The challenge of causal complexity in sustainability science

Understanding causal relations for sustainability scientists means studying phenomena that involve complex causality, e.g. multiple and heterogeneous relations and entities, context-sensitivity, and multi-scalar phenomena. To cope with this, sustainability scientists have borrowed concepts from neighboring disciplines, used causal expressions that have confusing meaning, or abstained from using causal language altogether. We argue for using causal language as it is useful for prediction, manipulation, explanatory understanding and responsibility attribution. However, traditional views on causality have limitations dealing with causal complexity. We spell out the challenge of formulating useful concepts. We argue that it is important to recognize the role of everyday causal cognition and its limitations, to distinguish the different ways in which sustainability scholars talk about complexity and to clarify the causal meaning of complexity concepts, like non-linearity, adaptive capacity, and feedback. Finally, we propose the concept of causal configuration to make explicit the causal meaning of complexity-related concepts.