Séverine Louvel

Assessing Nature? The Genesis of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

On the basis of an analysis of the creation of an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), our contribution addresses the progressive stabilisation of an institutional design for assessing Nature. Social science literature has widely promoted norms of transparency, openness and participation regarding the implementation of new forms of environmental governance. But so far, few researchers have focused on the way this disclosure model now concretely weighs down on real institutions and institutionalisation processes. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the way this requirement can combine with other requirements or older models of action. In the case of IPBES, our goal is to question how the requirements of participation and transparency are put into practice. We will highlight the role of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) in the institutionalisation process of IPBES and see how the disclosure model is combined with other requirements that simultaneously involve the re-creation of ‘enclosure’ (that is, the need for academic sound–science, or the usual way in which things are done at UNEP—that is, bureaucratic practices). Our work is based on an empirical study including documentation analysis (official reports available on websites) and interviews.

Going Interdisciplinary in French and US Universities: Organizational Change and University Policies

This chapter analyses French and US universities’ organizational responses to the more or less explicit pressures they face to go interdisciplinary. Defining universities as pluralistic organizations, I show that the implementation of interdisciplinary research does not result in well-integrated institutional strategies, but rather combines initiatives from the scientific community and from university leaders. Based on case studies conducted on the development of interdisciplinary nanomedicine in five leading French and US research universities, I identify three settings where the implementation of interdisciplinarity involves shifts in organizational structure - in principal investigator-based research teams and scientific networks, in departmental boundaries, and in institutional structures -, and question issues of governance, leadership and resource allocation arising from those shifts. We see similarities between the two countries in terms of how initiatives by ‘entrepreneurial academics’ - searching for funds for interdisciplinary research - and by the university leadership - also searching for funds, and redefining institutional projects around interdisciplinarity - complement each other. We also identify one major difference – with French pro-interdisciplinary university policies being strongly influenced by a political impetus from the French ministry of higher education and research.

From a ‘Social Raw Matter’ to the Emergence of Collectives—Exploring Bio-institutions as Social Lab: Introduction

ScIence and technology Studies usually consider social practices and their environments as dynamic socio-material relations where the stabilising processes of establishing facts, measures, rules, labels and/or standards are at stake. This sociological perspective bears a special interest to the deployment of actions. It considers them without referring to global structures, or to predetermined constraints (either cognitive, socio-political, etc.). These new sociologies take into account the process of understanding and agreement between people, but also their adjustments to things, technical objects and natural beings. They are based on the idea of a common world, which is permanently reshaped by complexity, diversity and conflict. As shown by Susan Leigh Star and Ruhleder (1996), any infrastructure relies on a particular ontological solidarism between socio-material entities.1 Following this approach, we define the ‘social’ as ontologically interdependent entities, which are constantly reshaped by controversies, demonstrations, shocks and attachments. Hence, we suggest describing the state preceding the shaping

Producing ‘Human Elements Based Medical Technologies’ in Biotech Companies: Some Ethical and Organisational Ingredients for Innovative Cooking

This article is based on the findings of an EU-funded qualitative research project, entitled ‘From GMP to GBP: Fostering good bioethics practices [GBP] among the European biotechnology industry’, which seeks to improve the understanding of bioethical issues through the observation of the daily practices in European biotechnology companies and proposes a methodology approaching ethical issues. The comparative study was carried out in biotech companies in France, Italy, Sweden, Hungary and Belgium which develop a wide range of new technologies, all of them involving human materials or where human subjects participate (in clinical trials). Based on our findings in these local settings, we suggest that the notion of bioethics and the way its production is theorised need to be re-conceptualised. We argue that material practices and moral statements are intermingled in inextricable ways that render the formation of bioethical concerns fully dependent on the organisational landscape in which it is embedded. More precisely, the here presented co-production model of moral statements and organisational practices presents a set of common factors that influence how bioethical discourses are shaped, despite the heterogeneity of their epistemic cultures. For example, the procedural design of cell-based-products, the modes of collecting and storing biological specimen, the relationship between patients and companies and technological transfers to emerging countries are defining components that contribute to the shaping process of bioethical concerns. Thus, the path dependency of bioethical concerns relies on an already existing, specific infrastructure and existing relationships within and outside a company rather than on external judgement subsequently applied to its objects, or a collection of processes of reasoning coming from external institutions.