CSPO Conversations

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced challenges that are commonly dealt with in engineering in the United States. Policy responses to the pandemic could be improved with lessons from other types of infrastructure, and by investing in “efficient resilience” when it comes to medical infrastructure. Engineering professors Braden Allenby and Mikhail Chester take a close look at how engineered systems such as electric power, communications and transportation infrastructures deal with peak load, disaster recovery, and partial failure to offer ideas for building greater resilience into the US medical system and infrastructures that provide critical services during pandemics.

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The United States has the world’s highest rating on the Global Health Security Index. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may well have the planet’s highest density of expertise in infectious disease. The nation had forewarning from its health experts and intelligence services that a pandemic was gestating in China and then southern Europe. So how is it possible that the United States mounted such an inept response to the coronavirus pandemic?

Join M. Anthony Mills (R Street Institute) and Robert Cook-Deegan (Arizona State University) for an in-depth conversation on fixing the broken links between expertise and governance, and on how improving the legislative branch’s capacity for understanding science and technology is necessary to ensure that the country is better prepared for the next public health crisis. Their new essay on this subject can be found at Issues in Science and Technology.

Other nations, including Scotland and England, are following France’s lead in convening their own citizen assemblies on climate. Will the United States be next? If so, what lessons might policymakers and organizers derive from Macron’s misadventure with climate politics and subsequent change of approach? Can citizen assemblies help to overcome political gridlock in order to implement effective climate policies?

Join Yves Mathieu of Missions Publiques, co-organizer of both the Grand Debates and the Citizen Assembly on Climate, in a CSPO Conversation moderated by Daniel Sarewitz.

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Solutions to the critical and complex challenges of sustainability (such as deep decarbonization, food sufficiency, and equitable water and energy access) demand collaborations between universities, businesses, government, and civil society. In this CSPO open workshop, five academic leaders from ASU and The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany will propose questions, issues, and strategies for collaborative efforts to forge transitions to sustainability. Intensive discussion will follow, where workshop attendees are invited to bring the perspectives of their own institutions and experiences to engage and critique these ideas.  The outcome of our deliberation will provide valuable input to the Global Sustainability Strategy Forum for further development of strategies for fostering transformation to a just and equitable sustainable society.

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Climate change is among the world’s most important problems, and solutions based on greenhouse gas emission cuts or adapting to a new climate remain elusive. One set of proposals receiving increasing attention among scientists and policymakers is “solar geoengineering” (also known as solar radiation modification), which would reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight to reduce climate change. Evidence indicates that this could be effective, inexpensive, and technologically feasible, but it also poses environmental risks and social challenges. Governance will thus be crucial.

In this CSPO Conversation, Jesse Reynolds will draw on his just-released book, The Governance of Solar Geoengineering: Managing Climate Change in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press), to show how solar geoengineering is, could, and should be governed. He will focus on the most common concern: solar geoengineering could undermine already insufficient efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Can policies be crafted in which solar geoengineering could actually increase emissions cuts?

Social science research—spanning disciplines as diverse as economics, anthropology, political science, and psychology—illuminates the inner workings of human behavior and society. How can this research be effectively applied to discover solutions to some of society’s most complex and formidable problems? And what role can universities play in transforming the social sciences into drivers of societal improvement?

These questions are at the heart of “Retrofitting Social Science for the Practical & Moral,” Kenneth Prewitt’s feature article in the latest edition of Issues in Science and Technology. Prewitt, a professor at Columbia University and former director of the US Census Bureau, will discuss his article at the launch event for the Fall 2019 Issues on November 20 in Washington, DC. He’ll be joined by Mary Ellen O’Connell (National Academies), Jed Herrmann (Results for America), and Toby Smith (Association for American Universities) in a wide-ranging exploration of how this research can better serve society.

The scientific uncertainties and contested values surrounding geoengineering research, particularly for a class of methods called solar radiation management (SRM), make it a prime issue for which public deliberation can provide valuable input. With SRM research advancing to the field-research phase, the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO), with funding support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, designed a set of public deliberations to explore questions of trust, transparency, consent, safety, collaboration, and other issues of importance related to SRM research.

CSPO convened groups of diverse citizens in two day-long forums to discuss SRM research in September 2018. The research team is now hosting a results launch event to share the deliberation results with SRM experts and stakeholders. Following a presentation of the high-level findings, a panel of experts will offer their reactions to the results report. All event participants will then have the opportunity to receive a copy of the final results report and ask additional questions.

Current headlines tell us there is a “war on science,” focused particularly keeping scientists of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) closely in check by those who want to contain federal environmental policies.  But the history of science in the EPA tells a more complicated story of how science, in becoming central to the identity of federal bureaucracies, has long been evolving under a variety of pressures to maintain its status as a constitutive element of the agency’s legitimacy.

In this CSPO Conversations breakfast seminar, David Demortain (INRA) will discuss his forthcoming book, The Science of Bureaucracy. Risk Decision-Making and the US Environmental Protection Agency, and how the EPA has shaped the science of risk-based decision-making since its inception.