Global Governance
I have been especially concerned with the emergence of the global arena as a space of scientific and technological as well as political rulership. How are norms of accountability crafted in global expert institutions that are not subject to ordinary norms of democratic control, and what are the distributive and ethical implications of those developments? I argue that we are all participant-observers in a process of global constitution-making, although that evolution is patchy, inconsistent, unacknowledged by major actors, and in need of deeper social science analysis. Environmental issues such as climate change figure especially prominently in this component of my work. An ongoing research interest is the role of images and visual texts in global governance (see Earthly Politics). Relevant writings include:
- “Epistemic Subsidiarity: Coexistence, Cosmopolitanism, Constitutionalism,” European Journal of Risk Regulation 2:133-141 (2013).
- “A World of Experts: Science and Global Environmental Constitutionalism,” Environmental Affairs Law Review 40(2):439-452 (2013).
- “Cosmopolitan Knowledge: Climate Science and Global Civic Epistemology,” in J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard, and D. Schlosberg, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 129-143.
- “A New Climate for Society,” Theory, Culture & Society 27(2-3):233-253 (March/May 2010).
- “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness,” in P. Edwards and C. Miller, eds., Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 309-337. [This piece traces the impact of the Apollo pictures of the Earth on environmental consciousness.]
- “Science and Decisionmaking” (with B. Wynne and contributing authors), in S. Rayner and E. L. Malone, eds., Human Choice and Climate Change (Washington, DC: Battelle Press, 1998), pp. 1-87.