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Our Agenda

CSEC’s rationale

CSEC was established in 1991 by the partnership of a London-based environmental activist, Robin Grove-White, and a Lancaster University based Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Brian Wynne. Their aim in 1991 was to establish a research centre at Lancaster University that could combine the critical aspects of STS (the interdisciplinary study of Science Technology and Society) with the activism and political insight needed to understand and intervene in contemporary environmental problems and policies.

Researchers

CSEC built up a substantial group of researchers in the 1990s. CSEC researchers were passionately  interested in environmental politics, but  they wanted to think about environmental issues as  sociological, cultural, philosophical phenomena, rather than a purely ‘physical’ or ‘policy’ set of issues and problems.

Research

Many different aspects of the environment and of environmental politics have been the subject of CSEC research, including:

1. Risk, environment and modernity
2. Climate change – modelling, uncertainty  and policy
3. Public perceptions of the disposal of nuclear waste
4. Genetic Modification of crops
5. New Social Movements and environmental politics
6. Creating new participatory fora to solve environmental problems
7. Participation in technological innovation
8. Biodiversity loss, knowledge of biodiversity, biodiversity politics
9. The valuation of nature

Critical Intervention

CSEC researchers were among the first to really explore what it meant to embrace a social constructivist position with regard to nature and the environment at the same time as wanting, as academics, to intervene in and improve the quality of environmental debates.
CSEC researchers bring - to debates on nuclear waste, sustainability, climate change, GM crops, etc.  - a distinctly qualitative, interpretive, sociologically informed understanding of what is at stake in contemporary environmental issues, movements and politics. CSEC has remained at the forefront of research that combines rigorous critical thinking with a commitment to intervening in contemporary environmental debates.

Click on the links below for examples of recent and current research:

• Arenas for Risk Governance - nuclear energy of the European Commission
• Understanding and Acting within Loweswater: A Community Approach to Catchment Management
• Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation
• Facilitating Alternative Agro-Food Networks: Stakeholders Perspectives on Research Needs
• Taxonomy at a Crossroads