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ANR0010.1177/2053019619843678The Anthropocene ReviewAsayama et al

Research article

The Anthropocene Review

Beyond solutionist science for the

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https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019619843678
DOI: 10.1177/2053019619843678
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Shinichiro Asayama,1,2 Masahiro Sugiyama,3

Atsushi Ishii4 and Takanobu Kosugi5

Abstract
The emerging narrative of the Anthropocene has created a new space for changes in global
environmental change (GEC) science. On the one hand, there is a mounting call for changing scientific
practices towards a solution-oriented transdisciplinary mode that can help achieve global sustainability.
On the other hand, the scientists’ desire to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries has broken a taboo
on researching solar geoengineering, a dangerous idea of deliberately cooling the Earth’s climate.
Whilst to date the two features have been discussed separately, there is a possible confluence in
the future. This paper explores this close yet precarious relationship between transdisciplinary GEC
science and solar geoengineering in the context of Future Earth, a new international platform of Earth
system science. Our aim is to understand how a transdisciplinary mode of science can navigate the
contention over solar geoengineering and its course of research without breeding polarization. By
seeking the immediacy of ‘problem-solving’, Future Earth is drawn into the solutionist thinking that
orders the mode of engagement in pursuing consensus. However, because conflict is inescapable on
the solar geoengineering debate, transdisciplinary engagement might as well aim at mapping out plural
viewpoints and allowing people to disagree. In transdisciplinary engagement, as co-design signifies
the engagement of stakeholders with decision-making in science, a fair and transparent procedure of
making decisions is also needed. From our own experience of co-designing research priorities, we
suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious process of
transdisciplinary decision-making with three different benefits for collective decision-making, namely,
efficiency, inclusivity and learning. For the future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science, since the
Anthropocene challenges are truly uncertain and contentious, it is argued that the science for the
Anthropocene should move away from a solutionist paradigm towards an experimentalist turn.

Keywords
Anthropocene, climate engineering, co-design, Earth system science, Future Earth, public
engagement, solar geoengineering, sustainability science, transdisciplinarity, voting

1Waseda University, Japan Corresponding author:

2University of Cambridge, UK
3University of Tokyo, Japan
4Tohoku University, Japan
5Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Shinichiro Asayama, Faculty of Political Science and
Economics, Waseda University, 1-6-1 Nishiwaseda,
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan; Department of
Geography, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK.
Email: s.asayama@kurenai.waseda.jp; sa891@cam.ac.uk
2 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

Introduction
Climate change is often called one of the greatest challenges in human history. The steadily increas-
ing carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere is seen as a symbolic figure of human
footprints on the Earth, signaling that the Earth has now entered a new geological epoch, the
‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen, 2002). The narrative of Anthropocene carries the alarming message of
exponential and unstoppable growth (the ‘Great Acceleration’) of human activities and their
impacts on the natural environment (Steffen et al., 2015a). The concept of ‘planetary boundaries’
(Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015b) was proposed to capture the growing worries about
overstepping biophysical thresholds or tipping points of the Earth system, which could cause, if
crossed, an irreversible change of the system and disastrous consequences to humanity. The
Anthropocene represents ‘a state change in the Earth system’ (Brondizio et al., 2016) – a shift from
the stable state of the Holocene to the unstable, uncertain and unpredictable state of the
Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2016, 2018).
The emergence of the Anthropocene narrative has brought two important changes into the field
of global environmental change (GEC) research. First, there is a growing recognition that transfor-
mation of knowledge systems and intellectual cultures is needed to address the unprecedented
Anthropocene challenges (Castree et al., 2014; Cornell et al., 2013). The Anthropocene concept is
employed to bring together a wide range of different disciplines and actors, and especially to over-
come the schism between natural science and social science (Brondizio et al., 2016; Palsson et al.,
2013; Toivanen et al., 2017). In the summer of 2012, Future Earth, a new international research
program on Earth system science, was launched by merging the preceding international programs1
in order to orient GEC science towards more integrated and participatory research that addresses
real-world challenges (Leemans, 2016; Rockström, 2016). The purpose of Future Earth was
strongly focused upon changing the practice of disciplinary ‘curiosity-driven’ research into that of
transdisciplinary ‘solution-oriented’ research to help achieve global sustainability (Future Earth,
2013, 2014). To this end, Future Earth highlights the importance of co-designing research agendas
and co-producing knowledge with societal actors (Mauser et al., 2013; van der Hel, 2016). The
underlying premise is that transformation of science is a prerequisite for social transformation
(Moser, 2016).
Second, the Anthropocene narrative creates a space for ‘speaking the unspeakable’, breaking
the silence on radical policy ideas. The scale and urgency of the Anthropocene challenges push
some scientists to searching for alternative ‘extreme’ solutions for avoiding a collapse of the stable
functioning of the Earth system (Steffen et al., 2011a, 2011b). One example of such extremes is
solar geoengineering (also called solar radiation management or SRM), a group of hypothetical
technologies to reduce global mean temperature by reflecting sunlight back to space through, for
example, releasing aerosols into the stratosphere (NRC, 2015; Royal Society, 2009). Owing to
deep uncertainties and serious concerns over social, political and ethical consequences, solar geo-
engineering had long been considered a taboo. But, a taboo on researching – but not deploying –
solar geoengineering seems to be broken, triggered by an essay of a Nobel Laureate chemist, Paul
Crutzen (2006), who also coined the term Anthropocene (cf. Lawrence and Crutzen, 2017). Since
then, yet still very controversial, scientific publications on the topic have proliferated (Oldham
et al., 2014). And now, the serious attempt to conduct in-situ field tests of stratospheric aerosol
injection – one of the most discussed solar geoengineering techniques – is underway (Keith, 2017).
The support for solar geoengineering research is underpinned largely by the scientists’ anxieties
about overstepping climate tipping points and their desires to regulate the stability of the Earth
system within planetary boundaries (cf. Steffen et al., 2018). Solar geoengineering appears to be a
technoscientific apparatus for the ‘effective planetary stewardship’ (Steffen et al., 2011b).
Asayama et al 3

Yet again, solar geoengineering is still seen as a dangerous idea that can disrupt conventional
efforts on climate mitigation, and potentially cause unexpected adverse side-effects (Robock,
2008, 2016). The very idea of intentionally changing climate via technological intervention is
accused of being an act of human arrogance (Jamieson, 2013). Solar geoengineering is a hot-button
subject among scientists with contending positions, ranging from a bold call for advancing its sci-
entific research (Keith, 2013) to a categorical opposition to the whole concept (Hulme, 2014). The
debate around solar geoengineering research – whether and how to research – is determined more
by social and political perspectives than scientific and technical ones. Solar geoengineering is
often seen as an archetypal case of ‘post-normal science’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993), requiring
early public engagement in a way that helps steer the course of research – including an option of
no further research – as socially acceptable and desirable (Stilgoe, 2015).
In this paper, we deal with the two emerging features of GEC research in the era of the
Anthropocene: a new mode of solution-focused transdisciplinary science for global sustainabil-
ity, and a broken-taboo of researching risky, controversial technologies of solar geoengineer-
ing. Arising from the same narrative of the Anthropocene, the two features have been rarely
discussed together so far. There is, however, a possible confluence of the two streams merged
into one. In the wake of the Paris Climate Accord, the goal of limiting global temperature rise
to well below 2°C is now seen as a key milestone for rapidly transforming the fossil-fuel-based
global economy towards a decarbonized future (Rockström et al., 2017). Future Earth is pur-
porting to help achieve this goal, outlining the roadmap for exponential acceleration of climate
mitigation actions in coming decades (Falk et al., 2018). But this is an extraordinarily daunting
challenge. If the pace of global CO2 emissions cuts is not accelerated soon, there might be an
increasing demand to look into large-scale negative emissions and solar geoengineering as
potential ‘extreme solutions’ for keeping the 2°C guardrail (cf. Steffen et al., 2018). In fact, the
issue of geoengineering technologies was already – though only briefly – mentioned in some of
the founding documents of the Future Earth framework, such as the Grand Challenges report
of the International Council for Science (ICSU, 2010; see also Reid et al., 2010) and the Future
Earth Initial Design report (Future Earth, 2013).
The aim of this paper is to understand this close yet precarious relationship between transdisci-
plinary GEC science and solar geoengineering. While Future Earth strongly endorses transdiscipli-
narity as a new way of producing knowledge conducive to solving the pressing Anthropocene
challenges, can solar geoengineering be considered a ‘solution’ for that despite deep controversy
over it? Should transdisciplinary engagement aspire to forming a consensual opinion or exhibiting
diverse viewpoints regarding solar geoengineering? When conflict is inherent in making decisions
about its research direction, how can such conflict be resolved in transdisciplinary engagement
without breeding polarization? And, more broadly, with or without solar geoengineering, what
might be expected for transdisciplinary science to guide the uncertain futures of the Anthropocene?
These are the questions we explore in the paper.
In the next section, we review the birth of Future Earth and its discursive contour of transdisci-
plinarity, showing that a solutionist thinking has become the dominant feature in Future Earth to
order the mode of public engagement in pursuing consensus as a precondition for effective problem-
solving. In the following section, we review the different types of participation in decision-making,
developed by Renn and Schweizer (2009), as co-design is basically meant to engage social actors
with ‘decision-making in science’. We argue that because of the inherent conflict over solar geoen-
gineering, an alternative approach is required beyond consensus-oriented participation. Within the
context set out in the previous sections, in the following section we feature our own exercise of
co-designing research priorities on solar geoengineering, where voting was employed to facilitate
deliberation and decision-making (Sugiyama et al., 2017b). Based on our exercise, we discuss the
4 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

possibilities of voting in guiding the contested process of transdisciplinary engagement. In conclu-

sion, we suggest future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science for the Anthropocene.

The genesis of Future Earth: From Earth system to global

sustainability
The emergence of transdisciplinarity in GEC research, namely, the birth of Future Earth, builds
upon a widespread recognition of the Anthropocene and proliferation of ‘sustainability science’ as
a new research field (Leemans, 2016). From the early 2000s onward, a call for a closer collabora-
tion across disciplines mounted among GEC researchers; in response, the initiative was taken to
start the joint research partnerships between different international programs,2 which has eventu-
ally resulted in the establishment of Future Earth (Ignaciuk et al., 2012). A key issue of this process
was convergence – greater integration of knowledge across disciplines was seen essential for
addressing the scale and complexity of the Anthropocene challenges (Uhrqvist and Linnér, 2015).
The integration of natural science and social science was, in particular, a major challenge, and the
desire for bridging this gap mobilized a transition to Future Earth (Lahsen, 2016). However, there
are criticisms that Future Earth does not sufficiently engage with critical social science, by prior-
itizing natural science agendas (Emmenegger et al., 2017; Lövbrand et al., 2015).
In parallel, the field of sustainability science has risen during the same period, which focuses
upon understanding the dynamics of coupled human–natural systems and contributing to problem-
solving (Clark, 2007; Kates et al., 2001; Miller, 2013). The concept of transdisciplinarity has
evolved in sustainability science and been adopted as a new mode of conducting research (Hirsch
Hadorn et al., 2006; Lang et al., 2012). While transdisciplinarity is commonly defined as a combi-
nation of ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘stakeholder participation’ throughout research (Jahn et al.,
2012), its conceptual application is driven by the desire for solving societal problems (Gross and
Stauffacher, 2014; Polk, 2014). Sustainability science is characterized primarily by its ‘solution-
focused’ research agendas (Miller et al., 2014). The notion of transdisciplinarity in sustainability
science seeped into GEC science and seeded the launch of Future Earth, which is often labelled by
intention as ‘global sustainability science’ rather than ‘Earth system science’ (cf. Lahsen, 2016;
Rockström, 2016).
As such, the idea of transdisciplinarity in GEC science, institutionally embodied by Future
Earth, was born out of two strands of the intellectual cultures: integrationist (Earth system sci-
ence) and interventionist (sustainability science). The two standpoints provide an important
context on how Future Earth envisions the role of science in society, which in turn determines
the mode of engagement with stakeholders in transdisciplinarity (cf. Felt et al., 2016; Mielke
et al., 2016).

The solutionist vision in transdisciplinary GEC science

Following the history of Earth system science, the evolution toward Future Earth has been driven
by an ever-growing demand for further integration (Uhrqvist and Linnér, 2015). For example,
integrative thinking is at the core of computer simulation modeling that enables to describe the
Earth system as a single unified, complex system and to recognize that human activities are caus-
ing global warming (Schellnhuber, 1999). From this perspective, systems integration between
human and environment is an obvious necessity for more holistic understandings of the Earth
system (Brondizio et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2015). Knowledge integration is indeed at the heart of
transdisciplinarity, considered a ‘major asset’ to be distinguished from conventional interdiscipli-
narity (Jahn et al., 2012; Scholz and Steiner, 2015). This integrationist view is clearly embedded
Asayama et al 5

in Future Earth and necessitates stakeholder engagement as a means to combine scientific knowl-
edge with practical knowledge of non-scientific experts (Klenk et al., 2015; Mauser et al., 2013).
Crucially, it is assumed that knowledge integration through engagement establishes a common
understanding of the goals and problems to ensure effective decision-making (Klenk and Meehan,
2015).
On the other hand, strongly concerned with problem-solving or solution-finding, sustainability
science views its fundamental role in society as mobilizing actions through knowledge production,
pointing towards an interventionist view, which says science should engage more actively with
actions and decision-making (Irwin et al., 2018; Miller, 2013; van Kerkhoff and Pilbeam, 2017).
The aspiration for linking knowledge to action is imbued with Future Earth as overcoming a schism
between knowledge and action was a main motive for its own establishment (Lahsen, 2016; van
der Hel, 2016). In 2016, Future Earth launched new open platforms to foster transdisciplinary col-
laboration across disciplines and between researchers and practitioners on key targeted issues (e.g.
water–energy–food nexus, urban, health, oceans, etc.) and the platforms were actually named
Knowledge-Action Networks.3 The underlying assumption is that engaging stakeholders (i.e. poten-
tial ‘users’ of knowledge) in the research process ensures trust on and legitimacy of science, thereby
increasing its problem-solving capacity (cf. Gross and Stauffacher, 2014; Polk, 2014).
As such, the two normative – interventionist and integrationist – views of the role of science in
society provide the basic ground for the epistemic goal of transdisciplinary GEC science. From the
interventionist perspective, the goal of science is understood as catalyzing social actions and trans-
formations by reducing the gap between knowledge and action (van Kerkhoff and Pilbeam, 2017).
The integrationist perspective, on the other hand, seeks to assimilate diverse knowledge into a uni-
fied understanding of the problem in order to support evidence-based policy-making (Klenk and
Meehan, 2015). A key common interest in both perspectives is that transdisciplinarity is to enhance
the utility of scientific knowledge for societal problem-solving (Gross and Stauffacher, 2014; Irwin
et al., 2018; Polk, 2014). Notably, public engagement is conceived as a necessary route to achieve
this overarching goal of transdisciplinarity. For interventionists, engagement is largely an instru-
ment for creating a usable knowledge to solve real-world challenges; for integrationists, engage-
ment is to create a ‘socially robust’ knowledge (Nowotny, 2003) that can speak for consensus as a
prerequisite for effective problem-solving.
We argue that the rise of transdisciplinarity discourse in GEC science is driven by the solutionist
thinking that defines the role of science as creating usable and socially-robust knowledge, condu-
cive to promoting ‘evidence-based sustainability solutions’ (Leemans, 2018). Future Earth
undoubtedly embraces this solutionist ideology by articulating its own nature as ‘solution-oriented
science that enables fundamental societal transitions to global sustainability’ (Future Earth, 2013:
13). As we discuss in the next section, this solutionist vision has considerable implications to the
way in which stakeholder engagement is constructed or regulated in transdisciplinary settings.

Co-design as engaging with decision-making in science

It is widely acknowledged that transdisciplinarity denotes a methodological approach to conduct-
ing research by combining interdisciplinary research with stakeholder engagement in the research
process (Jahn et al., 2012; Lang et al., 2012). In transdisciplinary research, stakeholders (e.g. gov-
ernment officials, civil society groups, the private sector) are typically invited as equal partners to
scientists for knowledge production – at least that is what is expected at the theoretical level (Scholz
and Steiner, 2015). Recognizing the diverse forms of knowledge and expertise beyond academic
disciplines, the role of stakeholders is elevated from passive recipients of using knowledge to
active agents of producing knowledge (Klenk et al., 2015). This is why transdisciplinarity is often
6 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

labeled as ‘new production of knowledge’ rather than ‘democratization of science’ – public engage-
ment with science is advocated primarily because it is expected to provide new opportunities for
creating socially-robust and publicly-trusted knowledge (Lidskog, 2008).
In Future Earth the notion of transdisciplinarity is translated into a more concrete concept of
‘co-design’ and ‘co-production’ (Mauser et al., 2013; van der Hel, 2016). While the two concepts
are usually applied to the different stages of research (co-design for defining research agenda and
co-production for exchanging and integrating knowledge), the both represent the basic idea of
‘upstream engagement’, i.e. public engagement needs to move upstream at an early stage of
research to reflect more adequately public concerns (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004). In this sense, the
phase of co-design becomes particularly important because it will ultimately determine the over-
arching direction and goal of a research project by defining the priority of research questions
addressed (Moser, 2016). Future Earth defines co-design as the process in which ‘the overarching
research questions are articulated through deliberative dialogues among researchers and other
stakeholder groups to enhance the utility, transparency, and saliency of the research’ (Future Earth,
2013: 21). The inclusion of stakeholder’s concerns and perspectives into research agendas through
co-design is understood to be critical to ensure the legitimacy of research.
Co-design is essentially about engaging stakeholders in ‘decision-making in science’ (i.e. defin-
ing research agendas). As pointed out by the seminal work of Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’,
engagement will be an empty ritual if the power to influence the outcomes of participation is not
redistributed to the invited public (Arnstein, 1969). Co-design is aimed at climbing up this ‘ladder
of participation’ beyond tokenism or lip service (Klenk et al., 2015) through joint identification of
research agendas by scientists and stakeholders. This obviously requires a clear rule of decision-
making at stakeholder engagement. However, other than the emphasis on inclusivity and trust-
building, there is a lack of discussion about how to design the decision-making process in co-design
(cf. Moser, 2016). In the case of solar geoengineering, this point really matters because there is a
fundamental disagreement over whether solar geoengineering should be researched or not. Since
research is itself a source of disagreement, a simple call for ‘more research’ cannot resolve the
controversy around solar geoengineering4 (Asayama et al., 2017; Rayner, 2015). It is an acute issue
for transdisciplinary engagement to find the ways to navigate tensions over and make decisions
about the direction of research on solar geoengineering.

Between consensus and conflict: Governing tensions in science

While co-design implicates the engagement of social actors with decision-making in science, there
remain many questions about who should be engaged, how decisions should be made and for what
goal should be aimed. To reflect on this point, Renn and Schweizer (2009) offer a useful typology
of stakeholder engagement, derived from different philosophical viewpoints over participation in
collective decision-making (see Table 1). They developed the six ‘ideal types’ of participation,
each of which is based on the certain principles of participation, the assumed purpose of participa-
tion in decision-making, and the expected outcomes from participation.5
For example, a premise of public perception research on solar geoengineering builds largely on
the anthropological concept, as many previous studies focused on exploring the ordinary lay citi-
zen’s understandings of the topic to provide insight for democratic decision-making (e.g. Bellamy
et al., 2017; Macnaghten and Szerszynski, 2013; Wibeck et al., 2017). A call for engaging the
Global South with the solar geoengineering debate (Rahman et al., 2018; Sugiyama et al., 2017a;
Winickoff et al., 2015) is grounded more on the emancipatory concept because such a call is usu-
ally motivated by a moral reasoning for giving a voice to the people who are most vulnerable to the
impacts of climate change. On the other hand, a primary concern of scholars who proposed the
Asayama et al 7

Table 1.  The six concepts of stakeholder engagement, adapted from Renn and Schweizer (2009).

Concept Main objective Basic principle Expected function

Functionalist To improve quality Integration of systemic, To enhance the
of decision output to experiential and local knowledge; effectiveness and
achieve a pre-defined representation of all problem- legitimacy of decision-
goal relevant knowledge and values making
Neoliberal To find win-win Informed consent of the affected To enhance the
solutions or acceptable population; proportional efficiency of decision-
compensation packages representation of public making
between winners and preferences through negotiation,
losers arbitration and mediation
Deliberative To find the best possible Inclusion of all relevant To enhance the
consensus among moral arguments; deliberation based on transparency and
agents about shared knowledge, basic human values accountability of
meaning of actions and moral standards decision-making
Anthropological To engage in common Inclusion of non-interested To reflect social
sense as the ultimate laypersons; a quota values and concerns
arbiter in disputes representation of the entire in decision-making
population including basic social
categories (e.g. gender, income,
locality)
Emancipatory To empower less- Inclusion of the powerless in To fairly reflect social
privileged groups to society; a focused representation and cultural values
develop their own of the socially vulnerable of those who are
collective agency population underrepresented
Postmodern To reveal power Inclusion of dissenting To enhance the
structures and views and social minorities; legitimacy of dissent
demonstrate plurality of acknowledgment of plural and decrease the
knowledge and values rationalities and no closure pressure of conflict
necessary

‘Oxford Principles’ of geoengineering governance slightly overlaps the neoliberal perspective by

requiring the informed consent of those affected by the research activities to be obtained (Rayner
et al., 2013).
As discussed above, the discourse of transdisciplinarity in Future Earth builds upon the integra-
tionist view on engagement as a means for knowledge integration. This arguably mirrors the func-
tionalist concept of participation to integrate all relevant knowledge and values for effective
decision-making. The functionalist concept might well limit participation to some kind of ‘experts’
holding useful – either scientific or practical – knowledge (cf. Lidskog, 2008). Likewise, the
Knowledge-Action Networks in Future Earth focus on bringing together ‘the broad range and
diversity of specialist expertise represented in the large community of researchers and practition-
ers’ (Shrivastava et al., 2016). In other words, an interventionist inclination of linking knowledge
with action would close a door of participation only for ‘experts’ but not open for everyone.6 The
‘integration imperative’ (Klenk and Meehan, 2015) also assumes that imposing a consensus
through knowledge integration is a precondition for effective decision-making. This partly – if not
entirely – resonates with the deliberative concept since its main purpose of participation is to find
a consensus among the engaged publics.
Overall, an integrationist impetus of solutionist science in Future Earth would likely order the
mode of transdisciplinary engagement through a combination of the functionalist and deliberative
8 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

concept. Renn and Schweizer (2009) favored this approach, calling it the ‘analytic-deliberative’
decision-making that combines the functionalist’s analytic force with deliberation’s consensus
reaching potential. They advocate the analytic-deliberative model because they believe that this
approach could produce a ‘tolerated consensus solution’ wherein ‘people who might be worse off
than before, but who recognize the moral superiority of the solution, can abstain from using their
power of veto without approving the solution’ (Renn and Schweizer, 2009: 182).
There is no doubt that the analytic-deliberative approach has many advantages and sometime
offers solutions to a complex problem. However, such an approach can also create a ‘shadow’ by
seeking consensus. The commitment to consensus necessarily involves a practice of inclusion and
exclusion, which in turn conceals the ontological politics of knowledge (Emmenegger et al., 2017;
Klenk and Meehan, 2015). When the debate is characterized more by disagreement than agree-
ment, pursuing consensus is problematic because it will eliminate or oppress the dissenting opin-
ions that might be valuable for addressing complex problems (Sarewitz, 2011). Consensus-seeking
may also distract attention away from more urgent issues that require a pragmatic compromise
between the disagreed parties, which would paradoxically hinder – rather than help – solving prob-
lems (cf. Pearce et al., 2017).
The dispute around solar geoengineering is instructive to capture the intractable nature of con-
sensus-seeking, where experts cannot agree even on using the term ‘geoengineering’ (Sarewitz,
2011). One way to avoid this trap of consensus-seeking is to aim at mapping out the diverse view-
points of people and revealing the disagreement among them. This approach to engagement is
similar to the postmodern concept as its purpose is oriented toward showing the plurality of knowl-
edge. Crucially, from this perspective, no closure on consensus is required – consensus may be
reached as a possible outcome of deliberation but is not a mandatory requirement. The focal point
of deliberation is placed on showcasing why and about what people disagree. For example, in the
participatory exercise of appraising geoengineering proposals, Bellamy et al. (2016) could ‘open
up’ the framings of geoengineering rather than ‘close down’ to an aggregated opinion by ensuring
the inclusion of diverse perspectives and criteria (cf. Stirling, 2008).
Furthermore, when conflict is inescapable and consensus is far from achievable, as in the
case of solar geoengineering, the engagement exercise to some degree comes closer to the neo-
liberal approach to participation of mediating competing interests. In reality, as van den Hove
(2006) argued, stakeholder participation has to be balanced between ‘compromise-oriented
negotiation’ and ‘consensus-oriented cooperation’. What is important here is that ignoring the
negotiation dimension of participation risks leaving room for the powerful actors to covertly
manipulate the participatory process, leading to their preferred outcome as a ‘pseudo consen-
sus’. To avoid such risk of strategic manipulation, a fair and transparent procedure of making
decisions is needed. One potential means for a fair arbitration is voting. If properly designed,
voting can be useful to reach agreement (but not necessarily consensus) or clarify how agree-
ment is reached (Guston, 2006).

Co-design research priorities through voting

In transdisciplinary research, a task of co-design usually includes defining problem frames and
research agendas (Moser, 2016). As co-design might determine the ‘allowable space’ of scientific
research by taking into account the interests of stakeholders from outside the science, its decision-
making necessarily involves some friction, including a resistance of scientists to intervening in the
autonomy of science. Through a negotiation between different societal visions and policy priori-
ties, co-design presumes that scientists and stakeholders come together to identify research agen-
das, i.e. the goals and activities of a research project. In this process, they normally start from
Asayama et al 9

listing a priority of research questions, issues, areas and concerns. For example, Future Earth co-
designed a set of research priorities to outline its overall research strategies (Future Earth, 2014).
Thus, selecting research priorities can be seen as a crucial first step of co-design.
In this section, we discuss our own experience of co-designing research priorities on solar geo-
engineering, in which voting was employed in tandem with deliberation to facilitate the decision-
making process (Sugiyama et al., 2017b). With a recognition of irreducible disagreement about
solar geoengineering, the objective of our exercise was defined to map out the diverse perspectives
regarding solar geoengineering. We emphasized to all participants of the exercise that this was not
aimed at finding a consensual position, either endorsing or dismissing solar geoengineering as a
potential option of climate change responses. The voting method was devised – borrowed from
Sutherland et al. (2011) – primarily for practical reasons to winnow the list of research questions at
time-constrained settings but was also conceived to mediate the contention between different per-
spectives. Thus, our exercise of co-design seems to be based partly on the postmodern and neolib-
eral conceptions of participation (see Table 1). The whole process of the exercise and the result of
identified research questions is detailed in Sugiyama et al. (2017b). We focus here on discussing
the role of voting as a procedural mechanism of guiding deliberations and making decisions in
transdisciplinary engagement.

Situate voting in the deliberative process

Motivated by the desire to support evidence-based policy-making, Sutherland et al. (2011) devel-
oped a method for scientists and stakeholders to collaboratively identify research priorities on
specific topics. The aim of their method is to incorporate the needs and concerns of policy-makers
and other social actors into scientific research questions, thereby bridging the gap between knowl-
edge and decision-making – their motivation therefore resonates with an interventionist impetus.
The innovative part of this method is to use voting for identifying research priorities. In their
method, the scientists and stakeholders gathered in a workshop setting are assigned to collaborate
on selecting high-priority research questions from many ideas proposed by diverse individuals
through an iterative process of voting and deliberation. The method has been applied to the various
sustainability challenges such as biodiversity (Sutherland et al., 2009), agriculture (Pretty et al.,
2010), poverty reduction (Sutherland et al., 2013), sustainable development goals (Oldekop et al.,
2016) and water–energy–food nexus (Green et al., 2017). A similar method was also used in Future
Earth to define its strategic research agendas (Future Earth, 2014).
Sutherland et al. (2011) suggested two different methods as voting systems: ‘mean-score-
ranking’ and ‘remove-or-retain’. The former is to ask each participant to give each question a score
(e.g. 1–10 scale) and rank all questions by the mean scores. The latter is to ask each participant to
vote whether each question should be removed or retained, then rank all questions by the number
of retain votes. In either case, the decision about selecting research priorities rests on the score of
votes. These voting systems are efficient and practical when attempting to produce a list of high-
priority research issues (somewhat) by consensus. This is why Sutherland et al. (2011) called their
method the ‘priority-setting exercise’ – their focus is on clarifying a priority of issues or areas for
scientific research to help better policy-making. In our exercise however, we considerably modi-
fied the voting rule of Sutherland et al. (2011) to adjust to our purpose of presenting the diverse
perspectives on solar geoengineering as a form of research questions.
The basic rule of our voting was as follows: each participant (except workshop conveners) was
given an equal, fixed number of votes, and were asked to vote for the questions to be retained; par-
ticipants could not give each question more than one vote (one vote with one question); and most
importantly, all the questions with at least one vote were retained and included in the final list of
10 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

research priorities (only the questions with no vote were removed). Therefore, we did not assign
priority to questions by the number of votes. This modified rule is aimed to ensure viewpoint diver-
sity and policy impartiality. Because people have very different views on what are the highest priori-
ties of issues or areas that research should address, the practice of selecting questions on the basis of
the score or number of votes would inevitably marginalize the dissenting or minority views.
Furthermore, the practice of defining research priorities by numbers itself can be perceived – even
if not intended – as steering the research course toward a particular direction, either for or against
solar geoengineering. Thus, while voting is often used to create an aggregated opinion, we instead
employed it as a means to explore plural viewpoints regardless of their weight of opinions.
It is worth noting some basic contexts of our exercise. First, all the participants (30 in total) –
both scientists (16) and stakeholders (14) – were experts of some kind in the climate policy field
and were invited by considering the balance of their expertise, gender, age and political orienta-
tion.7 Their personal views on solar geoengineering ranged roughly from moderate support to
strong opposition. Second, the initial list of proposed research questions (before voting) was col-
lected from a number of individuals who were solicited by the conveners and the participants
through their social network. The proposed questions covered a wide range of subjects and con-
cerns, from natural sciences to social sciences and humanities perspectives, from supportive to
critical views over solar geoengineering. Third, the format of workshop was divided into the three
group sessions in chronological order: (1) four parallel small breakout sessions, (2) two parallel
mid-size breakout sessions and (3) one final plenary session. The initially proposed questions were
allocated more or less equally to each group at the first small breakout sessions. The winnowed list
of questions from the first sessions was combined and reallocated to the second mid-size breakout
sessions, and the same process continued from the second sessions to the final plenary session.
Each session had a pre-defined target number to which the questions were winnowed down. About
350 initially proposed questions before voting were eventually winnowed down to 40 research
priorities at the end. Voting was used as part of group deliberations in each session (except the
plenary session8). Though the main purpose of voting was to select the questions, it also functioned
as a communicative device for participants to exchange their opinions during group sessions.

The benefits and challenges of voting in co-design

What are then the advantages (and difficulties) of using voting as a procedural mechanism of co-
design? We argue here that voting has three different benefits. First, voting has a benefit of effi-
ciency for collective decision-making. Co-design is truly a time-consuming process. It requires a
strong commitment of stakeholders to active participation – this is one of the most enduring practi-
cal challenges for transdisciplinary research (Klenk et al., 2015; Lang et al., 2012; Moser, 2016).
Meanwhile, participation does not always lead to making a better decision or producing a substan-
tive outcome, known as the ‘participation fallacy’ (Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2006). Because transdis-
ciplinary research projects often take place in highly temporary settings (Felt et al., 2016), it is not
practically sensible to overlook a trade-off between substantive engagement and efficient decision-
making. With this regard, voting can be useful to reconcile these two competing demands by ena-
bling collective decision-making under time-pressured situations. In our exercise, voting allowed
us to produce a list of research priorities within a very tight schedule of a one-day workshop, oth-
erwise difficult to do.
Yet, some participants in our exercise expressed their frustration with the limited space for
deeper deliberation. While voting was embedded in the process of deliberation, the main task
assigned to participants was inclined to be a ‘mere’ selection of research questions rather than a
deep reflection on them. Owing to intense time pressure, there was little room for reframing
Asayama et al 11

pre-determined questions to articulate better their key messages. It is therefore advisable to be

careful of finding a sound balance between the two different logics of ‘ordering research’: the logic
of efficiency and effectiveness and the logic of openness and reflexivity (Felt et al., 2016; see also
van der Hel, 2016).
Second, voting has a benefit of inclusivity by allowing each individual to have a right to make
decisions. Moser (2016) notes that one of the most frequent challenges in co-design is related to
communication. In fact, group conversations are quite often dominated by a few individuals hold-
ing better knowledge or language skills who can clearly articulate their opinions, and hence wield
a strong influence on the outcomes. There always exist to some degree ‘unspoken hierarchies’
between those who are knowledgeable or communicative and those who are not (cf. Moser, 2016).
From the communication perspective, voting can be seen as an important channel for the quiet, reti-
cent persons to express their opinions and exert their power on decision-making. Also, there
remains a deep-seated hierarchy in GEC science, i.e. a dominance of natural science (Lahsen,
2016; Lövbrand et al., 2015). Voting might break – or at least weaken – this hierarchy, for example,
by giving more weight to the votes of social science and humanity scholars. In our exercise, no
voting right was given to the workshop conveners because they were in a relatively powerful posi-
tion by taking the role of facilitators for group discussions; meanwhile, an equal number of votes
was allocated to scientists and stakeholders alike to treat them as equal partners, which is critical
to building a mutual respect for each other (Moser, 2016).
However, there remains the issue of ‘silence’ and ‘non-participation’ in the solar geoengineering
debate (Cairns and Stirling, 2014). In our exercise, some stakeholders declined our invitation or
were very reluctant to participate because they considered talk of solar geoengineering itself as
potential distraction from climate mitigation. There was also a serious concern among some par-
ticipants that the outcome could be utilized strategically by someone as a pretext for legitimizing
the development of solar geoengineering technologies – a danger of ‘co-option’ (Cairns and
Stirling, 2014; see also Lang et al., 2012). A clear voting rule can ease such risk of exploitation but
is not immune to it. On the one hand, abstention from a vote can be read as a form of ‘implicit
endorsement’ (i.e. not necessarily approving but at the same time not explicitly opposing a resolu-
tion), while on the other hand it can also mean an objection to making a motion to vote in and of
itself. Therefore, in some contexts, it might be advisable to read ‘silence’ or ‘non-participation’ as
a form of dissent.
Third, voting has a benefit of learning by offering an opportunity of making choices. Voting is
by definition the act of ‘active choosing’ to reflect an individual agency (Sunstein, 2015). According
to Sunstein (2015, 2017), active choosing is valuable to promote learning about the underlying
issues and develop one’s own preferences, values and tastes because people are pushed into, like it
or not, at a state of making decisions. This holds particularly true for solar geoengineering as it is
still largely an unfamiliar subject for the public (Burns et al., 2016; Wibeck et al., 2017). In our
exercise, many participants did not yet have a personal stake in research on solar geoengineering;
when confronted with a state of voting, they became more aware of their preferences related to
solar geoengineering and more broadly climate change responses, thereby increased their own
agency. Importantly, voting is based on an individual choice but designed for collective decision-
making or ‘social choice’ (Guston, 2006). By setting a target number of selecting research ques-
tions, our exercise facilitated the negotiations among participants about, for example, whether
merging several similar questions into one or keeping them separate independently. In this regard,
negotiation should be understood not as a mere bargaining of given preferences (‘pure zero-sum
game’) but as ‘a dynamic process in which preferences are endogenously constructed during the
process itself, and where power relations are susceptible to change’ (van den Hove, 2006: 14). In
12 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

other words, voting can foster reflexive learning, i.e. a recursive process of learning about the issue
at stake and cognition of ourselves.
Meanwhile, as our attention was focused upon selecting research questions on solar geo-
engineering, the decision context was confined inevitably within this scope. There was not
much space to explore the alternative policy approaches to climate change. Making choices
always entails some degree of closure so that it is rather advisable to be aware of unintended
‘discursive lock-ins’ that may implicitly promote learning to normalize the speculative idea
of solar geoengineering as a ‘real’ policy option (Bellamy and Lezaun, 2017). To avoid that,
it requires a recognition that any decisions are temporary, can be reversed for any reason in
the future. It is important to come always back to posing a simple but fundamental question:
Can solar geoengineering proposals be considered a legitimate option for governing climate
change?

Conclusions and future directions

Guided by the pessimistic narrative of the Anthropocene future where the Earth’s climate will
exceed critical planetary thresholds and bring humanity into a dangerously hot planet (Steffen
et al., 2018), the dangerous idea of solar geoengineering is coming out from a Pandora’s box.
While most techniques are still hypothetical, the increasing trend of solar geoengineering research
will probably continue for a while (Boettcher and Schäfer, 2017). For better or worse, it is thus
important to consider how to govern solar geoengineering research.
As a new mode of governing science, transdisciplinarity could potentially provide a common
ground for collaboration among different academic disciplines and social actors, allowing them to
work and speak together on a same platform. Ideally, in the process of co-design where wider
social, political and ethical concerns of stakeholders would be translated into scientific research
agendas, it is hoped that transdisciplinary research will open the way towards ‘responsible innova-
tion’ of solar geoengineering (Stilgoe, 2015). However, transdisciplinarity might very well also
bring into a situation where the debate on solar geoengineering is trapped by entrenched divisions
between the pros and cons of further researching, particularly stepping into highly controversial
outdoor experiments (cf. Parson and Keith, 2013).
As discussed above, a solutionist belief that is firmly embedded in the Future Earth framework
is directing the primary goal of GEC science into finding ‘solutions’ for global sustainability.
Insomuch as a solutionist impetus is driving a change from ‘curiosity-driven’ research to ‘mission-
driven’ research (cf. MacMartin and Kravitz, 2019), it is not entirely unimaginable that transdisci-
plinary GEC science within the Future Earth platform would shortly step into the research on solar
geoengineering as one potential solution for stabilizing the functioning of the Earth system. The
problem, however, lies in the solutionist inclination of using transdisciplinarity (and public engage-
ment) as an instrument for creating consensus around what should be accounted ‘solutions’. While
it is unlikely that solar geoengineering is going to be completely pulled off the table as a potential
option, it is also impracticable and perhaps premature to reduce plural diverging opinions to one
consensual position to accept it as a solution. This is because people embrace radically different
political visions over solar geoengineering. Seeking consensus will not only neglect the people’s
ambivalence to solar geoengineering (Asayama et al., 2017) but also run a risk of causing ‘politi-
cization of science’ (Sarewitz, 2004), breeding political polarization and paralyzing reasoned
debates about the risks and benefits of researching solar geoengineering.
We argue that, for navigating the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering research,
transdisciplinarity can be conceived not as a solutionist device for making consensus but as an
intermediary space where people with contending views are allowed to disagree without being
Asayama et al 13

forced to adopt a dominant, consensual view. Starting from a recognition of fundamental disagree-
ment about solar geoengineering, scientists and stakeholders alike must engage more with transdis-
ciplinary politics than transdisciplinary science. In other words, transdisciplinarity is more for
governing political negotiation than managing scientific research. If politics is understood as ‘pur-
poseful activities that aim for collectively binding decisions in a context of power and conflict’
(Brown, 2015: 19), the inherent nature of transdisciplinarity is more similar to politics than science
because it requires collective decision-making by scientists and stakeholders on research agendas,
goals and directions. This does not mean there is no space for science in transdisciplinarity –
instead it signifies doing politics in science. And importantly, as politics necessarily involves con-
testation, ignoring the political dimension of transdisciplinarity (i.e. hiding conflict behind
consensus) risks leaving room for strategic manipulation (van den Hove, 2006). This is why a fair
and transparent mechanism of decision-making is needed to mediate conflict in transdisciplinary
engagement.
We suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious
process of transdisciplinary decision-making. Also, voting can offer three benefits for collective
decision-making: efficiency, inclusivity and learning. While in our exercise we employed voting as
a deliberative tool to elicit the diverse perspectives of people, voting is commonly used as ‘a
mechanism of social choice’ (Guston, 2006) to aggregate separate individual opinions into a rec-
ognizable collective decision. Voting does not necessarily ensure acquiring a consensus but it can
identify the level of agreement from ‘unanimity’ to ‘supermajority’ or ‘simple majority’. By care-
fully arranging the rule conditions (e.g. whom to allocate votes, how to cast votes, how to count
votes), voting can settle the explicit procedure of decision-making and hence maximize the utility
of decision-making (Guston, 2006).
Of course, voting is not a necessary condition for transdisciplinary decision-making nor is the
best way to do so. With insufficient time and space for deliberation, voting can easily turn into a
mere machinery of factional numbers game. Greater caution must be given against the expedient
use of voting to bypass democratic deliberations. But, if – and only if – rightly placed within the
deliberative process, voting can facilitate the democratic politics in science, and thereby may
ensure the legitimacy of science for politics.

The experimentalist turn for Anthropocene science

At the end of the paper, we then want to discuss more broadly the future directions in which trans-
disciplinary GEC science should move forward in the era of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene
concept has drawn a great deal of attention from different disciplines, from natural sciences to
social sciences and humanities, and the challenges posed to the humanity are truly transdiscipli-
nary ones, requiring a critical debate across disciplinary and academic boundaries (Oldfield et al.,
2014; Toivanen et al., 2017). The global scale of environmental challenges and their complex
interconnections with the human system really demand an ever-greater collaboration on global
change and sustainability research (Brondizio et al., 2016). Thus, boarding a carrier heading
towards the transdisciplinary journey is the right move.
However, the vision of transdisciplinary GEC science, which is distinctly embodied in Future
Earth, has been narrowly focused upon the logic of ‘accountability’ (i.e. responding to society’s
needs) or ‘impact’ (i.e. producing usable knowledge for society) but has paid little attention to
‘humility’ (i.e. being humble and engaging in reflexive learning) (van der Hel, 2016). What is
probably needed for Future Earth is to step back from seeking the immediacy of problem-solving
and come to grips with the limit of science. The notion of transdisciplinarity should be divorced
from the solutionist thinking which so far monopolizes the discourse of transdisciplinarity in
14 The Anthropocene Review 00(0)

Future Earth. When confronted with the unprecedented scale and complexity of the Anthropocene
challenges, seeking an ‘optimal solution’ seems a futile attempt.
Shifting away from the solutionist paradigm, transdisciplinary science could embrace the exper-
imentalist turn, which is more attuned to balanced social learning than expediential societal prob-
lem-solving (cf. Huitema et al., 2018). What we mean by ‘experiment’ here is not as a ‘research
method’ but as an ‘approach to governing’ (Huitema et al., 2018) – or more likely, a normative
standpoint for the way in which science is engaged with politics and society. Owing to the deeply
uncertain trajectories of the Anthropocene futures, the science for the Anthropocene should be
experimentalist in a sense that could present the multiple opportunities for open-ended learning
about society, which stem from both the failures and successes of sociotechnical experimentations.
The criteria for ‘usable’ knowledge produced by the Anthropocene science should be then based on
flexibility and adaptability – not optimality and controllability – for learning creatively and cata-
lyzing social change (cf. Clark et al., 2016; Moser, 2016).
After all, solar geoengineering can be seen as itself an experimental system (Stilgoe, 2016).
Given the deep complexity and uncertainty involved, there will always remain ‘unknown
unknowns’ in solar geoengineering – a door is left open to the unexpected and surprises. The
research on solar geoengineering therefore has to offer a ‘safe-to-fail’ space for experimental learn-
ing instead of striving to make solar geoengineering a ‘fail-safe’ solution to dangerous climate
change (cf. Clark et al., 2016). In other words, solar geoengineering must be reimagined not as a
promise of technoscientific problem-solving but as ‘collective experimentation’ of the world
(Stilgoe, 2016). Because the future is unknown, by allowing to learn about human society from
experimenting with solar geoengineering, if ever used or not, humanity may find a way to live
through the turbulent time of the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to all the individuals who spared their time to participate in our workshop and shared
their insights for our research. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier
versions of this article.

Funding
This study was supported by the Research Institute of Science and Technology for the Society (RISTEX),
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) as part of the Future Earth programs. Shinichiro Asayama also
acknowledges the receipt of financial support from Grants-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow (grant no.
17J02207) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

Notes
1. This includes DIVERSITAS, the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the
International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and the World
Climate Research Programme (WCRP).
2. In 2001, the four international GEC research programs (DIVERSITAS, IGBP, IHDP, WCRP) started the
Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). After a decade-long experience of joint research collabora-
tions through the ESSP, the establishment of Future Earth came to fruition (for more detail, see Ignaciuk
et al., 2012; Leemans et al., 2009).
3. See http://futureearth.org/knowledge-action-networks.
4. This type of problem is often called a ‘wicked problem’ which is characterized by disagreement on both
values and knowledge (Jahn et al., 2012).
5. Each concept is not mutually exclusive. In practice, actual participatory exercises will more likely have
mixed elements from more than one conceptual type.
Asayama et al 15

6. Lidskog (2008) argues this approach can be seen as rather ‘elitist’ because the space of participation is
exclusive to highly knowledgeable individuals, not all kinds of lay people.
7. For this reason, our selection of the participants is somewhat based on the mixture of the functionalist
and anthropological conceptions of participation as the participants consisted of ‘experts’ with special-
ized knowledge but were balanced by some (but not all) basic social categories such as gender and age
(see Table 1).
8. Owing to time constraints, no voting took place in the plenary session; the discussion was centered upon
merging the similar questions into one through deliberation and negotiation between the participants.

ORCID iDs
Shinichiro Asayama https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6817-3862
Masahiro Sugiyama https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2038-1045

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