Making social change for climate change scientifically sound

"This is an immensely timely book. In a situation where our scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts becomes clearer and more solid, we urgently need to find ways to turn this knowledge into societal action. This gap between a richness of nevertheless uncertain scientific knowledge and a lacking understanding of processes of societal change is particularly intriguing in the case of climate change. The contributions to this volume profoundly reflect on this challenge and highlight steps to overcome it."

Bernd Siebenhuener - Professor of Ecological Economics at the Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany

Peter P.J. Driessen is
Professor of Environmental
Studies at Utrecht University

Pieter Leroy is Professor of
Political Sciences of the
Environment at Radboud University
Nijmegen

Wim van Vierssen is Professor
of Science System Assessment of
Water-related Research at Delft
University of Technology

Climate change, from many perspectives and for many reasons, is a complex issue: scientifically, politically, and in terms of global justice. As such, climate change might be the global societal and political challenge of the 21st century. Dealing with it, either via mitigation or via adaptation, will ask for enormous societal efforts.
This book addresses only one of the questions related to this complex challenge: the social efforts to deal with climate change need to be scientifically sound. Yet scientists are uncertain in some respects, and society tends to distrust science to some extent. Therefore, this book's central question is: what kind of science-society and science-policy relations do we need in order to translate climate change into social change? Next to the uncertainty issue, the book discusses different approaches in the science-policy interface, such as transdisciplinarity, boundary work, transition processes, social learning, climate science policy roles, and science system analysis.

Peter Driessen,
Pieter Leroy &
Wim van Vierssen (red.)
From Climate Change to Social Change
Perspectives on science-policy interactions
isbn 978 90 5727 061 1
paperback
172 pagina's
met figuren
€ 25,-
januari 2010

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