La autoridad social de la ciencia en la edad post moderna

Sin resume

Non-governmental organizations and the environmental movement:Challenges in climate change framing

Non-governmental organizations are important players in the making, shaping, and implementation of climate policies and practices. They campaign at coal mines and fracking sites, and they devise ways to exert pressure at international climate talks and they seek to influence public opinions around climate issues. Across the world, New Climate Movement groups (such as Extinction Rebellion) have appeared in the last few years focusing on non-violent direct action techniques such as sit-ins and road blocking. But even these groups, whose public profile is so confrontational, seek to show that scientific evidence is on their side. This is because climate policies depend on claims about changes in the atmosphere and oceans which usually need to be detected and measured through scientific means. This close relationship to scientific evidence confers advantages on environmental NGOs but can be a source of difficulties too – for example, if evidence takes a long while to produce or if campaigners want to disagree with scientific experts on other topics (on nuclear power or GMOs for example). Accordingly, environmental NGOs have experienced some ambivalence about their ties to scientific results, and found some alternative platforms for their campaigns. They may simply pick up on governmental climate targets and try to hold governments to their commitments (without specifically raising the question of the correctness of those commitments). Or, they may look at ways of avoiding carbon emissions by, for example, getting universities and colleges to avoid investing in coal or fossil fuels. Furthermore, in initiatives such as the famous school strikes and Fridays for Future, campaigners focus on generational differences. University students and all younger people were likely not born at the time of the last major climate treaty (the Kyoto Agreement) so this generation can reasonably deny the climate guilt of many of their forebears. Nonetheless, these campaigns too tend to assign a central role to science. And (older) current political leaders are attacked for not paying sufficient heed to the scientific evidence

Political, ethical, and societal aspects of issuing warnings to humanity

The scientific community has a sustained history of issuing warnings to society’s leaders and policy-makers. In such cases, scientists take on the task of alerting those in power to issues they may not notice or not wish to see. A distinctive thing about environmental warnings authored by leading scientists is that they are addressed to “humanity.” This paper argues that attempts to “speak truth to humanity”—despite the undoubted quality of the data and analyses—face three sorts of problem. There is firstly the difficulty that humanity is not a unified entity in the way that is often assumed and that, in practice, citizens may not be in a position to act in the way that is presupposed by those who issues the warnings. Secondly, though the declaration of a climate emergency may appear to be a desirable corollary of speaking truth to humanity, there are good reasons from political science to think that such declarations will be made for messier and complex reasons. Finally, even the more technical aspects of the warning documents may contain normative or social scientific components; they are not exclusively technical. Together these points argue for the engagement of humanities and socials sciences scholars in future attempts to offer compressive, integrated warnings to humankind

A Better understanding of Interdisciplinary research in Climate Change

This paper is divided into two main parts, the first of which reviews some of the literature on interdisciplinary research collaboration and categorises articles according to their contribution. The second part of the paper reviews the development of the field of climate change and examines the increasing importance of collaboration both between scientific disciplines, between physical and social scientists and with other stakeholders

Formalization and separation:A systematic basis for interpreting approaches to summarizing science for climate policy

In studies of environmental issues, the question of how to establish a productive interplay between science and policy is widely debated, especially in relation to climate change. The aim of this article is to advance this discussion and contribute to a better understanding of how science is summarized for policy purposes by bringing together two academic discussions that usually take place in parallel: the question of how to deal with formalization (structuring the procedures for assessing and summarizing research, e.g. by protocols) and separation (maintaining a boundary between science and policy in processes of synthesizing science for policy). Combining the two dimensions, we draw a diagram onto which different initiatives can be mapped. A high degree of formalization and separation are key components of the canonical image of scientific practice. Influential Science and Technology Studies analysts, however, are well known for their critiques of attempts at separation and formalization. Three examples that summarize research for policy purposes are presented and mapped onto the diagram: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the European Union’s Science for Environment Policy initiative, and the UK Committee on Climate Change. These examples bring out salient differences concerning how formalization and separation are dealt with. Discussing the space opened up by the diagram, as well as the limitations of the attraction to its endpoints, we argue that policy analyses, including much Science and Technology Studies work, are in need of a more nuanced understanding of the two crucial dimensions of formalization and separation. Accordingly, two analytical claims are presented, concerning trajectories, how organizations represented in the diagram move over time, and mismatches, how organizations fail to handle the two dimensions well in practice.</jats:p

One world or two? Science-policy interactions in the climate field

This article assesses how science–policy interactions are conceptualized in the social sciences with special reference to climate change and the IPCC. In terms of the dimension of distance (or proximity) between science and policy, we discern two ideal-type cases: a ‘two-worlds’ and a ‘one-world’ perspective. The first understands science and policy as independent spheres separated by a clear gap, while the second perceives science and policy as tightly coupled. These two perspectives, presented here in detail and in various sub-variants in order to show their complexity, appear dominant also in the discussions on how to improve, not only describe, the interaction between science and policy. We argue that this situation of opposing perspectives is not beneficial, nor properly recognized by scholars in the field. In response to this, we present a typology that may serve as a modest and judicious way for thinking about and making more nuanced choices in designing science–policy relations