When and how does science matter? : international relations meets science and technology studies

Under what conditions does science influence environmental policy? International Relations (IR) scholars, such as Peter M Haas, have argued that to gain political influence, science should not connect to policy before scientific consensus has been reached. We take this suggestion as a point of departure for investigating how science is and should be connected to policy in international environmental governance. Using insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the contribution of IR is critically discussed, both to present its limitations and, primarily, to further develop the understanding of scientific consensus within IR and the need for separation and connections between science and policy. The organization and performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the various assessments made by scholars from IR and STS, is used as an illustrative case. From the discussion of IR and STS and the role of the IPCC in climate policy, we conclude that the focus within STS on contextual and informal factors could shed light on how science and technology are understood by IR scholars, who focus more on the formal organizational design of the interplay between science and policy

Lost in transformation : The Paris Agreement, the IPCC and the quest for national transformative change

The IPCC stated in its special report on global warming of 1. 5°C (SR15) that meeting the temperature target of the Paris Agreement requires rapid and far-reaching changes across all aspects of society. This is called a need for transformative change. However, what is meant by transformative change? What should be changed, and how should it be changed? These questions are explored in this paper, which is structured in three steps. First, it develops a conceptual meaning of transformative change that is centered on society. Then, it analyses how the IPCC in SR15 understands transformative change. The analysis finds that the proposed pathways to reach the targets of 1.5 and 2°C have a strong technical focus on energy supply, which makes broader and deeper transformative change almost unnecessary. This finding is related to the recently published IPCC report on mitigation. Even if institutional and socio-cultural dimensions of transformative change are better covered in this report, they are insufficiently integrated into the overall assessment of necessary transformative changes. Finally, it turns to the national level, analyzing Sweden's ambition to become the first fossil-free welfare society in the world. The analysis shows, in line with SR15, that Sweden has a restricted focus on changes in energy supply, making transformative change, such as restructuring the economic system and questioning consumption patterns, unnecessary. Based on this analysis of international (the IPCC) and national (Sweden) levels, this paper identifies a need for an elaborated, consistent and deeper understanding of transformative change. It concludes that to be relevant to countries' work to achieve ambitious climate targets, the IPCC should develop a more qualified understanding of transformative change, which requires a better integration of social science research.vetenskapsrådet 2018-0163

Environmental Expertise as Group Belonging : Environmental Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies

What is environmental expertise? The background to this question is that many scholars consider environmental expertise crucial for discovering, diagnosing, and solving environmental problems but do not discuss in any depth what constitutes expertise. By investigating the meaning and use of the concept of expertise in three general theories within environmental sociology—the treadmill of production, risk society, and ecological modernization—and findings from science and technology studies (STS), this article develops a sociological understanding of environmental expertise: what it is and how it is acquired. Environmental expertise is namely about group belonging and professional socialization around specialized skills; that is, it concerns both substantial competence and social recognition. The implications of this general view on expertise are then used to enrich theories in environmental sociology

Political Context

The explicit aim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to influence  policymaking. By synthesising research on climate change andpresenting it to policymakers, the IPCC tries to meet its self-imposed goal of being policy-relevant and policy-neutral, but not policy-prescriptive. The hallmark of the IPCC has been to offer a strong scientific voice demonstrating the necessityof climate policy and action, but without giving firm political advice. Yet scholars have contested the idea of maintaining such a strong boundary between scienceand policy in the IPCC, questioning whether upholding this boundary has been successful and whether continuing to do so offers a viable way forward. The Paris Agreement provides a new political context for the IPCC, implying a need for solution-oriented assessments. The IPCC itself has also argued that large-scale transformations of society are needed to meet the targets set by the Agreement. To be relevant and influence policymaking in this new political context, the IPCC needs to provide policy advice

High gastrin cell activity and low ghrelin cell activity in high-anxiety Wistar Kyoto rats

Ghrelin is produced by gastric A-like cells and released in response to food deprivation. Interestingly, psychological stress also raises circulating ghrelin levels. This study compared plasma ghrelin levels in Sprague-Dawley (SPD) rats and high-anxiety Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rats. The two strains were also compared with respect to plasma gastrin, a gastric hormone with a pre- and postprandial release pattern opposite to that of ghrelin, and to the activity of the gastrin-dependent, histamine-forming ECL cells in the gastric mucosa. The rats were killed after being freely fed or after an over-night fast. The stomachs were weighed and tissue samples were collected for histological and biochemical analysis. Plasma ghrelin and gastrin levels were determined by RIA. While fasted SPD rats had higher plasma ghrelin levels than fasted WKY rats (P<0 center dot 001), plasma ghrelin did not differ between freely fed rats of the two strains. Gastrin levels were higher in fed WKY rats than in fed SPD rats (P< 0 center dot 001). Despite the higher plasma gastrin level, the oxyntic mucosal histidine decarboxylase (HDC) activity (a marker of ECL-cell activity) in fed rats and the mucosal thickness did not differ between the two strains. In a subsequent study, rats were subjected to water-avoidance stress for 60 min, causing plasma gastrin to increase in WKY rats (P<0 center dot 001) but not in SPD rats. In conclusion, high-anxiety WKY rats had lower circulating ghrelin and higher gastrin than SPD rats in both the fasted and fed state, while the ECL-cell activity (HDC activity) was only moderately affected

Intensive forestry in Sweden : stakeholders' evaluation of benefits and risk

There is growing consensus about the need to develop sustainable use of forest resources, but no consensus about how to interpret and implement this goal. Political institutions, governmental agencies, forest companies, and environmental organizations have partly different views on what sustainable forestry means and what strategies to use to achieve it. Not least, the climate change issue has put higher and partly new demands on forests, both as providers of biomass and as carbon sinks, which may be in conflict with other services of the forest’s ecosystem. This paper analyses how different Swedish stakeholders evaluate the possibilities for intensive forestry, that is, to increase the production of woody biomass through increased use of fertilizers, improved genetic material, the introduction of exotic tree species, and the use of fastgrowing deciduous tree species. The analysis shows that the pros and cons are evaluated differently, with some stakeholders assessing intensive forestry as a radical break from the current goal of sustainable forestry and others viewing it as according with it. It is concluded that this conflict should be understood as concerning not competing knowledge claims, but competing frames – schemes of interpretation through which the complexity of reality is reduced. This means that the solution is not to be found in improved knowledge but in increased awareness that the involved frames are the source of the conflict.Funding agency:Forestry Research Institute of Sweden (Skogforsk) Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) Umea University Future Forest