Concrete utopianism in integrated assessment models: Discovering the philosophy of the shared socioeconomic pathways

Foster, Gillian Joanne ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6978-3830 (2020) Concrete utopianism in integrated assessment models: Discovering the philosophy of the shared socioeconomic pathways. Energy Research & Social Science, 68 (10153). pp. 1-13. ISSN 2214-6296

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Abstract

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are at the forefront of climate change science today. As an influential methodology and method, the SSPs guide the framing of numerous climate change research questions and how these are investigated. Although the SSPs were developed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists in a well-documented process, there is no apparent consensus in the literature that answers the question, "What is the philosophy of science behind the SSPs?" To investigate, the paper applies a systematic thematic qualitative content analysis to the dataset of published papers that establish the rules and expectations for using the SSPs. The research determines that there is no obvious and concise statement on the epistemological and ontological foundation of the SSPs. However, based on the evidence identified in the dataset, SSPs are implicitly, though not explicitly, consistent with a critical realist and concrete utopian philosophy as coined by Roy Bhaskar. This is the first paper to discuss the philosophical underpinning of the SSPs.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.erss.2020.101533
Classification Codes:	Q54
Divisions:	Departments > Sozioökonomie > Ecological Economics
Version of the Document:	Published
Depositing User:	Gertraud Novotny
Date Deposited:	12 May 2020 11:38
Last Modified:	28 Sep 2020 15:44
Related URLs:	Publisher
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/95567/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/7601

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