Govert Valkenburg

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• PhD
• Research Professor (Forsker 1) at Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Arctic food systems blend Traditional Ecological Knowledge with modern, often energy-intensive influences, triggered by colonization. Food systems' future depends on alignment of tradition with innovation, facilitation of resilience and a heritage-driven interaction with the global economy-at a pace determined by local communities.

After the many symmetries (subject-object, truth-falsity, etc.) that science and technology studies (STS) has explored, one symmetry seems unaddressed: the symmetry of explaining non-existence from the same kind of causes as existence. A social-constructivist perspective that articulates the work required to bring about existence cannot uncriticall...

Introduction The focus on quantitative indicators–number of publications and grants, journal impact factors, Hirsch-index–has become pervasive in research management, funding systems, and research and publication practices (SES). Accountability through performance measurement has become the gold standard to increase productivity and (cost-) efficie...

The objective of this paper is to review how Science and Technology Studies (STS) has contributed to climate change mitigation research. We focus on large‐scale infrastructures as a key topic of both mitigation efforts and recent STS scholarship. The paper assesses the conceptual and methodological treatments in this field, uses literature evidence...

As the climate crisis moves from a distant threat to a lived reality, cities across the world are recognizing the importance of actions that will not only reduce emissions but help communities adapt to climate change. In response to this, cities are now introducing climate-friendly infrastructure such as nature-based solutions, active travel routes...

Policy institutions have been increasingly investing in demonstrators, pilots, living labs, test beds, and so forth, which focus on novel experimental approaches to dealing with climate change. In particular, cities have been advocated as ideal innovation sites for such experiments. However, we argue that insufficient attention has been given to ac...

The centrality of energy for daily life entails that citizens' relations to energy need particular attention, to the extent that it might merit a specific concept of energy citizenship. However, the academic literature on energy citizenship has remained small even if it is growing, the concept itself underspecified, and focused on a narrow set of t...

Objective: to investigate the perspectives of biomedical researchers on responsible assessment criteria that foster responsible conduct of research Design: A qualitative focus group study Setting: 3 University medical centers in the NetherlandsParticipants: 2 randomly selected groups of early career researchers (PhD and postdoc level & senior resea...

Democracy requires some sort of exchange of knowledge between holders of different knowledge positions. The concept of epistemic justice brings the ability to know and the right to be recognised as a knowledgeable person under a scheme of justice. It problematises social conditions that potentially compromise the ability to share knowledge and ther...

Democracy requires some sort of exchange of knowledge between holders of different knowledge positions. The concept of epistemic justice brings the ability to know and the right to be recognized as a knowledgeable person under a scheme of justice. It problematizes social conditions that potentially compromise the ability to share knowledge and effe...

Research integrity (RI) is usually discussed in terms of responsibilities that individual researchers bear towards the scientific work they conduct, as well as responsibilities that institutions have to enable those individual researchers to do so. In addition to these two bearers of responsibility, a third category often surfaces, which is variabl...

Second-generation (2G) biofuels are promoted worldwide as remedy to sustainable-energy challenges in the transport sector and as response to the criticism of first-generation biofuels. By utilizing agriculture and forest residues, 2G biofuels claim to support agricultural livelihoods and boost rural economies. Quantitative estimates exist of the av...

Background: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question of how the responsibilities are to be divided between the i...

Marketization and quantification have become ingrained in academia over the past few decades. The trust in numbers and incentives has led to a proliferation of devices that individualize, induce, benchmark, and rank academic performance. As an instantiation of that trend, this article focuses on the establishment and contestation of ‘algorithmic al...

Background: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question how the division between individual and institutional respon...

Governance of innovation needs to cater in a democratic way for heterogeneity of knowledges. Many initiatives in the democratisation of innovation aspire to some sort of consensus among relevant actors. However, consensus tends to silence dissenting voices, typically those of marginalised groups. In situations of high epistemic and epistemological...

Background: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question of how the responsibilities are to be divided between the in...

Background Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question how the division between individual and institutional respons...

In pursuit of responsible research and innovation (RRI), emphasis has been on various forms of inclusion in the governance of science, technology and innovation. Given that much of the ideas on inclusion in fact refer to discursive inclusion, it is surprising that little attention has hitherto been paid to what seems foundational to any discursive...

Many social problems have important technological aspects. At the same time, it is usually impossible to identify a single, purely technological cause for the problem, nor is it in most cases possible to identify a single technological solution. In practice, such problems can best be understood by conceptualizing the social and the technical as mut...

Energy transitions are complex processes, the management and governance of which are characterised by large uncertainties and ambiguities. Moreover, further complexities emerge when energy transitions are initiated in pursuit of energy security. Because of these complexities, transitions towards secure low-carbon systems qualify as unstructured pro...

Problems of energy security (ES) and climate change mitigation (CCM) are inextricably connected and form complex and unstructured problems (see Chapter 9), the solution of which is hard if not impossible to accommodate by conventional structures of governance. This chapter offers an attempt at describing and operationalising possible governance str...

The idea of securitization holds that perceived threats and the ensuing need for security measures are mobilized in speech acts to legitimate bypassing of normal practices of democratic politics and justification. Citizens, as members of the political community, are thus effectively deprived of their agency. Attempts at securitization gain clout fr...

Background When societies are faced with complex technological problems such as energy transitions, two basic approaches to governance are usually mobilized. On the one hand, there are methods that emphasize the need for enlarging the range of knowledge that is taken on board when decisions are to be made. On the other hand, there are methods that...

Dutch child-care policy has become increasingly focused on making the lives of children more and more ‘transparent’. This is accomplished by connecting multiple digital databases and aggregating data about children and persons to whom they are connected. This is to give the most complete picture possible of children who may be at some sort of risk....

Considerable criticism has been levelled against thinking of privacy and security as being placed in a trade-off relation. Accepting this criticism, this paper explores to what use the trade-off model can still be put thereafter. In specific situations, it makes sense to think of privacy and security as simple concepts that are related in the form...

What concepts such as ‘security’ and ‘privacy’ mean in practice is not merely a matter of policy choices or value concepts, but is inherently tied up with the socio-material and technological arrangement of the practices in which they come to matter. In this article, one trajectory in the implementation of a security regime into the sociotechnical...

This article presents an account of how a technology being transferred from one area of deployment to another entails that specific discourses travel along. In particular, we show that the development of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, often referred to as drones) is importantly determined by its military progeny, as the civilian context inherits s...

Public reason specifies the rules under which a political community collectively conducts ethical reasoning. Technoethics needs to incorporate an account of how the technologies it aspires to govern bear on these rules. As the case of biobanks shows, technologies have the capacity to change the exact meanings of concepts that play central roles in...

As technology has the ability to displace power and politics, it needs to be at the centre of political concern. This article develops the idea that technological citizenship is an important concept in cultivating political sensitivity to technology. Rather than straightforwardly correcting for the displacement of power, technological citizenship m...

This article presents an innovative approach to interpreting and mending political discussions on sensitive medical-ethical issues. It adopts the idiom of co-production, which presumes that technological and political choices shape our world simultaneously, and in turn cannot be seen apart from the background that they themselves help shape. By dev...

Our liberal society can be thought of as the co-existence of two spheres: a public and a private sphere. In the public sphere, we make decisions together, to govern the society we are all part of. Those decisions require a justification that all can accept. In the private sphere, we make decisions that are only our own business. Therefore, we need...

The development of any scientific theory has a certain logic. Bruno Latour formulated a theory, describing the development of science and technology. Outcomes of science are not guided by nature or "the truth", but by a complex negotiation. It starts with ideas, which follow paths of publications and assessment. Then they are either rejected or acc...

The development of any scientific theory has a certain logic. Bruno Latour formulated a theory, describing the development of science and technology. Outcomes of science are not guided by nature or "the truth", but by a complex negotiation. It starts with ideas, which follow paths of publications and assessment. Then they are either rejected or acc...