CET Lunch: Researching processes that make 'nature' governable
Welcome to our hybrid seminar with Gisle Andersen, a senior researcher at NORCE. In this CET lunch, Gisle will give a presentation on the EcoLogic project.
Main content
Our speaker will attend in person. Participants can sign up and tune in via zoom, or turn up at CET where lunch will be served on a first-come, first-served basis.
In this talk, CET affiliate Gisle Andersen will describe the ideas in an RCN funded project: The logic of measuring, managing and governing ecosystems (EcoLogic).
The 'ecological turn' is the realization that ecosystems are vital for human life and subsequent public, political and scientific attention towards maintaining ecosystem' health' at a sustainable level. After this turn, a goal is to maintain or restore ecosystems to their 'original' or 'optimal' state and to protect ecological systems from deterioration caused by human activity - to provide 'a safe operating space for humanity'. The shift towards ecosystem-based management represents changes in the key principles – the logic – underpinning political, administrative and science-based processes. This change has been important to increase the capacity to take justifiable decisions, but the effects of the ecological turn for environmental governance remain open and uncertain.
EcoLogic focus on state-level initiatives involving central environmental agencies and science-based knowledge production to meet specific policy goals for an ecosystem-based environmental policy, paying particular analytical attention to science-based attempts at standardizing the measurement, categorization and representation of the state of ecosystems. This means that our primary interest is the performative effect of various ways to operationalize 'nature-wholes'.
Empirically EcoLogic study and compare Norway and Sweden, two countries with ambitious environmental policies. They provide institutional settings that are similar enough to allow comparison, but the two countries differ on the formal and informal structures for the integration of expertise in policy formation. They also differ in patterns of interaction at the interface between science and policy.
About the speaker
Gisle Andersen holds a PhD in environmental sociology from the University of Bergen (2016). He is a senior researcher at NORCE < https://www.norceresearch.no/en/persons/gisle-andersen/955> and a CET affiliate.