From climate change to social change

Providing new insights into climate science as a system as well as into climate-policy interactions, this account is concerned with the challenges that climate change poses to the production and organization of scientific knowledge. Based on an international conference organized by Knowledge for Climate?a Dutch national research program on climate change and adaptation strategies?this account analyzes the issues from various angles, including epistemology, science-policy interface studies, political science, system analysis, science and technology, sociology, and knowledge production. Offering several perspectives on the implications of climate change and presenting a number of options for renewal of science-policy interrelations, this discussion argues for the development of regional, national, and international strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Climate change, from many perspectives and for many reasons, is a complex issue: scientifically, politically, and in terms of global justice. As such, climate change might be the global societal and political challenge of the 21st century. Dealing with it, either via mitigation or via adaptation, will ask for enormous societal efforts. This book addresses only one of the questions related to this complex challenge: the social efforts to deal with climate change need to be scientifically sound. Yet scientists are uncertain in some respects, and society tends to distrust science to some extent. Therefore, this book's central question is: what kind of science-society and science-policy relations do we need in order to translate climate change into social change? Next to the uncertainty issue, the book discusses different approaches in the science-policy interface, such as transdisciplinarity, boundary work, transition processes, social learning, climate science policy roles, and science system analysis.