Flödesanalys i den hållbara utvecklingens tjänst - Reflektioner kring en "metabolism"-studie av Rhenområdets utveckling

Sammanfattning: The objective of this study is to contribute to the discussion about linking society and nature in environmental research. It is an attempt to provide a critical analysis of the "Industrial Metabolism" studies, which have been based on a flow perspective and have argued that such a perspective is essential to the search for environmentally sustainable societal development paths and could serve as a basis for integration in environmental research. These studies can be considered a response to the problems encountered in emission estimations and environmental futures studies. An evaluation of the Rhine Basin Study, conducted at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), is used for a more general assessment of the limitations of the material flow studies. The statistics are far from ideal for this type of study and the available information about emission sources is seldom sufficient for making generalizations. Therefore the results of the study must be regarded as preliminary. The Rhine Study is also limited in its effort to connect to broad social change related to economic and technological development and decision making. These limitations stem from the flow perspective and how it has been used as well as from the focus on single elements and the delimitation and treatment of the region. The time-geographical "process landscape", framework, developed by Torsten Hägerstrand, provides an alternative framework for the analysis of flows. It places emphasis on analysis of flows in their context in time and space as well as on the constraints of the flows and its institutional context. This may offer guidance for addressing the limitations of material-flow studies to evaluate the social development and to create a basis for analyzing development strategies. Flow based perspectives can be used to improve communication and integration between studies with different emphasis that increase our knowledge and understanding of relationships between society and nature in a changing world. But this potential can hardly be realized with only a conventional flow perspective, which often becomes too abstract and narrow and cannot be easily connected to the wider context of the flows. Therefore, additional perspectives must be used to handle the temporal and spatial aspects of the flows and their physical, economic, and social frameworks.