Barbara Allen
Research project
Communities and Environmental Challenges : Shaping Policy-Relevant Knowledge and Technological Transformation in a Comparative Perspective
Project summary
The goal of this international comparative research is to understand how citizen participation shapes policy-relevant science, regulatory outcomes, and environmental transformation by analyzing four industrial regions. Fieldwork will have been completed in three industrial regions prior to arrival at Iméra (Italy, Germany, U.S.) and my time at the institute will primarily be spent researching the industrial area of Fos-sur-Mer, near Marseille. Questions asked include: In what ways do citizens engage with and influence the making of environmental science and how does that science gain policy-relevance in different national and cultural contexts? How do government regulatory structures, legal systems, professional and non-professional cultures, NGOs, and labor unions impact the making of policy-relevant environmental knowledge? How have environmental conditions, industrial response, and technological transformation varied in these three chemical regions and why? The central questions of the research are aligned with the study’s objectives and research methodology, namely qualitative methods that include: archival research, historical literature review, and document analysis, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork.
