Part 4: Towards a Positive Sustainability Narrative: Reflections on our role within ERW-D and stakeholder relations
We have prioritised interacting with the scientific teams at regular, organised ERW-D events over time. This has provided us as social scientists with opportunities to raise questions, participate in, and deliberate the unfolding natural science evidence and techno-economic modelling. Issues arising had to do, for example, with initial problem formulation and integrative scientific research strategy. The immediate advantages of these (often in person) interactions were that insights were generated for sharing with programme partners and the project external advisory panel in a timely way.
Regarding the in-person meetings which also informed the internal programme reviews, we found the social science advisory capabilities particularly useful in raising the profile of the rationales and processes for engaging with public agendas in shaping ERW-D research and innovation. Advisory panel feedback usefully underscored the original ERW-D work programme’s commitment to engaging stakeholders and publics in designing the purposes and ethical parameters of science and technology development, deployment, and assessment (DEFRA, 2022). The dedicated advisory panel expressed interest in helping us scope out the scale and focus of our evolving plans for our public engagement activities, confirming their support for doing this as part of what was for us a tried and tested approach.
Drawing from what is already understood about conducting research with stakeholders in net zero research across various sectors where society and technology intersect (Carr-Whitworth et al, 2023), we expected our chosen forms of stakeholder and public engagement to bring to fruition ways of making good on ERW as a rapidly evolving socio-technical programme. Equally, we were alert to challenges arising about scalability. For us as social scientists, this was aimed at understanding impacts and ramifications for society and publics of policies and deployment spanning larger and smaller spatial scales, rather than solving the technical or economic scalability problem per se. As multidisciplinary environmental and socio-cultural risk research scholars, a key matter for us is to understand how it is possible for planetary Climate, Earth and Ocean Sciences to key into consequential narratives in national UK, devolved and regional governance policy, in ways cognisant of “the local” : that is inclusive of the everyday lives of people in the place where they live.
We appreciated how this way of working was supported by guidance from a wider set of stakeholders already equipped with relevant, varied and necessary expertise, and with commitments to developing it further. Stakeholders included policy or science experts, spokespersons from civil society, the agricultural and mining sectors, landowners, other business operations (e.g. start-ups for carbon markets).
Moving forward: How programmatic engagements involve working through informed, lively analysis
Programme-wide discussion to integrate divergent discourses occurred throughout the lifetime of ERW-D. We found this to be a valuable precursor for conducting informed analysis of our social science research data resourced from carefully designed data sets. As we work to sustain this work, and in making more of already consolidated insights via peer reviewed publication thus far (O’Sullivan et al, 2025), less examined aspects of our well-crafted data sets need to be brought to life (Henwood and Pidgeon, 2025). There is work to be done to thoroughly elucidate this in ways specific to ERW-D, including data curation strategies.
There is more to be explained about how our ERW workshops were carefully designed to present complex ideas involving policy time-horizons to publics. This dovetails into understanding initial findings suggesting that they do not readily translate into commonsense frames. Methods already used have successfully linked ERW as a CDR with agricultural practice. But we also know that unassessed time horizons build risk into this sector. There is a question arising about assumed responsibilities as this agricultural risk-time dimension becomes more complex to understand. We are working through uncertainties and consequences of different institutional logics (James et al, in preparation). Might this represent a way to reflect further on our imperfect understanding of difficulties with constituting a suitable “stopping rule”?
Inter-disciplinary connections with pragmatism
In making a social scientific contribution within the ERW-D programme, we joined up with knowledge-making practices and techniques from the Social Studies of Science and Technology (SSST). Working within the interdisciplinary risk field, we have shared, generic interests with SSST’s broad community of theorists and practitioners who are seeking ways to assess what is at stake in scientific deliberations alongside those of wider society. SSST’s conceptual arguments prioritise understanding why and how science, technology and society co-evolve in relationship and over time. They help evolve ways of studying novel technologies to understand their potentials and challenges as part of wider socio-technical arrangements or configurations. And the idea of co-evolution reflects a relational and temporal understanding of science in society, going beyond static assessments deploying normative arguments and contested ideas of societal configuration (see e.g. Felt et al, 2017).
But, equally, approaches such as ours that are rooted in social scientific pragmatism (Pidgeon et al, 2014) and interpretivism (Thomas and Henwood, 2024) intentionally shift attention by posing more dispersed questions. In past research, we have shown how it is possible to prioritise and expand ethical and affective concerns as conveyed within commonsense frames (Henwood, 2019; Henwood and Pidgeon, 2025, 2016). Taking a pragmatic approach can elucidate how societal values (for equity, transparent decisions, dignity) can become a primary source of problem framing. Research conducted in this way raises the significance of human centrism and its critics, giving methodological impetus to reassessing technological changes and environmental ethics (Pidgeon, 2020).
Human-centrism as a research strategy is pragmatic (i.e. it does more than take a literal, representational stance). It generates research insight by considering people’s perceptions, social engagements and constructions of studied events and phenomena (some popular, others creative, sometimes imaginative). This kind of approach is a useful antidote to research that closes down the terms of debate by being reliant on simple dichotomies that leave wide gaps in approaching aspects of risk, ethics and governance of new technologies that require more nuance. It is particularly relevant with topics such as ERW which has multiple manifestations: as a form of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), as an intervention in our landscapes as places of work and habitation and, indeed, as something containing other, less tangible forms of meaning and value.
Final Remarks: How to Make Good and ERW-D’s Positive Sustainability Narrative
The pragmatic approach is in methodological terms well equipped to ask questions about how ERW impacts are perceived in ways that are socially situated and emplaced. This was the approach built into the ERW-D social sciences work programme from the beginning and took the form of stakeholder and public engagement research. It was also a strategy for reckoning with risk deriving from unwanted science-culture tensions concerning the pairing of ideas such as reparation and repair, renewal and regeneration, for example, which communities engaging in inter-connected (non-siloed) working can render more tangible. Our highly practical (yet also epistemically reflective) research and innovation engagement strategy took seriously the collaborative goal of social and natural scientists working together. Working in such ways, ERW-D could make good and foster the kind of positive sustainability narrative that its work has already seeded.
References
- Carr-Whitworth, R., Barrett, J., Colechin, M., Pidgeon, N.F., Styles, R., Betts-Davies, S., Cox, E., Watson, A. and Wilson, O. (2023) Delivering net zero in the UK: Twelve conditions for success. Environmental Research Letters https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ace199
- DEFRA (2022) Review of Public Engagement, conducted by the Defra Social Science Advisory Group
- Felt, U., Fouche, R., Miller, C., and Smith-Doerr, L. (2017) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies 4th edition London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
- Henwood, K. (2019) Investigating risk – Methodological insights from interpretive social science and sustainable energy transitions research. In A, Olofsson and J. Zinn (eds) Researching Risk and Uncertainty: Methodologies, Methods and Research Strategies. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan pp129-152
- Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (2015). Gender, ethical voices and UK nuclear energy policy in the post-Fukushima era. Chapter 5 in B. Taebi and S Roeser (eds)The Ethics of Nuclear Energy: Risk, Justice and Democracy in the Post-Fukushima Era Cambridge University Press, pp 67-84.
- Henwood, K.L. and Pidgeon, N.F. (2016). Interpretive environmental risk research: Affect, discourse and change. In J. Crighten, Firkins, A.R. and Candlin, C.N. (Eds) Communicating Risk Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 9781137478771.
- O’Sullivan, K., Pidgeon, N., Henwood, K. et al. (2025) Who pays for carbon dioxide removal? Public perceptions of risk and fairness of enhanced rock weathering in the UK. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 1010. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05384-9
- Pidgeon, N.F. (2020) Engaging publics about environmental and technology risks: frames, values and deliberation. Journal of Risk Research doi.org/ 10.1080/13669877.2020.1749118
- Pidgeon, N.F., Demski, C.C, Butler, C., Parkhill, K.A. and Spence, A. (2014) Creating a national citizen engagement process for energy policy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 111 (Sup 4), 13606-13613. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1317512111.
- Thomas, G. and Henwood, K. (2024). Interpreting and Deliberating Hydrogen Visions: A HiAct Synthesis Report: https://hi-act.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Synthesis-report-deliberation-expert-and-public-visions-2.pdf