The Department of Environmental Social Sciences, within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, is running a junior-faculty search this year in Environmental Behavioral Sciences. In the run up to advertising this job, we’ve done a bit of soul-searching, trying to figure out what our vision for EBS entails. As part of this process, I was asked by the chair to write my version of a vision statement. Since I could never respond to a request like that in a totally straightforward way, I decided to approach this from the perspective of what I would like to see in my colleagues as they consider applying. Please note that these are my opinions and don’t represent any official departmental position. However, this vision is part of our active conversation within the department about our future, so make of it what you will.
Diversity, Emergence, and Intergenerational Ethics
You see, I am not entirely comfortable with prescriptive visions for a department. There are many possible versions of a social and behavioral science department anchored in a school of sustainability, and the particular realization depends on the constituent faculty, their research interests, and the complementarities and emergence that comes from their mutual engagement. I do believe that sustainability is, at its heart, a question of persistence and intergenerational ethics. To be sustainable, humans (and the systems upon which we depend) need to persist into the future and the people in this persistent future should have the same opportunities to thrive that we had. Given these requirements, there will be certain broad questions with which an Environmental Behavioral Sciences group is likely to be preoccupied. These include adaptation and adaptability, collective action, livelihoods and human-environment interactions, norms and behavior change, the growth and composition of populations, governance, time and risk preferences, and particularly uncertainty; organizations and institutions, and what might broadly be called the moral political economy. This is a very broad remit.
As a department is largely an emergent phenomenon of the faculty who comprise it, I do have strong opinions about what we should look for in potential colleagues.
We are looking to simultaneously build a new department within a new school that we are also actively building. We need people who have a vision of the future and who specifically care about institution-building. If you are willing to take the risk to apply for a position in a department like ours, I don’t see how you can not talk about how you would help build/shape the department.
We need good interdisciplinary scientists. We have social science departments in H&S that are dominated by humanistic scholars with very parochial interests. I want to see people who ask important scientific questions and then go acquire the technical skills (either through learning themselves or through collaboration) to test hypotheses bearing on these important questions. This means we want curiosity-motivated lifelong learners with the humility to forge collaborative partnerships.
Good science is motivated by scientific theory, so we need researchers who are doing theoretically-motivated work. Theoretically-grounded science is replicable and actionable. The rhetoric of SDSS and its constituent centers and institutes—such as Woods and Precourt—is highly focused on immediate application and on the idea that the only applications that matter are those that happen at scale. However, applications are to the present, but sustainability is inherently about the future. Theory allows us to make statements about things that haven’t yet happened. This is essential in an environment dedicated to understanding and motivating change. As Kurt Lewin noted, there is nothing so practical as good theory. Moreover, local and community-based research provide a proving ground for impactful action, even if these actions don’t achieve mass scale. Establishing a norm that the only good work is work that produces solutions at scale suggests homogeneity through regression-to-the-mean. Neither innovation nor adaptation come from regression to the mean. We should embrace diversity and the peripheries of disciplines to maximize our potential impact.
We want scholars who ask big questions. At the very least, there should be links in your small questions to larger themes. If you work on something very specific (e.g., seriation of prehistoric dry-country adaptations via phytoliths, ethics of technology, middle-class anxieties under neoliberalism), you must relate it to larger themes of sustainability or human-environment relationships more generally. Why should we care about your small research project, as interesting as it may be to you? In a department this diverse, no one is going to be an expert in your area.
If you can’t do the work to explain how you fit into the new department in a new school, how good a colleague are you going to be?
We want scientists. At the very least, we want scholars who have a track record of working with interdisciplinary scientific teams. A record of interdisciplinary teamwork is necessary for a departmental situation like ours. The default environmental social scientist is not, in fact, a scientist. There are many humanistic anthropologists and geographers, often from highly prestigious academic departments, who study some aspect of the environment but are not likely to be the sort of colleagues we need in EBS/SDSS. This means we need to go beyond the prestige of their institution and critically examine their science, their collegiality, their interdisciplinarity, their mentorship, etc.
This is considered a bit of a hot-take by some of my colleagues, but I believe we should care more about applicants doing top-notch research on topics relevant to sustainability and the environment than we do about their track record of work or publication on explicitly environmental/sustainability topics. We should seek to hire people who would be a win even if they never fully pivoted to specifically environmental work. For example, someone working on collective action, social movements, behavior change, or migration would provide essential perspectives and tools for sustainability science even if their work was not explicitly framed as “sustainability.”
Do you aim high? We want people who take intellectual risks. While we shouldn’t fetishize high-impact journals, a record of publication in such journals indicates a willingness to take (sensible) risks. Many social science disciplines prioritize publication in their “flagship” journals (e.g., AJS/ASR in Sociology; the various in-house econ journals (AER,QJE,JPE); APSR in political science). A record of exclusively publishing in such journals suggests less of an interdisciplinary bent that we want. Publishing in, say, PNAS or Science, can be seen as a costly signal of a researcher’s willingness to communicate broadly at the expense of in-group approval.
In the year of our Lord 2026, science should be as open, equitable, and transparent as possible. Do you pre-register experiments? Do you publish code and data? Do you have a public repository? Do you use open-source tools, or is your research tied to expensive proprietary software? Is there any evidence that you’ve at least thought about phenomena such as the replication crisis or do you just repeatedly publish the results of low-power studies? Relatedly, are you blindly enamored of big-data studies without critically thinking about the biases of this sort of work? Do you have an OSF and ORCID profile (or even Google Scholar)? Do you publish preprints? Do you make your work accessible to lower-resourced parties such as researchers in the Global South? It would be unreasonable to expect every candidate to provide an affirmative answer to all these questions, but some effort on these important issues is highly desirable.
Community-engaged research is desirable. Not doing it is not a deal-breaker, since some disciplines lend themselves better to it than others, but for many disciplines it’s clearly necessary. Decolonial sensibilities are also desirable as our unsustainable political economies are rooted in colonial extractive mandates. Scholars should at the very least be cognizant of power differentials and how they shape outcomes, both societal and scientific.
Following from this, and as a signal of collegiality more broadly, show me that you provision public goods. Do you publish for broader audiences? Do you maintain code/data repositories? Do you publish your syllabi and other course materials? Are there YouTube videos of your lectures? Do you teach in workshops for junior researchers? Have you served on thankless-but-essential university committees? Have you put your money where your mouth is with respect to ethics? If you are more senior, do you have a record of mentorship? Do you have students/post-docs who have been successful? Do you promote your mentees’ work? Do you publish with your mentees? Do mentees get first authorship?
The grand-daddy of sins is status quo bias. This is a department and a school for which change is in the mission statement. There are two very different ways that status quo bias could undermine the quality of EBS. The first is that we accept the prestige-biased status quo. That is, if we were to only consider fancy people from fancy departments working on fashionable topics. The second is that we accept the environmental-social-science status quo and hire people who lack the chops to contribute to the core of disciplines, but are also not taken seriously by the physical scientists and engineers who dominate sustainability. Navigating the Scylla of prestige and Charybdis of scientific mediocrity will be an enormous challenge requiring the capacity to convincingly articulate our vision to a skeptical school leadership. When faced with uncertainty, academic leaders will always fall back on heuristics such as prestige or familiarity. We must push back and educate if we are going to achieve our goal of being the world-leading home for the social science of sustainability.