Poste
PhDInstitution de rattachement
Centre de recherche médecine, sciences, santé, santé mentale, société (CERMES3)Thesis title:
SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE AND PUBLIC ACTION. Managing the air pollution problem
Thesis directors: Soraya Boudia, Université Paris Descartes and Maurice Cassier, CNRS
Key words: air pollution, environmental health, scientific expertise, public action
Summary:
Air pollution offers social science an exemplary case study of the long-term persistence of environmental health problems. Despite a public accumulation of scientific knowledge, the associative mobilizations rise, the health agencies development and the significant growth of scientific expertise in the public policies development, the public action is characterized by a certain degree of inaction leading to the persistence of these problems over long-term periods.
At the crossroads of the new political sociology of science (Frickel and Moore, 2006) and the collective risks and expertise sociology (Gilbert, 2003), this thesis studies the scientific and political dynamics that structure the definition and treatment of air pollution-related health problems in Paris, as they compare to New York and Singapore. This thesis analyses the recent phenomenon of a rise in environmental and health policies initiated by “global cities” as an addition to or substitution for national policies.