Environmental Health Governance in Six Cities: How Scientific Cultures, Practices and Infrastructure Shape Governance Styles

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General Audience Summary This project will focus on efforts to understand and address the health effects of long term exposure to transportation-related air pollution in six cities: Albany, New York City, Philadelphia, Houston, Beijing, and Bengalura. In each city studied, project researchers will examine the operation and use of science in four arenas of governance: environment, health, transportation and education. They will explore how these different arenas interrelate, and they will map the sources of scientific evidence used in governance, how these sources are evaluated, and translated into policy and programming. They will also document and analyze the scientific infrastructures that produced the findings used in governance, the diversity of stakeholders involved in interpreting scientific findings, and diverse cultural logics that shape the creation and use of scientific knowledge in different settings. Ethnographic interviews will be the primary means of data collection, supplemented by analyses of scientific publications, policy debates, and media coverage. The final stage of the project will result in recommendations that will be actively disseminated among policy makers, journalists and other stakeholders in all cities and countries studied in the project. Project results will also be translated into curriculum for K-undergraduate students, using the techniques and infrastructure developed by RPI's EcoEd Research Group.Technical Summary This project is an innovative extension of an ongoing project, The Asthma Files project. The digital platform built for the ongoing project will support collaboration among researchers (including student researchers) involved in the new project. In addition, there will be in each city a field school to teach the project's methods to students. The aim of the project is to advance understanding of different ways scientific capacity is developed and used in governance, examining how environmental health research and governance has developed. The project will result in a theoretically robust, empirically grounded conception of environmental health research and governance styles, detailing and categorizing different ways of developing environmental health data, advancing the sciences of environment and health, and directing these toward governance of complex problems. It will extend theorization of governance by addressing how scientific cultures, practices, and infrastructure shape governance processes and outcomes; and it will test and stabilize the process and cyberinfrastructure needed to support collaborative research in the social studies of science. Project results will have wide implications in efforts to improve collaboration between governance regimes (across scale, and between nations); such collaboration is particularly important in addressing complex, often trans-boundary problems like air pollution, which call for new levels of cooperation and sharing of technology, data, and effective policy design.