Academic Council Meeting of the RIEPL, Timed to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Institute

The article is devoted to the solemn meeting of the Academic Council of the Russian Research Institute of Economics, Politics and Law in Science and Technology (RIEPL), on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. The ceremony of awarding the employees of RIEPL and the election of new members of the Academic Council took place. Participants of the meeting discussed issues devoted to the most topical problems, tasks and trends in the field of science governance.

About GaDS and PJGD

Multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary journal of Jimma University. Political science, governance, development, leadership, national and international law, globalization, human rights, economics, environmental science, public policy, international relations, international organizations, gender, peace and conflict management, international political economy, multiculturalism, civil society, etc.

Political ecology and the Foucault effect: A need to diversify disciplinary approaches to ecological management?

While explicitly Foucauldian analyses have declined in recent years in the social sciences, Foucault’s ideas continue to strongly influence scholars’ approaches to power, governance and the state. In this article, we explore how Foucauldian concepts shape the work of political ecologists and social scientists working on environmental management, multispecies ethnography and the Anthropocene – often in an unrecognized way. We argue that – regardless of whether or not Foucault’s work is explicitly cited – his legacy of linking scientific projects, population management and state control continues to have an outsized impact on thinking in these fields. It is time, we assert, to directly consider how such theoretical inheritances are affecting the shape of political ecology, in particular, and the social sciences, more generally. How, we ask, are Foucauldian traditions at once enabling and constraining more-than-human scholarship? In this article, we explore the contributions and limitations of Foucauldian approaches in environmental contexts through empirical attention to trout introduction and management efforts in South Africa. Our overall aim is to call for a deeper conversation about how scholars working on environmental topics engage the science-governance nexus. The article ends with proposing landscape, as a material enactment of more-than-human politics, as a useful analytical category to this end.

A framework for assessing the commons qualities of citizen science: comparative analysis of five digital platforms

Citizen Science (CS) has greatly expanded as a collaborative model of knowledge co-production, often outside traditional scientific institutions. However, CS potential to enable new forms of collective governance of scientific research remains largely unexplored. At least, two confronting standpoints dominate the debate around CS: from mere crowdsourcing perspectives supported by debates over cost-effectiveness of massive data collection, to more participatory views, which understand CS as a means to democratize science and challenge current academic structures. Although most accounts of CS focus on crowdsourcing participatory formats, the discussion around CS governance mechanisms that go beyond crowdsourcing models is unfolding. Understanding CS as contributing to constitute science as a commons requires specific conditions that must be met, as well as continuous reflection and discussion. This study provides a framework for exploring the commons-like formations that characterize CS approaches, as already applied in the study of commons based peer production (CBPP). This framework of commons’ qualities considers openness at the governance level, open knowledge at technological and data levels, and social responsibility and impact of CS projects. The framework was tested and informed empirically with the analysis of 5 digital mapping CS projects, to provide points of comparison and illustration. Data was gathered through web collection, based on a netnographic method. The results show that, overall, the dimensions considered prove useful to shed light on the commons-like formations that characterize CS. They further point to the interplay of several institutional, legal, and practical dimensions in constructing and governing openness in citizen science. The preliminary adaptation of the framework is intended to place in an analytical context the debate around CS potential to enable new forms of science governance of knowledge co-production.

About GaDS and PJGD

Multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary journal of Jimma University. Political science, governance, development, leadership, national and international law, globalization, human rights, economics, environmental science, public policy, international relations, international organizations, gender, peace and conflict management, international political economy, multiculturalism, civil society, etc.

The Cybernetic Prediction

This chapter explores the often overlooked area of cybernetic prediction, a form of prediction conceptualized by the ‘father’ of cybernetics, the US mathematician Norbert Wiener, during the 1940s–1960s. Although critical interest in the cultural and political histories of cybernetics is growing, the notion of scientific prediction, which is central to cybernetic control, is insufficiently examined. This chapter argues that this form of prediction is not a mere technical cog in the epistemology of the future, but a complex concept. It demonstrates that Wiener’s epistemology of cybernetic prediction emphasizes the role of uncertainty and does not replace materiality with information. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the useful lessons offered by Wiener’s concept of cybernetic prediction for future-oriented practices within the broader fields of contemporary science, governance, and politics.

The imagined scientist of science governance

In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with social responsibility. The article identifies what we call ‘deficit trouble’, when there is poor alignment of the deficits of different imagined scientists, which may lead to a stalemate in the communication between science policymakers and scientists. We argue that ‘the imagined scientist’ can function as sensitizing concept for further studies of science governance across a range of topics, bringing into view how different deficit logics operate in science policy.

Metascience as a scientific social movement

Emerging out of the “reproducibility crisis” in science, metascientists have become central players in debates about research integrity, scholarly communication, and science policy. The goal of this article is to introduce metascience to STS scholars, detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research projects, and discuss its institutional and intellectual future. Put simply, metascience is a scientific social movement that seeks to use the tools of science- especially, quantification and experimentation- to diagnose problems in research practice and improve efficiency. It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions. Metascientists have been remarkably successful at winning grants, motivating news coverage, and changing policies at science agencies, journals, and universities. Moreover, metascience represents the apotheosis of several trends in research practice, scientific communication, and science governance including increased attention to methodological and statistical criticism of scientific practice, the promotion of “open science” by science funders and journals, the growing importance of both preprint and data repositories for scientific communication, and the new prominence of data scientists as research makes a turn toward Big Science.