Environmental Expertise

Abstract

Environmental issues have complex causes and impacts that vary across human societies. These issues have significant present and future consequences, making the development of appropriate environmental expertise critically important for responsive policy and practice. Although environmental expertise—grounded in specialist knowledge and experience in particular domains of life—is critical, it is also highly contested. The expertise of the biophysical sciences has tended to dominate public and policy deliberations about the environment; however, relevant environmental expertise also includes Indigenous knowledges, social and other sciences, humanities, and many practice-based perspectives, such as that drawn from farm workers or energy consumers. Environmental expertise is therefore a rich area for sociological inquiry. The question of who counts as an expert is particularly pertinent. Sociologists offer sometimes conflicting ideas about what counts as expertise. One view treats expertise as a real and unequally distributed phenomenon grounded in tacit skills, credentials, and demonstrated competence (a substantive model). Another treats it as a socially attributed label assigned based on differential relations of authority and trust (a relational model). Some scholars propose a hybrid view of expertise that combines both substantive and relational models, recognizing the role of boundary organizations in mediating relations between science and policy and stabilizing expertise through both capacity building and public recognition. Sociologists also ask how social, political, and material contexts shape the norms and nature of environmental expertise. They find that the attribution of expertise is codependent upon the way that environmental issues are framed, the national or global political cultures within which expertise is performed (civic epistemologies), and the institutional resources and material infrastructures that are afforded to some prospective experts over others. Sociologists are also interested in how environmental expertise is being transformed over time, especially in response to public and scientific controversy and as part of global agendas for sustainability. They observe that experts and expert organizations are increasingly expected to meet a range of demands, including integrating a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, acknowledging and working with Indigenous expertise, engaging with publics, going beyond policy-relevant expert consensus, and enhancing reflexivity in the organization of expertise. Decades of scholarship have produced fruitful insights on environmental expertise, and sociologists will continue to play an important role. There remains substantial scope for sociological research to critically analyze the changing nature of expertise, but there is also potential to harness these critical insights to constructively design, enable, and evaluate novel experiments in how environmental expertise is produced and used.