Understanding Environmental Knowledge Controversies

Project Status: Completed
Type of Project: Research Project
Principal Investigator: Prof Sarah Whatmore, University of Oxford (Email)
Website

Publications, Data and Other Outputs
Policy and Practice Note

Objectives

The GM saga shows the difficulties generated by the ways in which scientific knowledge is variously used and understood by policy-makers and citizens. Scientific activities that were once hidden in laboratories and journals have become more open to public scrutiny through technologies like the internet. This means that scientists, and those who use their work, have to think again about how science should inform democratic decision-making. This project studies flooding as a pressing rural land management problem that is controversial among scientists and the public, especially those directly affected.

To explore these environmental ‘knowledge controversies’, the project develops cutting edge tools and approaches that pinpoint which practices result in which impacts and account for how environmental science is produced, used and disputed. The project sets out to develop a different way of “doing science” that involves social and natural scientists working closely together, and with local people, in what we call ‘Competency Groups’. The team will evaluate this approach and identify lessons for other kinds of controversial areas of science (e.g. nanotechnology and climate science).