This dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences broadly, with contributions from sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and so on. That said, social science is fairly narrowly conceived; leaders in the field stress that they are studying social mechanisms in order to predict and manage social behavior. In a popular textbook on the subject, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke stress that "resource management is people management" and call for a social science of this management.Social-ecological systems scientists have generally neglected the ethics of people management-for the most part they subscribe to a fairly typical fact/value dichotomy according to which scientists describe social-ecological systems while managers and policymakers prescribe actions in light of these descriptions. Following several philosophical traditions (in particular pragmatist philosophy of science), I call attention to the ways that social-ecological systems science is value-laden. I take environmental pragmatism to provide a roadmap for conducting social-ecological systems science ethically. Environmental pragmatists stress that science is always embedded in practical problem-solving activities that presuppose particular goals for, and side constraints to, inquiry. Many traditions in the philosophy of environmental science embrace social science for the specific role of facilitating this deliberation, but these traditions do not seem to anticipate the explanatory ambitions of social sciences. This leaves unaddressed several pertinent questions about how social explanations work (i.e. how functional distinction structure inquiry), which have very practical implications for which social science disciplines should be included in a collaboration and how social and ecological knowledge should be integrated. For example, most social situations are characterized by property rights institutions, cultural traditions, political alliances, and other social institutions within the purview of particular social science disciplines, but researchers are not reflexive about whether to explain environmental change according to one set of practices or another.The dissertation traverses the following terrain: the first chapter more carefully motivates the questions above regarding the need for ethics and the promise, but present inadequacy, of environmental pragmatism to meet this need. Chapter two attends to Dewey's theory of inquiry, in particular the dialogical dimension of inquiry that authorizes warranted assertions. Through reflection on Daniel Bromley's volitional pragmatism and a debate between Richard Rorty and hermeneutic social scientists, chapter three attends to the way that social science structures inquiry in order to intervene in the normative practices of a community. Chapter four analyzes social-ecological explanations in order to locate normative and evaluative assumptions that should be accountable to democratic deliberation. Finally, chapter five redescribes interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project where decisions about the centering and decentering of different sciences is as much ethical as epistemological.
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