Environmental issues: knowledge, uncertainty and the environment

Environmental issues have now surfaced in all the social sciences, especially geography, sociology and political science. Yet the unbounded character of the environment has evaded territorialization, resulting in an increasingly expanding and multidisciplinary field of inquiry, too wide to be easily traversed in a progress report like this. Many of the issues which are ‘environmental ’ are also ‘cultural’, ‘economic’, ‘social ’ and ‘rural’, and thus covered in part by other progress reports in this journal. So, in this my first report, I shall confine myself to the more manageable area of environmental knowledge. Recent work in this area has been driven by increasing cross-disciplinary attention to questions of risk and the quality of knowledge in the modern world. This addresses not only the production of environmental knowledge through science but also its dissemination, legitimation and contestation through debates within society. In particular, work in social constructivism and related approaches has analysed environmental knowledge as the product not merely of scientific practices but also of research cultures and of negotiations between science and policy, between science and its publics and between claims to authority. Social constructivist studies of science were