From the Governance of Sustainability to the Management of Climate Change: Reshaping Urban Policies and Central–local Relations in France

This paper analyses the interlinked usages of the concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘sustainable development’ over the past two decades of French urban policies. It shows that the importance of ‘sustainable development’ procedural principles has significantly declined in public agendas alongside the rise to prominence of climate change issues. Based on a study of the urban policies developed by central French government authorities since the 1990s, it identifies two main phases. In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘governance’ slogans were extensively mobilized in urban policies for the purposes of modernizing public action. In a context of economic, social and institutional transformations, these urban policies aimed at constructing local dynamics of collective action and encouraged the emergence of projects relying on incremental and deliberative practices. As of the mid-2000s, this dynamic weakened and climate change replaced sustainable development as a reference in urban policies. This shift occurred in the context of a neo-managerial restructuring, with central government authorities regaining influence over cities and urban policies being redefined around quantitative and technical objectives

Mobilising Consumers for Food Waste Reduction in Finnish Media Discourse

Raippalinna explores how consumers are mobilised for food waste reduction in media discourse. Food waste reduction initiatives are often criticised for putting the responsibility on individual consumers, but little research exists on the mobilisation of consumers in actual contexts. Through critical discourse analysis of media texts, Raippalinna investigates how the food waste problem and consumers are constructed in relation to each other in Finlands leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat 2010–2017. The analysis demonstrates that the discourses of consumer mobilisation appear mostly as consumer education where the consumer’s role is to manage individual consumption and household practices. The theoretical framework combines governmentality studies with a practice theoretical approach on consumption. Raippalinna discusses if and how media discourse can contribute to a transformation of food (waste) related practices.peerReviewe

Trustworthiness of autonomous systems

Effective robots and autonomous systems must be trustworthy. This chapter examines models of trustworthiness from a philosophical and empirical perspective to inform the design and adoption of autonomous systems. Trustworthiness is a property of trusted agents or organisations that engenders trust in other agent or organisations. Trust is a complex phenomena defined differently depending on the discipline. This chapter aims to bring different approaches under a single framework for investigation with three sorts of questions: Who or what is trustworthy?–metaphysics. How do we know who or what is trustworthy?–epistemology. What factors influence what or who should we trust?–normativity. A two-component model of trust is used that incorporates competence (skills, reliability and experience) and integrity (motives, honesty and character). It is supposed that human levels of competence yield the highest trust whereas trust is reduced at sub-human and super-human levels. The threshold for trustworthiness of an agent or organisation in a particular context is a function of their relationship with the truster and potential impacts of decisions. Building trustworthy autonomous systems requires obeying the norms of logic, rationality and ethics under pragmatic constraints–even though there is disagreement on these principles by experts. Autonomous systems may need sophisticated social identities including empathy and reputational concerns to build human-like trust relationships. Ultimately transdisciplinary research drawing on metaphysical, epistemological and normative human and machine theories of trust are needed to design trustworthy autonomous systems for adoption