From Climate Change to Social Change: Perspectives on Science-Policy Interactions

Climate change, from many perspectives and for many reasons, is a complex issue: scientifically, politically, and in terms of global justice. As such, climate change might be the global societal and political challenge of the 21st century. Dealing with it, either via mitigation or via adaptation, will ask for enormous societal efforts. This book addresses only one of the questions related to this complex challenge: the social efforts to deal with climate change need to be scientifically sound. Yet scientists are uncertain in some respects, and society tends to distrust science to some extent. Therefore, this book's central question is: what kind of science-society and science-policy relations do we need in order to translate climate change into social change? Next to the uncertainty issue, the book discusses different approaches in the science-policy interface, such as transdisciplinarity, boundary work, transition processes, social learning, climate science policy roles, and science system analysis.