"Scaling diverse" and implications for science policy and the question of power: insights from the French RZA-RI and the Expé-1point5 experiment

We, as a human community, are at a pivotal moment in our history. Faced with the threats posed by climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, growing inequalities and the attacks on democracy, which has been losing ground over the last ten years, we stand at a crossroads. The choice between closure and openness, justice and strength/domination, universalism and identitarianism is increasingly urgent. While forces of closure, strength, and identitarianism seem to be gaining ground in this first quarter of the century, there is still time to reverse the trend. Joyful experiments in resistance are emerging all over the planet, blending social and ecological struggles with feminist and decolonial struggles to imagine «another possible». Research and education are being called to action to resist these powerful trends, stimulating a renewed commitment to the question of meaning, a dimension neglected for a century by both philosophers and scientists, well hidden behind the ideas of objectivity and neutrality. But, scientists are taking part, in many ways, in transformative experiments, particularly social-ecological ones, designed to enhance the resilience of territories against global threats, to restore a mode of development – or to explore alternatives to development - that is sustainable, in a perspective of care and planetary habitability. However, science itself has become unsustainable, caught in the same acceleration affecting all human activities. This acceleration prevents it from taking the time needed to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations and the creativity required to tackle the complexity of social-ecological systems and the wicked problems they face. To support the transformations required, science must transform itself, a shift with significant implications for the functioning of High Education Institutions (HEI's) themselves. This transformation concerns both research and education, serving as a first step towards scaling up systemic change. Indeed, one pressing question remains, expressed by Moore et al. (2015): how can brilliant yet isolated experiments aimed at solving the world's most urgent and complex social and ecological problems be more widely adopted to achieve a transformative impact? This is the whole question of reconciling meaning and urgency, calling for an approach to scaling that preserves the richness of diversity, i.e. avoiding generalization/standardization. Moore and collaborators propose three ways of scaling: scaling out (replication), scaling up (institutionalization) and scaling deep (culture, education). We propose to extend this typology to the idea of “scaling diverse”, which emphasizes harnessing diversity of experiments conducted in varied geographical, sociological, economic, and political contexts. How can we scale up without going too general, erasing diversity and producing solutions that will not be adapted to local contexts? What are the implications of such an approach on governance and the definition/perception of power? O. Ragueneau and collaborators explore this idea of scaling diverse from the work conducted as two networks in a transformative perspective, to stimulate impacts that are more systemic, political and legal. Within the French RZA-RI («Réseau des Zones Ateliers»), inter- and transdisciplinary approaches are developped on the long term, fostering co-construction of knowledge with local stakeholders, testing the working hypothesis that this co-construction is a necessary – albeit probably not sufficient due to the importance of power gaps - condition to accompagny «learning territories» in their transformation to sustainability/habitability. Comparisons or testing various hypotheses accross gradients (climate, anthropisation, history of co-research, …) are examples of first approaches to scaling diverse. Within the Expé-1point5, as part of the Labos 1point5 research initiative, experiments are being conducted to stimulate changing research practices towards reducing their own carbon emissions, thereby embodying transformation: since 2021, 23 pilot «learning laboratories» (i.e. 4,000-5,000 persons), representing a wide diversity of size, discipline, GreenHouse Gaz (GHG), choose a reduction objective, a trajectory, one or several tools proposed to them in a special «Kit-1point5 - awareness-raising, economic, legal - and follow the implications of these changing practices on their GHG emissions as well as on the quality of life and quality of research. The idea of this experiment is to make science a transformation demonstrator (Ragueneau and Sabbagh, 2024). Both networks aim at reducing human impacts on the environment and exploring their broader social, economic, and anthropological effects. Working as networks, they first allow to make links accross these learning territories and laboratories. Both have important implications on science policy and philosophy, regarding not only practices, but also funding – i.e. fostering collaboration rather than competition -, evaluation and the overarching meaning of research activity itself.