This paper addresses some key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society itself. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible ‘sustainable energy’...

Innovation is about more than technological invention. It involves change of many kinds: cultural, organisational and behavioural as well as technological. And there are no guarantees that any particular realised innovation will necessarily be positive. Accordingly, innovation is not a one-track...

"This paper slightly amends a concluding chapter in the above book on ‘vulnerability in technological cultures’. It offers a personal view of key governance implications of this fruitful concept. Picking up earlier arguments, technological vulnerability is seen in a dual fashion – both in...

For good or ill, technology mediates our relationships with one another and with nature. Whether an ox-drawn plough in the hands of a peasant, or remote sensing equipment feeding back data from a satellite, technology informs and shapes our place in our environments. It is therefore unsurprising...

"Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book's chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural...

Equally at national and the highest international levels, few issues in technology governance are more vexed than those around the precautionary principle. Often using colourful rhetoric – and frequently paying scant attention to the substantive form taken by precaution in any given setting,...