking Back at the Gap: International Organizations as Organizations Twenty-Five years later” in a special issue of the Journal of International Organizations Studies (Brechin and Ness 2013).

Steve’s dissertation research (1989) and eventually his 1997 book, Trees for People: Toward a Sociology of International Organizations (Johns Hopkins University Press) focused on how three very different IOs – The World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (specifically its Forestry Department), and CARE USA (now Care International) – as self-interested actors, each possessing sets of strengths and weaknesses in pursuing similar tasks.  This work built from several sociological classics on organization, such as Phil Selznick’s TVA and the Grassroots (1949) and Leadership in Administration (1957), James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action (1967), Jeffrey Pfeifer and Gerald Salancik’s Resource Dependency Theory (1978), and Mayer Zald (with colleagues) on their political-economic view of organizations as self-serving (Zald 1970; Wamsley and Zald 1977), as well as classic works that focused on the internal characteristics of organizations. Specifically, he attempted to understand the type of organizational outputs and their relative effectiveness related to tree planting efforts in the developing world from the mid-1970s to mid 1980s (Brechin 1989) to the early 1990s (Brechin 1997 and 2000). What Steve found was that the match among the organization’s internal characteristics, its environment, and the components of the social forestry task itself, led to very different types of social forestry programs by each organization, and in their relative success in implementing their projects, especially for the rural poor.  He found that internal characteristics, especially the nature of the organization’s technology and its degree of bureaucratic flexibility greatly influenced where these organizations could work, why type of social forestry activities they could pursue, and how effective those efforts were on the ground.  In short, FAO, the World Bank, and CARE are very different organizations with different capacities and constraints that led to very different organizational behaviors and outcomes when it came to the similar social forestry task.  FAO assisted national governments with social forestry programs that rarely reached the rural poor, but sometimes built up some national/agency capacity; the World Bank funded tree plantations for commercial use via relatively large loans (large for social forestry; very small for the Bank) that often failed or served only the elite in developing counties of limited need, while CARE with its considerable bureaucratic and program flexibility was the most successful in planting trees and provided these programs to poor rural communities and farmers directly in those countries where the need was the greatest with the ability to decide where they would work.  With this analysis the notion of organizational performance took on a much more complex and multidimensional construction, including geographic dimensions.  The findings stressed the importance of organization working together pursuing complex task such as rural development projects in the developing countries to overcome the limitations of each organization.

In his work in Belize, Steve’s interests shifted to involve more to understand the role of organizations in nature protection efforts.  In 2011, two former students, he published a special edition in the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research on organizational networks and environmental governance based on a symposium he had organized at the Maxwell School a few years earlier.  See Benjamin et al 2011ab as well as Brechin and Salas 2011. The central theme of the special issue was to focus on the importance of organizational dimensions and especially organizational networks in addressing complicated questions of environmental governance.

 

Comparative Environmental Opinion and Values – Postmaterialism and Global Climate Change

Steve’s work here was not grounded in classical literature but rather as a challenge to at the time a more contemporary contribution.  While at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he was exposed to Ronald Inglehart’s Postmaterialists Values Thesis. Inglehart was an esteemed faculty member in Political Science at the University of Michigan.  The basic premise of Inglehart’s thesis is that the cultural revolution of the West that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s could be explained as a shift in values.  Drawing upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Mannheim Theory of Generations, Inglehart argued that the post WWII generation/cohort grew up in a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and military security (1950s economic boom and no world wars). These conditions plus an explosion in the number of young people in Western Europe and the US created a growing number of postmaterialists who pursued more interests of self-expression vs. materialists or those individuals who seek economic and physical security foremost.  Steve listened to Inglehart’s arguments by attending presentations at Michigan, read some of his writings, and while Steve thought that some of Inglehart’s arguments made sense as a general theory of social change in the West, he did not like his use of the environmental movement/concern as a principal case to illustrate the shift in values he argued. At the time, Steve could not put his finger on it, but later came to understand that Inglehart had a limited notion of environmentalism, or if you will, he illustrated only a particular type of environmentalism. Inglehart had framed environmentalism in economic terms as a high-end good; something to be pursued with higher income and sense of security; it was a higher order concern, not lower, centered in wealthy industrialized nations.

In Steve’s first year of teaching introduction to environmental studies at Princeton, the very first course of its kind at Princeton, he attempted to end the rather pessimistic course with a more up-beat, hopeful message; it was on the rise of environmentalism as a transnational shift in cultural values leading potentially to a more sustainable future, e.g. Inglehart’s Postmaterialism Thesis.   At just that time, two cross-national social surveys on public opinion and the environment were released and for the first time in history there were data that included national probability samples from low to middle income, non-western countries, showing broad support for the environment globally. The Health of the Planet Survey by the Gallup International Institute overseen by environmental sociologist Riley Dunlap provided the empirical data needed to test Inglehart’s thesis concerning environmentalism as a Postmaterialist phenomenon. Brechin & Kempton 1994 presented findings that did not support Inglehart’s arguments of using environmentalism as a Postmaterialist value.  The findings showed considered support for addressing environmental problems by respondents in poorer, non-Western countries (fewer Postmaterialists) than in richer countries (more Postmaterialists). These findings called for new research to understand environmentalism as a global phenomenon and that some forms of environmentalism were materially based.  Brechin & Kempton 1994 generated considerable interest and criticisms. The major challenge came from political scientists (Kidd & Lee 1997) who argued that Brechin & Kempton had mischaracterized the postmaterialist values as a broad societal or cultural phenomenon as opposed to its operationalization as a social-psychological or individual-level phenomenon.  There was considerable truth to their arguments. Brechin and Kempton had not explored the individual-level differences between postmaterialists and materialists.  The dataset Steve and Willett used lacked the indices necessary to conduct such tests.  But they argued successfully that Inglehart himself many times had made broader arguments that with enough postmaterialists entire cultures of societies would shift as a result (otherwise what is the point).  This discussion led to a Social Science Quarterly forum on postmaterialism that again generated considerable scholarly debate (see Brechin & Kempton 1997).  In 1999, Steve published “Objective Problems and Subjective Values”, SSQ, once again attempted to address further debate on this topic.  In 1995 Inglehart published an article that indirectly challenged Brechin & Kempton 1994. He stated that global environmentalism could be explained by two independent processes – objective problems experienced by the poorer citizens in more developing counties and subjective values (postmaterialism) among the wealthier citizens in more industrialized countries. He was able to show this dual explanation for global environmentalism did not make conceptual sense nor was it supported by data.  In short, while respondents from poorer counties were more concern about local environmental problems (e.g. air/water pollution) than their wealthier country counterparts (objective problems) they were equally concerned about non-local environmental issues that were (at that time) more conceptual and less immediate, climate change and the hole in the ozone layer as were the respondents from wealthier Western countries.  Postmaterialism could not explain the variation.  In short, what this cluster of research really ended up conceptually highlighting that there are multiple dimensions of environmentalism, not just one.  It is critical to understand what dimensions one’s variables actually measure.  Brechin would also proposes that there are likely serious methodological issues with the postmaterialism indices used.  Still, the debate on environmentalism and postmaterialism continues today but at a much lower ebb and in a different manner around wealth and environmental concern suggesting that social context matters.

 

Some Early Climate Change Scholarship

Since the early 2000s, Steve began to take a comparative look at public concern about climate change, and policies and technologies to address the issue.  There was considerable variance in the level of understanding of climate change and support for various policies across nations.  For a special issues of the Journal of Sociology and Social Policy based upon sessions Steve had organized for an annual ASA Meeting, Brechin 2003 provided the first more comprehensive analyses comparatively looking at public concern for global climate change and the willingness to support the Kyoto Protocol established in 1992 to address the issue.  More recent efforts such as Brechin 2010 and Brechin and Bhandari 2011continued to explore this issue critically.  With Rachael Shwom and Aaron McCright (and others), he co-wrote a chapter published in 2015 on public opinion and climate change as a contribution to the ASA Task Force on Climate Change, edited by Riley Dunlap and Bob Brulle, and published by Oxford.  See more recent research for more details.