Integrated science for sustainable development: the role of social science
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A UiB Global/CROP lecture
John Crowley
Team leader, Ethics of Science and Technology Section, UNESCO, and editor of the International Social Science Journal.
It is widely recognized that science and policy challenges relating to the environment require an integrated approach. However, a rather traditional division of labour still tends to prevail between the natural and social sciences. The natural sciences study systems and describe how they might evolve, whereas the social sciences are expected to provide a basis for action to do what science requires. This division of labour has failed in practice, most spectacularly with respect to climate change, and is indefensible in theory.
Crowley will re-examine the nature of the systems that are of concern to integrated science - emphasizing the key role of humans within them - and the challenges that the world faces, which are not always best understood in terms of failure to act on unquestionable knowledge. Crowley argues that social science has a crucial role to play within integrated science - and in doing so will face signficant challenges in terms of theories, concepts and methods.
John Crowley is team leader for the section on Ethics of Science and Technology at UNESCO, and editor of the International Social Science Journal. in the UNESCO Division of Ethics, Science and Society. Since joining UNESCO in 2003 he has also been a programme specialist in social science (2003-05) and head of the communication, information and publications unit (2005-07).
Before joining UNESCO, he worked as an economist in the oil industry (1988-95) and as a research fellow at the French National Political Science Foundation (1995-2002). Since 2002, he has been editor of the UNESCO-published International Social Science Journal.
He is the author of Sans épines, la rose. Tony Blair : un modèle pour l’Europe ? (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) and editor of Tony Blair, le nouveau travaillisme et la troisième voie (Paris: La Documentation française, 1999), Pacifications, réconciliations (special issue of the journal Cultures & Conflits, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), and Rethinking Human Security (Paris/Oxford: UNESCO / Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, with Moufida Goucha). He has published a further 90 academic articles and book chapters, mainly on political theory and comparative politics.
