Anders Hanberger

A highly controversial issue in Sweden and in countries using nuclear power concerns how to deal with the nuclear waste. The Swedish government has assigned a special agency to investigate and explore alternative solutions to take care of the waste. A special task has also been given to the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste, an independent committee on nuclear waste, to be the government’s advisor in coming to judgement about sustainable solutions for nuclear waste deposit. The council is an independent actor and source not only for the Government, but for other state agencies, local governments and stakeholders as well.

Anja Bauer

What will be the environmental and health risks of nanotechnology and how should they be regulated? How does the economy of a region develop and which areas for industry are needed? What challenges arise for mountainous areas due to climate change and how can strategies to remedy the adverse effects look like?  -  All these questions refer to some future state or event, challenge or problem, goal or vision. While their happening is expected in the future, the questions are raised as orientations for current decision-making in politics and society. The challenges, chances, risks or visions are anticipated and reflected in order to prepare for, to limit or to foster them by investments, strategies, planning, regulations, etc. Following increasing concerns about unintended side-effects of developments and decisions, new concepts of environmental policy integration and Sustainable Development as well as the call for evidence-based policy-making a range of analytical and interactive instruments, concepts and tools have been established with the aim of providing anticipatory knowledge as a guide to decision-making.

Basing on the idea that such instruments and tools co-evolve with particular theoretical ideas and discourses on anticipatory knowledge and knowledge production, the decision-making process and the role of knowledge therein, I discuss three such anticipatory instruments, namely Strategic Environmental Assessment, Technology Assessment and Foresight. By their institutionalization, through guidelines and textbooks, professional communities, laws and regulations, organizations, networks, etc., the instruments form a more or less coherent and identifiable set of specific ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions about collecting, weighing and using anticipatory knowledge. By their institutionalization and application, in turn, they contribute to the reinforcement and objectivation of these assumptions. Against this background and drawing on insights from policy analysis as well as Science and Technologies Studies, I discuss the conceptions, underlying assumptions and resulting design principles of the instruments. In particular, I analyze the underlying ideas about what can be known about the future and how. Further, I reconstruct the assumptions about the nature of the decision-making processes and the rationality of actors, about what accounts for legitimate expertise, the role of knowledge in decision-making and the character of the science-policy-society interface in general. For example, while the conception of SEA refers to technical rationality and positivistic knowledge production with a strong belief in instrumental use of knowledge, Foresight emphasizes the constructed nature of knowledge and interactive knowledge production processes.

The different underlying assumptions have implications on how the processes of anticipation are organized, which methods are applied, which actors are seen as legitimate to participate, the dealing with different knowledge claims, data, uncertainties and ambiguities as well as the way decision-making is informed. Within this paper critical attention is paid to forms of inclusion and exclusion; allocations of power, authority and control; making of credibility, expertise and legitimacy; manifestations of rationality and technocracy that are inscribed in the conceptions and reinforced by the use of the three instruments of anticipatory policy information and deliberation. 

Liz Sharp

For me, interpretative approaches have a strong visceral appeal.  They feel right.  But why?  Existing arguments for interpretive research are based on either on their appropriateness in the light of the 'new governance' (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003), or on the need to factor in wider expertise in a post-positivist world (Collins and Evans, 2002).  In this paper I seek to move beyond these general arguments to consider specifically why research about environmental governance needs to be more interpretative.

Environmental governance is taken to mean "the regulation and mobilisation of the social actions that impact on our physical surroundings" (after Healey, 2006).  Drawing on insights from the sustainable consumption literature and from science and technology studies, this paper makes two new contributions:

1. Environmental governance is understood as the governance of socio technical systems, that is, the governance of interwoven physical, individual and institutional components through which our daily lives, including our consumption of resources, are structured.  Past discourses are sedimented in these components, but the different components also co-evolve via the medium of practices.  If we want to influence these systems, we need to think about how the range of (governance) institutions are structuring both the physical infrastructure and the assumptions, understandings and preferences of individuals.   This means that we need to unpack how practices are understood by those performing them.
2. Here, attention is given to the interaction between institutional and individual components, and related issues about trust, power and collectivity.   Using contemporary water systems as an example, the characteristics of socio-technical systems are characterised in relation to the grid-group analysis of Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson.  Contemporary water systems are understood as hierarchical; that is, extremely effective in the provision of collective services, but offering system little knowledge, understanding or control to citizen-consumers.    Attempts to 'transition' this highly sedimented system to a different type of water services are argued to be difficult within the existing hierarchical dynamics.  A strong argument for interpretative research is the potential it offers to provide space for the renegotiation of our water (and other socio-technical) systems.

The paper concludes by laying out a programme of priorities for interpretative research on socio-technical systems. 

Jan Dobbernack

Initiatives to invigorate counter-terrorism measures increasingly profess an interest in root causes of extremism. The concern with 'home-grown terrorism', it seems, has made governments expand their purview to cover a range of previously unproblematic choices, expressions and practices. The British Contest II strategy of 2009 focuses on individuals that 'reject and undermine our shared values and jeopardise community cohesion.' Concerns of German security agencies over terrorism have been expanded, as witnessed in recent policy papers, to cover those milieus that 'strengthen their own religious and cultural identity' whilst 'refusing to assimilate into German society.' In France, in a recent White Paper, fractures sociales are presented as the most salient factor in explaining radicalisation and extremism. Counter-terrorism, it seems, has become a crystallizing point for definitions of social cohesion and national unity.

This paper compares and contrasts such definitions in recent initiatives across the cases of Germany, France, and the UK. It inquires, in particular, into the relations of two themes: how are the according definitions of social cohesion and national unity operationalized into expectations of conduct and demands for self-responsibilization? How do new definitions of 'risky' populations, in turn, substantiate changing imaginations of society? 

Claus Drejer

This paper is about subjectification of pupils' in the Danish primary school (here after The Folkeskole). In the paper, I will tell the story about what kind of impact teaching after the implementation of The Folkeskole Act from 2006 has on teaching and the pupil. The paper is based on my PhD research on The Folkeskole.

Firstly, I will briefly introduce The Folkeskole Act. In 2006, a new legislation for the primary school was agreed in Folketinget (The Danish Parliament). The new legislation is basically based on performance and accountability. The key elements in The Folkeskole Act is; an increased use of evaluation, mandatory national tests, written plans for each pupil, quality reports, and a new independent council of evaluation and development of quality. (See Law 313 of 19. April 2006 and Law 576 of 9. June 2006). These different steering technologies The Folkeskole Act is a result of a PISA-test from 2000, where Danish pupil's got low test-scores, and it is also a result of a new government.

The paper begins with a problematization of the way low-test scores in subject as Reading and Science in the PISA-test from 2000, and the educational a priori judgements the Pisa-test produced. In addition, the use of the above mentioned steering techniques such as tests, evaluations, written plans for each pupil, quality reports, to enhance the responsibility of the pupil has become a widespread tool. My approach to the analysis is a scepticism of teaching and the techniques and mechanisms which its 

I will employ a governmentality approach to study subjectification in The Folkeskole. Foucault's work on 'conduct of conduct' provides an exiting base to analyze the operation of power. He sees governmentality as a three-step process of power and knowledge. (Foucault 2008: 116f). Governmentality is a process, in which the human sciences concepts and frames our understanding.

I combine two different data producing techniques: interviews and documents. The interviews are semi-structured qualitative interviews with experts in field and with teachers as well. My primary data source is Folkeskolen (a specialist journal for teachers in primary school). But to make the material heterogeneous, it is indispensable to include other empirical sources, such as different reports (Pisa-reports and governmental reports etc.), relevant news paper articles, articles in specialized journals, and relevant websites.