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The Institutionalisation of Expertise in Environmental Governance
The Institutionalisation of Expertise in Environmental Governance
Thursday, 14 July 2016: 10:45-12:15
Location: Hörsaal 50 (Main Building)
RC24 Environment and Society (host committee) Language: English
In global environmental politics and governance, knowledge-production and decision-making are becoming increasingly connected. We see a dramatically growth in the number of knowledge brokers, expert organizations and hybrid forums that aim to transfer and transform knowledge for decision-making. At the same time, scientific facts and expert claims are frequently contested.
Expert organizations in environmental governance face the complex challenge to synthesize and package knowledge in ways that makes it useful, credible and meaningful for policy communities, other stakeholders, and the scientific community simultaneously. While these organizations aim to influence policy-making and motivate political action, they differ in their choice of institutional design, strategy chosen and external support.
As a result of their formalization and institutionalization, these organizations many times have evolved to become bureaucracies in the sense that they involve administrative hierarchies, standardized work procedures and specialized competences but also informal norms, rules and practices that are not explicitly articulated.
This session focuses on the institutionalisation of expert advice in environmental governance. It welcomes both conceptual papers, discussing how to best conceptualise and understand this phenomenon, and empirical papers, analysing particular expert organisations. The aim of the session is to improve our understanding of how science-policy dynamics works, in particular the institutionalising and organising of science-society interfaces.
Session Organizers: