Expertise for Transformative Change

What role should scientific expertise play in the work for transforming society towards sustainability? What kinds of expertise is needed to facilitate and guide the work? The background for these questions is that despite massive investments in environmental research and the accumulation of data on the human impact on the environment, action remains insufficient. The severity of the current situation has led to the conclusion that moderate change is not enough; there is a need for a fundamental transformative change of society. This has also led to a quest for new forms of environmental expertise, with a radical new, broader, and more complex task which challenges disciplinary and institutional boundaries and raises fundamental epistemic and normative questions.

This session focuses on the opportunities and challenges in developing an expertise for transformative change. It welcomes conceptual papers, discussing how to best conceptualize and understand this kind of expertise, as well as empirical paper, analyzing particular expertise and its experience from its efforts to initiate, facilitate and guide transformative changes.