Photo credit: Ismael Vaccaro
By Ismael Vaccaro.
This perspective piece discusses the history of the use of the term “reciprocity” across environmental social sciences in the analysis of the interactions between the social and the natural systems. Reciprocity, as a concept, these days, seems to be used in a rather uncritical fashion. These pages do not intend to be exhaustive, instead they focus on the role that the idea of explicit intentionality (or its absence) has had on the different ways scholars think about reciprocity. The literature identifies two clusters of approaches to this subject. On the one hand, we encounter a group of schools in which the notion of reciprocity demands explicit intentionality, an articulation of the concept that requires intent and consciousness of the consequences of agency and the directionality of causality. On the other hand, some have used a wider definition of reciprocity that does not depend on awareness, to discuss the relationships between human and non-human actors. Thanks to this wider definition, reciprocity has been used as well to describe interactions between human and non-human entities in which one or both parties were not explicitly intending to benefit each other. The aim of this article is not to determine which approach is correct. The goal is to underscore the significance intentionality in the idea of reciprocity, and consequences of this choice.
Relational Thinking 