Many have flagged that the “nexus” has become a buzzword, and I have found myself working in two different projects that use the word “nexus”, but have quite different focuses, aims and scopes. The first project is a European project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon2020 programme, and is entitled Read more…
How to provide good science advice to policymakers, under conditions of scientific complexity and uncertainty?
There are three points that I would like to make. (more…)
What happens to science advice to policy when science speaks with multiple voices? How does pluralism affect the science policy interface? Is pluralism irreducible or can it be governed? In this post, I review three approaches to governance in the context of pluralism.
The complexity view is that economic systems are adaptive systems, becoming systems, self-organising systems. Adaptive systems are not as susceptible to planning as machines may be. Complexity may be useful to discuss the challenges of scaling up the actions and innovations of economic agents and firms to economic growth, and the limits of trickle down logics in the context of persistent and growing inequalities in terms of non-linearities between lower level and higher level system components.
Why write a blog about complexity and science for policy? Because complexity matters for science advice to policy. Complex systems may lead to a situation in which science cannot provide all answers. Complexity refers to situations in which “the whole is different from the sum of its parts”, because of emerging properties at different scales of analysis. This situation is challenging for governance, because providing evidence on “the parts” will lead to different decisions than providing evidence on “the whole”.