Rethinking the conceptual terrain of AIDS scholarship

Rethinking the conceptual terrain of AIDS scholarship: lessons from comparing 27 years of AIDS and climate change research.

Chazan M, Brklacich M, Whiteside A. Global Health. 2009;5:12.

While there has recently been significant medical advance in understanding and treating HIV, limitations in understanding the complex social dimensions of HIV epidemics continue to restrict a host of prevention and development efforts from community through to international levels. These gaps are rooted as much in limited conceptual development as they are in a lack of empirical research. In this conceptual article, the authors compare and contrast the evolution of climate change and AIDS research. They demonstrate how scholarship and response in these two seemingly disparate areas share certain important similarities, such as the "globalization" of discourses and associated masking of uneven vulnerabilities, the tendency toward techno-fixes, and the polarization of debates within these fields. They also examine key divergences, noting in particular that climate change research has tended to be more forward-looking and longer-term in focus than AIDS scholarship. Suggesting that AIDS scholars can learn from these key parallels and divergences, the paper offers four directions for advancing AIDS research: focusing more on the differentiation of risk and responsibility within and among AIDS epidemics; taking (back) on board social justice approaches; moving beyond polarized debates; and shifting focus from reactive to forward-looking and proactive approaches.

Editors’ note: In the lead up to Copenhagen, this article makes for a very stimulating read. You will learn about the similarities and differences between HIV and climate change research but also about how the response to these two threats was conceptualised at different time periods. Both phenomena are complex, unprecedented, and highly dynamic. For both, scholarship has evolved from a physical or life sciences perspective to one that integrates the social sciences. HIV researchers can learn from the forward-looking and longer-term focus of climate change research, along with its well-considered social vulnerability concepts. A strong message emerges: we need to intervene now proactively to identify and address existing context-specific vulnerabilities to HIV infection and AIDS impacts, before HIV epidemics have fully run their course, in order to mitigate future impacts. It means moving away from a crisis footing to a forward-looking proactive stance to understand was is needed now to reduce or prevent future hardships.