The Role of Science in Environmental Regimes: The Case of LRTAP

2005

The proliferation of scientific information in the international policy sphere has increased with the proliferation of global environmental problems. The conventional transfer of scientific information becomes increasingly complex in the international sphere where the implications of global environmental problems are severe and where divergent values around the type of information considered sufficient and adequate for policy action lead to differentiated governmental responses. Constructivist science-policy scholarship has challenged the unidirectional transfer of science into policy suggesting that the sociopolitical sphere plays a significant role in determining the value, legitimacy and relevance of science. Scholarship in the social studies of science goes further to argue that scientific knowledge itself is influenced by social and cultural factors, bringing the status of scientific knowledge as objective and neutral into question. This dissertation utilizes these two literatu...

Global Environmental Change-human and Policy Dimensions, 2006

This article focuses on the science-policy interaction in international negotiations in the context of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's Convention for Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). It addresses the question how participants in the assessment process divide and co-ordinate work between science and policy and how this enhances credibility, legitimacy and relevance with multiple audiences. For this purpose the article combines an analytical framework to approach effectiveness of scientific assessment in policy making, with the notion of boundary work and co-production of science and policy. The article argues that knowledge produced within the CLRTAP process and the institutional setting in which this knowledge production takes place cannot be separated from each other. Furthermore credibility, legitimacy and relevance are to a large extent determined by boundary work in an early stage of the process. At the same time boundary work has to take place continuously in order keep the assessment process credible, legitimate and relevant for new audiences. The application of a combined framework for analysing credibility, legitimacy and relevance and for analysing boundary work turns out to be helpful in describing in detail what happens in practice at the science-policy interface. In particular it helps to address the question of the way participants in the assessment process divide and co-ordinate work, how this shapes design elements and how this enhances credibility legitimacy and relevance of an assessment. r

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, 2018

Global Environmental Politics, 2010

based on hard law). It is thus almost impossible from the outset to support the strong form of the hypothesis that makes effective nonstate participation a necessary condition for improving legitimacy. The data and methods used can only obliquely adjudicate that kind of claim. The quantitative analyses consist of percentages and counts (how often did the case study experts agree that a regime had a causal impact, or how many regimes exhibited both a particular mechanism and level of a legitimacy component). These serve well in demonstrating that a number of regimes already employ (more or less) what Breitmeier considers to be legitimacy enhancing mechanisms, and that nonstate actors have had (more or less) an impact on regimes’ effect, but the data tell us less about the causal impact of legitimacy concerns on regime designers or followers or the necessity of nonstate participation. Breitmeier concludes that “the willingness to obey the policies of international regimes is contingen...

Given the heavy dependence of environmental law and policy on science, it is necessary to find ways to facilitate the uptake of scientific knowledge into policy and law. The boundary organisation has emerged as a potentially powerful, but also highly problematic, institution for the accomplishment of this task. While a good deal of attention has been paid to the interactions between law and politics within boundary organisations, less has been written about the actual and potential role of law. The paradox underlying science in the public sphere has often been noted: environmental policy depends on science for its authoritativeness, yet science depends on its independence from politics for its authoritativeness. The process of building a scientific consensus of sufficient robustness to support the weight of a decision on environmental measures by a public official are in tension with, and can threaten to undermine, the institutional structures within the scientific community that serve to protect the independence and integrity of scientists and the cogency of scientific knowledge. It is necessary to go beyond an analysis of the ‘co-production’ of scientific knowledge in tandem with the wider society. The different logics and objectives of scientific knowledge production and policy making are not altogether arbitrary: they serve to protect the integrity of each. Jurists and political scientists are used to thinking about the contributions that law makes to political decision-making, structuring and disciplining it and seeking to protect the rights and interests of those implicated or affected by such processes. Constitutions achieve the structural coupling of politics and law, making each available to the other – political authority is legitimated by law, the validity of legal rules is ensured by the political authority that enacts them – but, equally importantly, keeping them separate and ensuring that they can continue to accomplish their respective prestations. The role of the boundary organisation must be more than simply bringing science and politics into closer proximity to one another or, worse, simply combining them, thus compromising one or the other or both. The integrity of each could potentially be preserved by legal rules, which could also function to foster the conditions for fruitful interaction between them.

Environmental Sciences, 2006

Evidence & Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate and Practice, 2013

2016

Scientific knowledge is one of the main keys for human and social development. In this context, science policies are vital for affirmation of societies at the present time and in the future. Therefore, these policies assume a public value because they are reflected in the quality of political decision-making and the living conditions of citizens (Neal, Smith & McCormick, 2008). Manifold changing processes have been shaping the recent era, primarily linked to development of the knowledge society. Examples include the following: productive sectors are experiencing various reconfigurations; there is an exponential increase in the use of information and communication technologies; new business activities are emerging; the organisation of work as well as of working times are being changed; new social and environmental risks and problems are emerging. In the space of a few decades, knowledge has been presented as one of the main political challenges, in view of the complexities that are emerging in all walks of life. These challenges impel the need for a constant search for resources, and management of the delicate balance between the natural and social world. In other words, knowledge has started to be considered as a cross-result of several processes that go beyond scientific research, scientists and research units. The paradigm of the coproduction signalling the intrinsic relation between science and society (Jasanoff, 1996) supports this idea, by demonstrating that in the knowledge society, the commitment to science and research is (or should be) collective. According to this line of thought, science policy does not define an immutable or even a wholly tangible reality. It incorporates evaluative and ideological assumptions, as well as options and choices of different natures (Neal et al., 2008). It also involves diverse scales of performance: supranational, organisational, departmental, and institutional. Some authors assign a structural and regulatory role to science policy (Neal et al., 2008), stating that it must be defined as the set of decisions and actions taken by political actors and institutions in order to plan, standardise, manage and evaluate science and research, as it is produced in a certain geographical and political context. In sum, we can define the following spheres of science policy as the principal ones, or those that are more embedded in the daily lives of institutions and researchers (Araújo, 2009, 2013b, 2014; Martins, 2012b): human resources in science, expectations and professional integration in science careers; scientific research funding (either from public or private institutions); distribution of funds and its connections with evaluation methodologies; principles and methods of evaluation in science (addressed to researchers and institutions); definition of priority areas; and the incorporation of scientific results in political decision-making. These processes concern not only the most effective and efficient ways

Environ Sci Policy, 2005