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Guston, David

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    Report of the workshop on boundary organizations in environmental policy and science
    (Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, 2000-04) Guston, David; Clark, William; Keating, Terry; Cash, David; Moser, Susanne; Miller, Clark; Powers, Charles
    Boundary organizations are institutions that straddle the shifting divide between politics and science. They draw their incentives from and produce outputs for principals in both domains and thus, it is hypothesized, facilitate the transfer of useful knowledge between science and policy. This paper brings ideas from the social studies of science pertaining to boundary organizations to bear on the study of institutions in environmental policy and science. It summarizes a set of five case studies on candidate boundary organizations in both the domestic U.S. and international context: 1) the Health Effects Institute, jointly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the automobile industry to support and review research relevant to air pollution regulation; 2) agricultural extension, which mediates between the needs and interests of local farmers on one hand, and the work of researchers on the other; 3) the Sea Grant program, which provides extension services for mediating between coastal interests and researchers; 4) the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, which is attempting to create from large climate models information more usable by populations vulnerable to climate change; and 5) the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, which is a forum for negotiating scientific aspects of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The cases, with additional commentary, conclude that the concept of boundary organizations is a useful one for understanding the relationship between environmental policy and science.
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    Assessing vulnerability to global environmental risks
    (Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, 2000-09) Clark, William; Jager, Jill; Corell, Robert; Kasperson, Roger; Mccarthy, James; Cash, David; Cohen, Stewart J.; Desanker, Paul; Dickson, Nancy; Epstein, Paul; Guston, David; Hall, J. Michael; Jaeger, Carlo; Janetos, Anthony; Leary, Neil; Levy, Marc; Luers, Amy; MacCracken, Michael; Melillo, Jerry; Moss, Richard; Nigg, Joanne M.; Parry, Martin L.; Parson, Edward; Ribot, Jesse C.; Schellnhuber, Hans-Joachim; Schrag, Daniel; Seielstad, George A.; Shea, Eileen; Vogel, Coleen; Wilbanks, Thomas
    The last several years have witnessed a significant evolution in what society wants to know about global environmental risks such as climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, while devoting relatively little attention to the ecosystems and societies the changes might endanger. Recently, however, questions about the vulnerability of social and ecological systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. Meeting the growing demand for a deeper and more useful understanding of vulnerability to global change will require a dual strategy in which initiatives targeted on immediate assessment needs and research opportunities complement and feed into a longer term program for enhancing relevant knowledge bases, assessment practices, and institutional capacities. This paper makes recommendations for the design of such a strategy that emerged from an ongoing conversation between communities of decision-oriented vulnerability assessors for global environmental change issues, research-oriented vulnerability scholars generally focusing on regional scale human-environment interactions, and those conducting vulnerability assessments that assist in targeting improved intervention and mitigation strategies. It sketches an integrated framework for vulnerability-based assessments of climate and other global changes. By virtue of both concept and design this framework has the potential to improve significantly the production of policy-relevant insights into the social and environmental implications of global environmental change. This paper was prepared as a brief summary of the Workshop on Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change: Challenges for Research, Assessment and Decision Making, held on May 22-25, 2000 at Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.