Clark A. Miller

Hybrid Management: Boundary Organizations, Science Policy, and Environmental Governance in the Climate Regime

The theory of boundary organizations was developed to address an important group of institutions in American society neglected by scholarship in science studies and political science. The long-term stability of scientific and political institutions in the United States has enabled a new class of institutions to grow and thrive as mediators between the two. As originally developed, this structural feature of these new institutions—that is, their location on the boundary between science and politics—dominated theoretical frame-works for explaining their behavior. Applying the theory of boundary organizations to international society requires a refocusing of some of the theory’s central features, however. In this article, I introduce a new framework—hybrid management—to explain the activities of boundary organizations in the more complex, contingent, and contested settings of global politics. I develop the framework of hybrid management using the specific example of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice.

Science and Decisionmaking

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses science as an activity independent of society. There is certainly one pathway in science that is a pure investigation of natural processes. But, in this age when the very sustainability of the Earth and its critical ecosystems are in question, it is important to communicate the key findings of environmental science and be used by those who make decisions about the future of the Earth. The challenge is how the scientists can effectively impart appropriate and useful information to decision-makers. Science is an integral part of decision making, as scientific results and model predictions are rarely expressed in terms of end points that have direct meaning or inherent value to decision makers. A number of questions arise to facilitate this interchange between science and decision-making. Three examples of how science is used in making decisions about land management, and their use are explained. Based on the common elements of these examples, a set of questions about appropriate ways to transmit science to decision-makers are also included.

Climate science and the making of a global political order

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index

New Civic Epistemologies of Quantification: Making Sense of Indicators of Local and Global Sustainability:

Processes of globalization and decentralization are changing the relationship among statistical knowledge production, nation, and state. This article explores these changes through a comparison of five projects to design and implement indicators of sustainable development to replace conventional measures of economic welfare and social demographics—community sustainability indicators, Metropatterns, greening the gross domestic product, the Living Planet Index, and standardized accounting rules for inventorying greenhouse gas emissions. Drawing on a coproductionist idiom, the article argues that these projects constitute experiments in modifying the civic epistemologies of democratic societies, transforming not only knowledge production but also political identities, relationships, and institutions.

The Dynamics of Framing Environmental Values and Policy: Four Models of Societal Processes

While the subject of framing has achieved considerable recognition recently among social scientists and policy analysts, less attention has been given to how societies arrive at stable, collective frames of meaning for environmental values and policy. This paper proposes four models of societal processes by which framing occurs: narration, modelling, canonisation and normalisation. These four models are developed, compared, and explored in detail through a case study of the framing of the impacts of climate change on human societies in US science policy from the 1960s through the 1990s. I conclude by offering a number of potentially fruitful avenues for further research into the dynamics of framing.

The Social Dimensions of Energy Transitions

The future of energy systems is one of the central policy challenges facing industrial countries. This challenge is complex and multifaceted. Energy systems are among the largest human enterprises,...

The effect of the water/methane interface on methane hydrate cages: the potential of mean force and cage lifetimes.

Molecular dynamics simulations were used to determine the influence of a methane-water interface on the position and stability of methane hydrate cages. A potential of mean force was calculated as a function of the separation of a methane hydrate cage and a methane-water interface. The hydrate cages are found to be strongly repelled from the methane gas into the water phase. At low enough temperatures, however, the most favorable location for the hydrate cage is at the interface on the water side. Cage lifetime simulations were performed in bulk water and near a methane-water interface. The methane-water interface increases the cage lifetime by almost a factor of 2 compared to cage lifetimes of cages in bulk water. The potential of mean force and the cage lifetime results give additional explanations for the proposed nucleation of gas hydrates at gas-water interfaces.

Surface Activity of Amphiphilic Helical β-Peptides from Molecular Dynamics Simulation

The surface activity of beta-peptides is investigated using molecular simulations. The type and display of hydrophobic and hydrophilic groups on helical beta-peptides is varied systematically. Peptides with 2/3 hydrophobic groups are found to be surface active, and to adopt an orientation parallel to the air-water interface. For select beta-peptides, we also determine the potential of mean force required to bring a peptide to the air-water interface. Facially amphiphilic helices with 2/3 hydrophobic groups are found to exhibit the lowest free energy of adsorption. The adsorption process is driven by a favorable energetic term and opposed by negative entropic changes. The temperature dependence of adsorption is also investigated; facially amphiphilic helices are found to adopt orientations that are largely independent of temperature, while nonfacially amphiphilic helices sample a broader range of interfacial orientations at elevated temperatures. The thermodynamics of adsorption of beta-peptides is compared to that of 1-octanol, a well-known surfactant, and ovispirin, a naturally occurring antimicrobial peptide. It is found that the essential difference lies in the sign of the entropy of adsorption, which is negative for beta- and alpha-peptides and positive for traditional surfactants such as octanol.

Examining the role of Web site information in facilitating different citizen–government relationships: A case study of state Chronic Wasting Disease Web sites

Abstract This paper develops a framework to assess the text-based public information provided on program level government agency Web sites. The framework informs the larger e-government question of how, or whether, state administrative agencies are using Web sites in a transformative capacity—to change relationships between citizens and government. It focuses on assessing the degree to which text information provided on government Web sites could facilitate various relationships between government agencies and citizens. The framework incorporates four views of government information obligations stemming from different assumptions about citizen–government relationships in a democracy: the private citizen view, the attentive citizen view, the deliberative citizen view, and the citizen–publisher view. Each view suggests inclusion of different types of information on government agency web sites. The framework is employed to assess state Web sites containing information about chronic wasting disease, a disease effecting deer and elk in numerous U.S. states and Canada.

An effective instrument of peace Scientific cooperation as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, 1938-1950

The profound transformation of postwar world affairs wrought by science encompassed both competition—driven by the atomic bomb and the growing centrality of science and technology to military as well as economic security during the cold war—and cooperation, driven by the desire to use science, in the words of the 1951 Berkner report, as “an effective instrument of peace.” Of the two, the former has garnered greater attention among scholars and among public audiences; the latter, however, has also significantly influenced the organization and conduct of world affairs. In the years since World War II, scientific and technological cooperation among governments has become a prominent fixture on the global stage, in programs of development, in the existence of powerful international expert institutions, and in the day‐to‐day business of international diplomacy. Indeed, scientific and technological cooperation has transformed the institutional apparatus of the state for foreign policy, supplementing, and on occasion displacing, diplomacy with programs of technical assistance, coordination, and harmonization. This paper explores the early phases of this transformation, globally and in the foreign policy organs of the state, in the mobilization and deployment of intergovernmental scientific cooperation as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy between 1938 and 1950.