Coping with Complexity: Toward Epistemological Pluralism in Climate-Conflict Scholarship

Abstract

Over the last two decades, climate security has become an increasingly salient policy agenda in international fora. Yet, despite a large body of research, the empirical links between climate-change and conflict remain highly uncertain. This paper contends that uncertainty around climate-conflict links should be understood as characteristic of complex social-ecological systems rather than a problem that can be fully resolved. Rather than striving to eliminate uncertainty, we suggest that researchers need to learn to cope with it. To this end, this article advances a set of principles for guiding scholarly practice when investigating a complex phenomenon: recognizing epistemological uncertainty, embracing epistemological diversity, and practicing humility and dialogue across difference. Taken together we call this ethos epistemological pluralism, whereby scholars self-consciously recognize the limits of their chosen epistemology for understanding the climate-conflict nexus and engage with other approaches without attempting to usurp them. Reviewing the last decade of climate-conflict scholarship, we show that climate-conflict research already manifests many of these ideals; however, we also identify problematic patterns of engagement across epistemological divides and thus plenty of scope for improvement. To illustrate why a diversity of methods (e.g., qualitative and quantitative) will not suffice, the article critically discusses prior research to illustrate why at least two epistemological approaches - constructivism and positivism - cannot be synthesized or integrated without significant analytical cost, and elaborates why excluding insights from any one would lead to an impoverished understanding of the climate-conflict nexus. We conclude with five practical recommendations of how scholars can help realize the ideal of epistemological pluralism in practice.