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This article explores the flourishing claims to create crisis taskforces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Are taskforces a remedy for all crises? Taskforces are ad-hoc created groups of highly specialized experts who provide advice to policymakers. They have the advantages of flexibility and allow to recruit high-level competences for short-term mandates. However, taskforces are not a panacea, as different types of crises (e.g. creeping crises, disruptive events, cyclical crises) require different types of policy advisory systems. A taskforce is also a short-term, reactive model, which runs the risk of politicization. This article analyzes the suitability of the taskforce model in various situations and compares expert advice provided to decision-makers during the financial crisis and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. It answers the question of what types of advisory systems suit what type of crisis. The contribution shows that in the era of polycrises, one size does not fit all and the distinctive characteristics of crises must be considered to find a fit-for-purpose approach.

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Recently, scientific experts have become increasingly influential in political decision-making. Although previous research has examined the extent and conditions under which politicians use scientific evidence, we know less about how citizens perceive scientific experts. In this study, we argue that the credibility of experts depends not only on the message they deliver or the medium they use, but also on the individual characteristics of the experts. Using data collected from an original survey experiment among Swiss citizens on climate change (N = 1,854), this study analyses whether the gender and discipline of experts influence citizens’ perceptions of their credibility. The results show that, contrary to our assumptions, citizens do not perceive female experts as less credible than their male colleagues. However, this effect is mainly driven by female citizens who consider female and social science experts as more credible. These findings have important implications for the role of experts in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined how scientific information influences policy beliefs among organizations in climate change policy networks in Germany and Japan. Different combinations of information types, policy beliefs, and organizational roles were found to play instrumental roles. Ideational influence can occur when (1) the sender is a credible information source, (2) the receiver can understand the "message," and (3) the receiver depends on the sender's information. Organizational roles involved in this ideational influence are different in technical and political information exchange. The leverage of influence depends on the organizational ecology of different roles in each country. • This policy network study examines the science-policy interface in climate policy. • QAP regression models were applied to the organizational policy beliefs. • Five different roles in scientific information exchange were identified. • The specific combinations of beliefs, info type, and organizational roles matter. • The organizational ecology in Japan and Germany decides the leverage of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researchers (e.g., Vosniadou and Brewer, Cognitive Psychology 24:535–585, 1992) have claimed that children have naïve, but coherent, mental models of the earth, such as the flat earth and the hollow sphere. Recent studies have challenged this view, focusing on the original researchers' methods of testing (drawing and open questions) and coding. In this study we tested the construct validity of these methods by asking expert astronomers to complete the same test originally used with 5-year-olds. Many astronomers gave responses that, if given by young children, would have been considered non-scientific and as evidence of naïve mental models. Many gave two or more seemingly contradictory answers to the same questions and, even when only their 'most scientific' responses were considered, fewer than 50% of these expert scientists were classified as having coherent scientific mental models. Comparison with children's responses to a rephrased and disambiguated task indicated that even 6–7-year-olds gave more scientific answers. The astronomers' comments revealed the main reasons why the original task lacks validity: they found many questions confusing and ambiguous. This may well explain many children's responses, too. Since the task incorrectly indicates that experts in the field have fundamental misconceptions, it is likely also to have led to substantial underestimates of children's scientific understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the current legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan for the development, adoption and execution of legislative and other regulatory legal acts in the field of national security. Scientific expertise is considered as the main tool in assessing the quality and effectiveness of the rule-making process, while the author emphasizes that the types of scientific expertise carried out in the Republic of Kazakhstan (legal, economic, anti-corruption, environmental) are able to ensure compliance with national security requirements only partially. The most promising way to ensure the safety of the law-making process in the article is to conduct a scientific examination for compliance with national interests as an independent type of examination. Developing positions on the introduction of an independent type of scientific expertise for compliance with national interests, it should be noted that it should not be limited only to the stage of preparation of the draft law. Scientific expertise on the observance of national interests should be applied to the existing regulatory legal acts, which, together with the Institute of Legal Monitoring, will be aimed at ensuring the quality and effectiveness of legal regulation of public relations in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Within the framework of the scientific project No. AR14872048: Development of measures to ensurethe national security of the Republic of Kazakhstan in the legislative sphere.

This article evaluates the Philippine government's science-based response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the field of administrative rulemaking. Specifically, it evaluates the effectiveness of the Motorcycle Pillion Shield Regulation (MPSR) to implement social distancing and prevent COVID-19 infections in motorcycle backriding. Applying Max Weber's view on the necessity of scientific expertise in rulemaking, and using government and media reports, the article analyzes the scientific foundation of the MPSR rulemaking by the Philippine Inter-agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF-EID) and National Task Force (NTF), the country's top task forces against COVID-19. It argues that a truly science-based approach to rulemaking must be based on sound scientific evidence and consultation with scientists, experts, interest groups, and motorcycle riding public, before crafting and implementing a regulation. Results showed that use of shield in motorcycle back-riding can cause the spread of the virus instead of preventing it, especially in motorcycle taxis. The use of common helmet and the inevitable physical contact between the driver and the back-rider may cause infection if one rider is positive, as scientific studies indicate that touching contaminated surfaces can cause a transmission. It is also an added expense, unsafe, and prone to accident as the shield obstructs the motorcycle's aerodynamics and balance. Lastly, no comprehensive scientific study and consultations with experts and riders before the MPSR was crafted and implemented by the NTF. Ultimately, this article contends that the government's claim to a science-based strategy against COVID-19 can remain elusive if it fails to address the country's lack of a reliable scientific advisory group and if it fails to amend the new Philippine Administrative Code to require regulators to strictly follow sound science in rulemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse insufficient epistemic pluralism and associated problems in science-based policy advice during the COVID-19 pandemic drawing on specific arguments in Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy. Our goal is twofold: to deepen our understanding of the epistemic shortcomings in science-based policy during the pandemic, and to assess the merits and problems of Feyerabend’s arguments for epistemic pluralism as well as their relevance for policy-making. We discuss opportunities and challenges of integrating a plurality of viewpoints from within and outside science into policy advice thus contributing to discussions about normative issues concerning evidence and expertise in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, proposals to deliberately modify the Earth's climate have gained political traction as a controversial last resort measure against dangerous global warming. The article provides a 'longue durée' picture of such climate engineering proposals. It traces their historical trajectory from the late 1950s to their most recent arrival on mainstream climate policy agendas. This perspective suggests that the history of climate engineering unfolds not only along historically specific modes of understanding climatic change. It also corresponds to changing alliances between climate science and the state. By bringing together historical scholarship with contributions from sociology and science policy studies, the article sheds new light on the rise of climate engineering proposals. It recontextualizes these proposals within the bigger history of the political cultivation of climate science. This perspective highlights how deeply entwined efforts to understand and efforts to govern climatic change have always been. This article is categorized under:Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and KnowledgeThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate KnowledgeThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Actual Problems of Jurisprudence / Habaršy. Zan̦ Seriâsy is the property of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article sets out to examine the politicising and depoliticising effects of the various stories that were deployed by the UK government in its response to the coronavirus crisis during its daily press briefings over a 2-month period between 16 March and 16 May 2020. In doing so, we identify four key narratives: (1) unprecedented government activism ; (2) working to plan ; (3) national security, wartime unity and sacrifice ; and (4) scientific guidance. Through a quantitative and qualitative study of the deployment of these narratives, we attempt to further recent theoretical insights on depoliticisation by noting that the COVID-19 crisis produced a particular type of crisis moment in which the government was forced to respond in 'real time' to a set of circumstances which were rapidly changing. As such, this made it much more difficult to control the various stories they wanted to tell and therefore find a coherent 'anchor' for their politicising and depoliticising strategies. This led to some deft discursive footwork as the government sought to pass the ball of responsibility between various groups of actors in order to rapidly and continually shift the balance between avoiding blame and taking credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a notable increase in the production of scientific expertise by large multidisciplinary groups. The issue we address is how reports may be written by such groups in spite of their size and of formidable obstacles: complexity of subject matter, uncertainty, and scientific disagreement. Our focus is on the International Panel on Climate Change (henceforth IPCC), unquestionably the best-known case of such collective scientific expertise. What we show is that the organization of work within the IPCC aims to make it possible to produce documents that are indeed expert reports. To do so, we first put forward the epistemic norms that apply to expert reports in general, that is, the properties that reports should have in order to be useful and to help decision-making. Section 2 claims that these properties are: intelligibility, relevance and accuracy. Based on this analysis, section 3 points to the difficulties of having IPCC reports indeed satisfying these norms. We then show how the organization of work within the IPCC aims at and to a large extent secures intelligibility, relevance and accuracy, with the result that IPCC reports can be relied on for decision-making. Section 4 focuses on the fundamentals of IPCC's work organization—that is, division of labour within the IPCC—while section 5 investigates three frameworks that were introduced over the course of the functioning of the IPCC: the reviewing procedure of IPCC reports, the language that IPCC authors use to express uncertainty and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). Concluding remarks are offered in section 6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe to address the question of what kind of knowledge we should incorporate into public health policy. We show that policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic has been biomedicine-centric in that its evidential basis marginalised input from non-biomedical disciplines. We then argue that in particular the social sciences could contribute essential expertise and evidence to public health policy in times of biomedical emergencies and that we should thus strive for a tighter integration of the social sciences in future evidence-based policy-making. This demand faces challenges on different levels, which we identify and discuss as potential inhibitors for a more pluralistic evidential basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how individual and contextual factors collectively contribute to the developmental histories that facilitate the emergence of creative expertise in science is improved by considering the contribution of the broad structure of developed cognitive abilities to creativity, prospective research on the high achieving or gifted students who may choose careers in and end up as creative scientists later in life, as well as retrospective studies of established creative scientists themselves and what their educational histories reveal. We first review and elaborate on these connections as documented in research which explore the development of talent, including cognitive mechanisms that include math and spatial reasoning and science related educational opportunities. We propose a research thought experiment that utilizes the multi-trait, multi-method matrix, and bifactor modeling to help understand the true overlap between measurement structures of cognitive and creative aptitudes. Then we explore the social and cultural contexts that may facilitate and/or hinder creative solutions in science through the lens of how these ecosystems influence talent development for gifted students and also the production of elite scientists. Based on this review, some policies will be suggested that may enhance the development of scientific creativity and broader societal innovation and expand the pipeline to include and fully develop the talents of disadvantaged students and provide nurturing environments to improve the likelihood of the emergence of scientific creative expertise.

Understanding how individual and contextual factors collectively contribute to the developmental histories that facilitate the emergence of creative expertise in science is improved by considering the contribution of the broad structure of developed cognitive abilities to creativity, prospective research on the high achieving or gifted students who may choose careers in and end up as creative scientists later in life, as well as retrospective studies of established creative scientists themselves and what their educational histories reveal. We first review and elaborate on these connections as documented in research which explore the development of talent, including cognitive mechanisms that include math and spatial reasoning and science related educational opportunities. We propose a research thought experiment that utilizes the multi-trait, multi-method matrix, and bifactor modeling to help understand the true overlap between measurement structures of cognitive and creative aptitudes. Then we explore the social and cultural contexts that may facilitate and/or hinder creative solutions in science through the lens of how these ecosystems influence talent development for gifted students and also the production of elite scientists. Based on this review, some policies will be suggested that may enhance the development of scientific creativity and broader societal innovation and expand the pipeline to include and fully develop the talents of disadvantaged students and provide nurturing environments to improve the likelihood of the emergence of scientific creative expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the possibility of using semantic search to solve the problem of appointing an expert in automation systems for the management of scientific and technical expertise. The characteristics of tag search and the problems that arise when using it are given, which is followed by a description of the domain ontology and the semantic search algorithm. The main problems to be dealt with during the implementation of this approach are also indicated. After that, the results achieved with the use of semantic search are examined. In the conclusion, we discuss the direction of the further development of the algorithm within the framework of the information system and its expediency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the research is to provide analytical outlook of the norms and regulations of the Ukrainian legislation concerning handwritten and book heritage, its preservation, scientific expertise and value assessment as well as proposals for its improvement. The methodology of the research is based on a systematic approach, structural and functional analysis of legislative acts concerning the manuscript and book heritage, scientific expertise and value assessment thereof. This approach provides a necessary toolkit for analysis of reflection in the legislation of such concepts as cultural heritage, handwritten and book heritage, monuments, cultural values of national cultural heritage, national library collections, scientific expertise and expertise of the value of handwritten and book heritage. The scientific novelty of the research. For the first time the evaluation of handwritten and book heritage as a separate definition in the legislation and regulation of all issues related to it is considered; the paper emphasises the lack of concepts of cultural heritage of the depositaries of libraries and the National Library Fond of Ukraine in legal norms and regulations. Conclusions. Due to the imperfection of Ukrainian legislation, there is no unified register of historical and cultural heritage - a consolidated database of cultural values that would perform the function of state registration, centralised accounting and protection of monuments at the national level. There is no clear regulatory framework regarding the value assessment and the registration of manuscript and book heritage. Therefore the current agenda should include the legislative update of the definition, composition and content of the National Library Fond as a phenomenon of cultural and unique heritage; the revision of terminology; provision of precise definitions of cultural heritage and the national cultural heritage; development and enforcement of legal regulations ensuring the preservation of the manuscript and book heritage, and provision of free access to it.

The aim of this paper is to fill a research gap to show how ‘below the line’ comments can be used for digital food activism. As the study focuses on genetically modified (GM) crops and foods, the study also reveals the narratives deployed by commenters in this particular debate. This paper attempts to provide an answer through a qualitative data analysis using a grounded theory approach and a discourse analysis. The findings reveal a lack of trust in science and political authority, and the use of alternative knowledges by digital food activists. The paper concludes by discussing how this study adds to the understanding of digital food activism. Whilst the below the line comments as a form of digital food activism may not connect to action in the non-virtual world, they do offer an opportunity for debate.

This article analyzes the new tool of receiving feedback about the quality of social services — the Independent Quality Assessment. This tool is claimed to be “a form of social control”, one of the demonstration of public participation in social sphere administration. The object of research was social care centers for families and children. A key element of the Independent Quality Assessment is a Public Council of the executive authority, non-governmental organizations, and individual consumers of social services and the expert community should play an active role. Last but not least, an independent assessment concerning their position depends whether it will be an effective social institution, promoting the development of civil society in Russia. Independent Quality Assessment prospects are determined by the state ability and readiness to carry on a dialogue with the individual and collective consumers of social services, and take into account their wishes during the development and correction of social initiatives, of which it is the author. Despite the fact that the full implementation of the Independent Quality Assessment in the social sphere was held in 2015, we may already say that this new tool has been tested in many regions of Russian Federation, including Moscow. Experience of implementation of independent assessment provided information, not only about the need to improve research bases, but also about the institutional traps that can lie in wait of this method of receiving “feedback”. In this article, various issues of Independent Quality Assessment implementation are considered in terms of the likelihood of institutional traps, and options are proposed for actions aimed at minimizing the risk of their rooting in the further practice of evaluation studies.

This study examines the application of mixed-method and participatory approaches to conservation and development research. Both approaches were applied in a research project on the relationship between ecosystem governance and the wellbeing of local communities adjacent to a protected area in Laos. By encouraging four of the involved field researchers to reflect upon and expose their practical approaches as scientific experts (in terms of methodologies, objectives, reliability of results and research influence), this article aims to improve our learning from research practice and to promote reflexivity in research. The reflexive study presented here emphasizes the social and political context or real world situation against which research outputs can and should be evaluated, and retrospectively sheds light on the barriers to reach research objectives. In essence, the article addresses the relation between science and policy, and underlines the political undercurrent of conservation and development research in facilitating institutional change. The article outlines the very role of researchers in developing conservation policies, and provides a foundation for institutions and individual researchers to promote critical and constructive self-reflections in scientific practices.

Taking point of departure in the ambitious framework for ‘safe and just operating spaces’ for social-ecological systems, this paper explores the applicability of this conceptual framing. Specifically, we draw attention to limitations in the conceptualisation of justice as a question of attaining a minimal level of (material) wellbeing. With an empirical case from Laos, we apply a broader notion of environmental justice based on interconnected dimensions of distribution, procedure and recognition to examine the dynamic relationship between ‘safe’ and ‘just’ at village level, and we question how ‘boundaries’ of social and ecological sustainability are conceptualized and determined. Our findings illustrate important considerations for the way conservation interventions are rationalized and designed, in particular for the way social and environmental sustainability are portrayed and how governance is envisaged to function locally. This paper contributes to current sustainability debates on how to explore and integrate justice dimensions in development and conservation within human-defined planetary boundaries.