Books in the The Earthscan Science in Society Series series

Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. This title questions scarcity's taken-for-granted nature.

As progress towards a greater knowledge in sustainability science continues, the question of how better to integrate scientific progress with actual decisions made by practitioners remains paramount. This book aims to help close the gap between science and practice.

Offers a profound analysis of science and technology policymaking. By focusing on an episode of major importance in Britain's nuclear history - the Windscale Inquiry, a public hearing about the future of fuel reprocessing - this title offers a critique of such judicial procedures and the underlying assumptions of the rationalist approach.

Places the question of human/animal relations at the heart of sustainability and climate change debates. This book focuses on ethics, examining critically the dominant paradigms of bioethics and power relations between human and non-human. It also considers animal biotechnology and political economy, examining commercialisation and regulation.

Explores how uncertainty is interpreted and used by policy makers, experts and politicians. This title argues that conventional notions of rational, evidence-based policy making - hailed by governments and organisations across the world as the only way to make good policy - is an impossible aim in highly complex and uncertain environments.

Focuses on the intractable conflict that characterises policy debate about messy issues. The author first develops a framework for analysing these conflicts and then applies the conceptual framework to four very different policy issues: the environment - focussing on climate change - as well as transport, ageing and health.

What is technology? How do humans use it to build and modify the world? What are the relationships between technology, science, economics and democratic governance? What, if any, are our ethical and political responsibilities and choices in how we develop, deploy and control technology in democratic states? This title answers these questions.

Explores how parents understand and engage with childhood vaccination in contrasting global contexts. This book examines anxieties emerging as highly globalized vaccine technologies and technocracies that encounter the deeply intimate personal and social worlds of parenting and childcare.

This book provides a discussion of how to conduct climate politics by offering new perspectives on how social and political institutions are capable of responding to climate change.

This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies.

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2009. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2007

A growing problem of interest in the field of science and technology policy is that the next generation of innovations is arriving at an accelerating rate, and the governance system is struggling to catch up. Current approaches and institutions for effective technology assessment are ill suited and poorly designed to proactively address the multidimensional, interconnected societal impacts of science and technology advancements that are already taking place and expected to continue over the course of the 21st century. This book offers tangible insights into the strategies deployed by well-known, high-profile organizations involved in anticipating the various societal and policy implications of nanotechnology and synthetic biology. It focuses predominantly on an examination of the practices adopted by the often-cited and uniquely positioned Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in the United States, as well as being informed by comparisons with a range of institutions also interested in embedding forward-looking perspectives in their respective area of innovation. The book lays out one of the first actionable roadmaps that other interested stakeholders can follow when working toward institutionalizing anticipatory governance practices throughout the policymaking process.

This book explores the emerging perspectives and methodologies of STEM education and its relationship to cultural understanding of science and technology in international context.

The term "institutional response capacity" is a measurement for how effective political institutions may respond to threats and challenges such as climate change. This book provides a discussion of how to conduct climate politics by offering new perspectives on how social and political institutions are capable of responding to climate change.

This book examines how groups looking to plan and make decisions in any number of areas wade through the imperfect and often contradictory information they have to make fair, efficient, wise and well-informed choices. An emerging and very promising approach called joint fact-finding (JFF) can help. Rather than each stakeholder group marshalling the set of facts that best advance their respective interests and perspectives while discrediting the contradictory facts others provide, groups are challenged to collaboratively generate a shared set of facts that all parties accept. This book introduces readers to the theory of JFF, the value it can provide, and how they can adopt this approach in practice. It brings together writings from leading practitioners and scholars from around the world that are at the forefront of the JFF approach to science intensive policy making, urban planning, and environmental dispute resolution.

This book examines how groups looking to plan and make decisions in any number of areas wade through the imperfect and often contradictory information they have to make fair, efficient, wise and well-informed choices. An emerging and very promising approach called joint fact-finding (JFF) can help. Rather than each stakeholder group marshalling the set of facts that best advance their respective interests and perspectives while discrediting the contradictory facts others provide, groups are challenged to collaboratively generate a shared set of facts that all parties accept. This book introduces readers to the theory of JFF, the value it can provide, and how they can adopt this approach in practice. It brings together writings from leading practitioners and scholars from around the world that are at the forefront of the JFF approach to science intensive policy making, urban planning, and environmental dispute resolution.

A growing problem of interest in the field of science and technology policy is that the next generation of innovations is arriving at an accelerating rate, and the governance system is struggling to catch up. Current approaches and institutions for effective technology assessment are ill suited and poorly designed to proactively address the multidimensional, interconnected societal impacts of science and technology advancements that are already taking place and expected to continue over the course of the 21st century. This book offers tangible insights into the strategies deployed by well-known, high-profile organizations involved in anticipating the various societal and policy implications of nanotechnology and synthetic biology. It focuses predominantly on an examination of the practices adopted by the often-cited and uniquely positioned Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in the United States, as well as being informed by comparisons with a range of institutions also interested in embedding forward-looking perspectives in their respective area of innovation. The book lays out one of the first actionable roadmaps that other interested stakeholders can follow when working toward institutionalizing anticipatory governance practices throughout the policymaking process.

This book explores the emerging perspectives and methodologies of STEM education and its relationship to cultural understanding of science and technology in international context.

First Published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies. It aims to illustrate and better understand the nature of these tensions rather than argue specific ways of resolving them. Each chapter explores the complexity of interaction between the two forms of authority in different policy domains in order to reveal and clarify some common elements in the various ways political and expert authority interact in modern liberal democracies. The policy domains covered include climate geoengineering discourses; environmental health; biotechnology; nuclear power; whaling; and the use of force.