51 research outputs found
Risks, alternative knowledge strategies and democratic legitimacy: the conflict over co-incineration of hazardous industrial waste in Portugal.
The decision to incinerate hazardous industrial waste in cement plants (the socalled
‘co-incineration’ process) gave rise to one of the most heated environmental
conflicts ever to take place in Portugal. The bitterest period was between 1997 and
2002, after the government had made a decision. Strong protests by residents,
environmental organizations, opposition parties, and some members of the
scientific community forced the government to backtrack and to seek scientific
legitimacy for the process through scientific expertise. The experts ratified the
government’s decision, stating that the risks involved were socially acceptable.
The conflict persisted over a decade and ended up clearing the way for a more
sustainable method over which there was broad social consensus – a multifunctional
method which makes it possible to treat, recover and regenerate most
wastes. Focusing the analysis on this conflict, this paper has three aims: (1) to
discuss the implications of the fact that expertise was ‘confiscated’ after the
government had committed itself to the decision to implement co-incineration and
by way of a reaction to the atmosphere of tension and protest; (2) to analyse the
uses of the notions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ in scientific reports from both
experts and counter-experts’ committees, and their different assumptions about
controllability and criteria for considering certain practices to be sufficiently safe
for the public; and (3) to show how the existence of different technical scientific
and political attitudes (one more closely tied to government and the corporate
interests of the cement plants, the other closer to the environmental values of reuse
and recycling and respect for the risk perception of residents who challenged
the facilities) is closely bound up with problems of democratic legitimacy. This
conflict showed how adopting more sustainable and lower-risk policies implies a
broader view of democratic legitimacy, one which involves both civic movements
and citizens themselves
Sustainability Science
Meeting fundamental human needs while preserving earth's life support systems will require an accelerated transition toward sustainability. A new field of sustainability science is emerging that seeks to understand the fundamental character of interactions between nature and society and to encourage the interactions along more sustainable trajectories. Such an integrated, place-based science will require new research strategies and institutional innovations to enable them especially in developing countries still separated by deepening divides from mainstream science. Sustainability science needs to be widely discussed in the scientific community, reconnected to the political agenda for sustainable development, and become a major focus for research
Doctoral Education, Danger and Risk Management
This paper examines how risk management is reworking the doctoral supervisor/candidate relationship. We argue that a larger and more diverse population of doctoral students means special challenges for universities worldwide in managing doctoral programs to optimize their productivity and minimize the risk of failure, costliness and/or litigation. An effect of this is that professional and personal relationships in universities, as in many other public and private institutions, are being reshaped in order to be more closely aligned with risk minimization policy directives and strategies. To understand what effects such reshaping is having on doctoral education, we bring together anthropological theorising of risk with pedagogical theorising of power and identity in education contexts. This theoretical cross-over between anthropology and education situates the pedagogic work of doctoral training within a culturally constituted order of professional care and risk management. We utilize this framework to interrogate ‘soft marking’ as a specific domain in which risk minimization is producing new relational identities for both supervisors and students involved in doctoral studies programs
'Silly, soft and otherwise suspect': Doctoral education as risky business
This paper investigates how certain doctoral practices come to count as scandalous and with what effects on universities. To do so, it engages with a number of recent media allegations that relate to doctoral practice in Australia and elsewhere. The analysis of these allegations is developed in terms of three broad categories, namely allegations of silliness in relation to thesis content, allegations of softness in relation to entry, rigour and assessment, and allegations of suspect conduct and/or credentials. The impact of such allegations on university governance is then addressed
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