The roles of social science expertise for transformative change.

This project investigates the conditions and challenges for developing social scientific expertise for transformative change.

The context is the growing severity of the current situation where the environmental challenge has increased not only in scope (global problems) and breadth (including all sectors) but also in depth (concerns fundamental societal structures). This means a broadening of environmental expertise, where social science become crucial.

Environmental expertise is thereby given a radical new and more complex task and raises fundamental epistemic, institutional, political, and normative questions.This project integrates findings from different research areas and explore the conditions and challenges for developing this kind of social scientific expertise.

The project will pursue three main objectives:i) to conduct a systematic interview study of social-scientific experts involved in developing policy advice for transformative changeii) to explore and compare different forms of epistemic infrastructure (its material and social aspects) that shapes the production of expertise (including what kind of advice it makes).iii) to contribute to the theory of expertise.The project focuses on two global environmental challenges: climate change and biodiversity