Science Based Targets: Transactionally Reformist or Transformatively Radical?

What We’re Reading at r3.0 (12)

By Bill Baue

“To reform or to transform, that’s the question” — to riff on a well-known Shakespearean quote — is an age-old question. For the sake of this inquiry, we apply this choice to the case of science based targets (SBTs) that compare company-level impacts to systems-level sustainability thresholds in earth systems, including the climate regulatory system in the case of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and other ecological systems such as biodiversity and water in the case of the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) and its associated Earth Commission, which both fall under the umbrella of the Global Commons Alliance.

More specifically, this exploration is pursued in a recent scientific study by Sasha Quahe, Sarah Cornell, and Simon West entitled Framing science-based targets: Reformist and radical discourses in an Earth system governance initiative, published late last year in the peer reviewed journal Earth System Governance.

While this question was relevant throughout the study period “between late 2019 and the middle of 2020,” it has risen in prominence exponentially in the current context of the “shitshow” of the SBTi Board announcing a “decision” to allow carbon credits and other “environmental attribute certificates” to offset Scope 3 emissions, in flagrant violation of SBTi’s own Due Process, given that SBTi Staff were still in the process of analyzing results from its Call for Evidence and its Technical Council had yet to weigh in on the decision.

While this controversy is clearly a question of governance integrity, it also bears in on broader theory of transformation questions. Specifically, investigate reporting from the Financial Times and Bloomberg identified how the Bezos Earth Fund, as the predominant SBTi funder (at $18 million, alongside the IKEA Foundation), likely exerted undue pressure for SBTi to drop its no-offsets policy in favor of allowing such offsets, which form the basis of the carbon credit market that the Bezos Earth Fund is pursuing alongside the Rockefeller Foundation and US Department of State through their joint Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA) initiative.

Essentially, the ETA’s reliance on offsets-based carbon markets represents a “reformist” agenda, which the SBTi Board chose to prematurely rubber-stamp instead of respecting the integrity of its due process — which could stand to financially enhance the actors behind the initiatives advocating for its embrace.

The real-time unfolding of this real-world drama directly demonstrates the high stakes of the conceptual theorizing of this study, which applies Q Methodology that “aims to analyse subjectivity in a scientific, empirical and structured manner.” Specifically, the study applies “Q” to two subjective “factors”:

• Factor 1: ‘We need science-based targets to help economic systems move towards global sustainability’; and
• Factor 2: ‘The system itself is unsustainable and needs to change — science-based targets can help’.

The researchers noted: “Factor 1 and Factor 2 generally emphasised reformist or radical environmental discourses respectively, showing a clear preference for either working with ‘the system’ or critiquing it.” According to the researchers, “Factor 1 saw SBTs as the catalyst for such transformation” while “Factor 2 depicted the opposite causality in its theory of change; transformation was a prerequisite for achieving SBTs. As a Factor 2 participant explained, ‘I’m not seeing how [SBTs] can be met without that significant economic system transformation.’”

Significantly, the researchers applied this assessment primarily to “insiders” in the SBTi and SBTN ecosystems: “we included both sources advocating for SBTs and those presenting critical commentary; the former group was larger.” We need to take this imbalance into account in interpreting the results of this study — while further considering the fact that the study neglected to integrate a critical mass of external critical perspectives.

The study categorized 64 statements along the Factor 1 to Factor 2 continuum in a Venn Diagram, with some statements clearly delineated along the poles, and some statements falling into the overlap zone.

While the study assessed Factor 1 (reformist) and Factor 2 (transformative) perspectives separately, it also assessed syntheses of the two perspectives:

• “Could SBTs be seen as a Trojan Horse of radically transformative ideas hidden in a depoliticised shell?”
• “Research on transition management has found that innovative niches are more likely to diffuse and transform regimes when they are radical enough to have transformative potential, yet compatible with the incumbent regime.”

Significantly, the study spotlighted incumbency power dynamics, noting the danger “that the boundary object function of SBTs could reproduce hegemonic discourse(s) and existing power relations by keeping alternative counter-hegemonic discourses sidelined” and “a possible bias in transdisciplinary sustainability science and Earth system governance towards more reformist interpretations of transformation processes, with more radical versions excluded on the basis they are ‘too political’.”

Ultimately, the study identifies a confounding paradox at the intersection between the two seemingly divergent Factors:

“There is a paradoxical tension involved in working for sustainability transformation: that of seeking to fundamentally change a system whilst working within it. It concerns the interplay between the idealism involved in envisioning a desirable and radically different future, and the pragmatism of trying to fit into the current system to increase support for and uptake of ideas and tools. This situation gives rise to various environmental discourses along a radical/reformist continuum.”

The researchers explain this paradox in deeper detail:

“The findings point towards a paradox relating to sustainability transformations.

We understand paradox to be a kind of tension in which contradictory yet interrelated elements exist simultaneously and persist over time…

On one hand, the interpretive flexibility of boundary objects and their ability to fit into dominant discourses enables broad participation of actors and widespread uptake of SBTs within the existing system, which implies transformative power.

However, by filtering out more controversial discourses, the boundary objects (here, SBTs) perpetuate hegemonic discourses and potentially inhibit alternative visions of deeper or more radical transformations.

This paradox arises because there are pressures to both fit into and challenge dominant discourses, as several respondents indicated in interviews.”

This study, grounded in robust theoretical frameworks, carries profound practical implications in terms of the ultimate effectiveness of SBTi and SBTN in achieving the systemic sustainability they ostensibly embrace. Specifically, the current SBTi controversy vividly illustrates the dangers of the reformist narrative, which risks prioritizing achievability within current systemic constraints while failing to achieve actual sustainability. This danger is not “academic” — given the existence of non-linear tipping points in ecological systems, the danger is existential.

Stated more plainly, while radical transformation from the self-reinforcing existing system is necessary, the cards are stacked in favor of incremental reform and against necessary transformation. This bias is replicated by the study design itself — as the researchers transparently acknowledge, they weighted their interviewee sample toward reformists.

We thus need to resist the hegemonic influence of the study’s findings, and introduce a counterbalancing weighting toward more radical transformative interpretations. After all, the ultimate question posed by SBTs is “to be or not to be.”