Richard Worthington

Biography

Rick Worthington is Professor of Politics and Chair of the Program in Public Policy Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He also chairs the Science, Technology and Society Program of the Claremont Colleges. Rick’s research and teaching center on science, democracy, and social change. He was U.S. coordinator of World Wide Views on Global Warming, the first global citizen policy consultation in history, in which citizens in 38 countries deliberated September 26, 2009 on the policy questions later addressed at the December 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. He was a principal investigator of a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the process and outcomes of WWViews.

Through his teaching students have been involved throughout the Inland Valleys and the greater Los Angeles area in hundreds of internships and community-based research projects in social and environmental justice.  Rick also chairs the Board of  Trustees of the Loka Institute, whose mission is “Making research, science and technology responsive to democratically-decided social and environmental concerns.”  He is a principal at the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST), a distributed institutional network for peer to peer public deliberation.

Rick is the author of “Rethinking Globalization: Production, Politics, Actions” (Peter Lang Publishing, 2000) and other works in science policy, environmental issues, and politics in the Americas. He co-edited “Citizen Participation in Global Environmental Governance” (Routledge, 2011).