Suchergebnisse

In the last four budget cycles, the Trump administration has proposed slashing funding for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research programs. When Congress has refused, administration officials have sought to prevent, hide, and discredit research in other ways. They have been remarkably successful despite the existence of agency policies designed to protect researchers against political interference.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a tradition of scientific excellence. EPA has led groundbreaking research on acid rain, lead, chemical safety, and many other public health and environmental issues. However, in the last four budget cycles, the Trump administration has proposed slashing funding for EPA research programs. When Congress has refused, administration officials have sought to prevent, hide, and discredit research in other ways. They have been remarkably successful despite the existence of agency policies designed to protect researchers against political interference.

Finola Kirrane, science engagement intern, reflects on her summer in the Chief Scientist's Group and highlights the contributions of her science intern cohort.

Recent health and environmental crises have emphasized the importance of transparency of agency science, i.e. the scientific information that underpins public regulation. Yet how EU law shapes the transparency of EU agency science and whether it contributes to publicly holding experts to account for the quality of their advice, remains an open question. This article analyses the transparency regimes of three EU agencies.We show that the EU legal approach to transparency of agency science is undergoing significant change, through legislative reform and agency practice. The traditional "passive" approach based on the Access Regulation is fragmented and reveals several shortcomings. Recent trends, such as the 2021 reform of the General Food Law, indicate that the EU is moving towards "proactive transparency", which improves expert accountability. Our study contributes to debates on EU risk regulation and the general reform of the Access Regulation. The article offers an interdisciplinary perspective informed by political epistemology, namely the study of the role of experts in public decision-making.

AbstractResponding to mistrust in the European agencies' risk assessments in politically salient cases, the European Union (EU) legislator, the European Food Safety Authority and the European Medicines Agency alike have accelerated their efforts to foster EU regulatory science transparency. These simultaneous endeavours have, however, taken place in a fragmented legislative and administrative context, with each agency operating under a different legal framework. By focusing on authorisation procedures, from registration of studies to authorisation of novel foods, pesticides and human medicines, this article examines the resulting regimes governing the disclosure of scientific data by EU agencies to identify common trends and sectoral specificities. Against the background of an overall shift towards enhanced transparency, we shed light on, first, the circulation of institutional arrangements and practices among agencies and, second, the new dimensions of transparency emerging from these developments. We also highlight the remaining sectoral differences and argue that they could have potentially large impacts on the amount and type of information disclosed and on the level of transparency perceived by stakeholders and citizens. We argue that more coherence across the sectoral transparency regimes is needed, in particular in light of the agencies' contested legitimacy and of their increasing cooperation on cross-cutting issues like antimicrobial resistance and medicine and pesticide residues in food.

Drawing from a combination of the author's own research on Portugal's empire and recent work across a range of disciplines, this essay discusses the growing dialogue between Latin American studies and science and technology studies (STS). It discusses key similarities and differences in the questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks which have guided research in both areas. It focuses particular attention on the divergent ways in which the two interdisciplinary arenas of scholarship have handled objects and materiality. The author argues that despite important differences in orientation, a focus on objects and materiality informed by STS perspectives can broaden the archive available to scholars of colonial Latin America, challenge and extend critical insights of colonial research, and call into question the adequacy of conventional Latin American and Atlantic spatial frameworks.

Motivated by the recent concerns of the scientists participating in the elaboration of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports, we study a principal-agent relationship between a politician and a researcher that captures some stylized facts regarding the involvement of politics into scientific research. The politician contracts with a researcher in order to get some scientific advice about a policy relevant variable. The politician trades off the policy that he would implement in the absence of any reelection concerns with a desire to please voters by choosing a policy that is supported by scientific advice and that turns out to be the ``right'' policy ex post. As a consequence, the politician bribes the researcher to bias his scientific advice towards the ideal policy of the politician. We study the optimal contracts under symmetric and under asymmetric information about the researcher's ability and concern for reputation, as well as the selection of a researcher by the politician. Thereby we identify several conflicts between the interests of the voters and those of the politician.

Is the science capable to act as the subject of political action? This question is considered as one of themes of the modern philosophy of science. It could not be posed within the framework of the philosophy of science concentrated only on the analysis of logical structures of scientific knowledge or on problems of its dynamics defined by procedures of rational reconstruction of history of science. In this framework, influence of factors of a sociо-cultural context on the formal and substantive aspects of scientific processes was not a subject of the philosophical analysis. However, the internal logic in development of philosophy of science led to expansion of a circle of its interests. This circle included processes of interfluence of science and the cultural environment in its historical development. It affected sense of the major epistemic values: truth, objectivity, rationality. Their interpretation as variable dependent on a sociо-cultural context led to relativism which, in fact, devaluated the philosophical analysis of science. In attempts to counteract relativism the idea of political agency of science had to be rejected, which contradicted the obvious realities. The philosophy of science became in need of reform. Its initiator was historical and socio-cultural epistemology. The central thesis of reform is recognition of equal rights, continuity and interdependence of the principles of truth, ob­jectivity and historicism forming triple complementarity (by analogy with the well-known principle of N. Bohr). In the reformed philosophy of science political agency of science is a fact and a factor in the development of both the science itself, and the socio-cultural context.

Citizen science initiatives provide invaluable data about our water environment and complement our own monitoring and assessment work, enabling a greater understanding of the issues we face and how together we can take action going forward. John Findlay, who works in the East Anglia analysis and reporting team at the EA, writes here about his role and the data his team is collecting.

This three-article dissertation presents complementary perspectives on Science Youth Action Research (Sci-YAR), a K-12 curriculum designed to emphasize relevance and agency to promote youth's science learning. In Sci-YAR, youth conduct action research projects to better understand science-related issues in their lives, schools, or communities, while they simultaneously document, analyze, and reflect upon their own practices as researchers. The first article defines Sci-YAR and argues for its potential to enhance youth's participation as citizens in a democratic society. The second article details findings from a case study of youth engaged in Sci-YAR, describing how the curriculum enabled and constrained youth's identity work in service of critical science agency. The third article provides guidance to science teachers in implementing student-driven curriculum and instruction by emphasizing Sci-YAR's key features as a way to promote student agency and relevance in school science.