
Luigi PellizzoniScuola Normale Superiore | Normale
Luigi Pellizzoni
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Publications (108)
Preparedness is an anticipatory approach developed in the military and health sectors in response to unforeseen and unforeseeable crises and emergencies. It has recently entered the debate over the resilience and sustainability of European food systems. The paper seeks to shed light on the implications of the European Union's adoption of preparedne...
The article deals with some implications of radical uncertainty for participatory democracy, and more precisely for Participatory Technology Assessment (PTA). Two main forms of PTA are discussed. One is aimed at involving lay citizens and highlighting public opinion. The other is addressed to stakeholder groups and organisations, not only in terms...
Peatlands have served a crucial ecological and economic purpose for a very long time. Purun (Eleocharis dulcis) is a common plant that grows in peat bogs and contributes to the community. Its population is diminishing, however, due to changes in land management and environmental damage. The concept of communal empowerment was inspired by the sustai...
The paper discusses Dimitris Papadopoulos and Andrea Ghelfi's proposal for a transition to a 'green democracy'. It identifies the main points of their argument, namely, a case for a green democracy from below, the level of everyday practices and of a technoscience made by and for communities; the need for taking into account more than human constit...
Authority in decline? Scentific Expertise in the Post-Truth Age
The rise of post-truth seems to indicate that the confusion between knowledge and opinion has reached a point of no return, making scientific expertise indistinguishable from any kind of assertion. However, the weakening of the epistemic authority of science in the public sphere does...
The paper deals with preparedness, a take on biological threats of growing academic and policy relevance, as a clue to ongoing changes in governmental approaches. We first address its features. Gauged against the security rationale of biopolitical governmentality, as discussed by Foucault, we argue these show "post-securitarian" traits. We then foc...
La pandemia del Sars-CoV-2 sollecita la sociologia dell'ambiente a interrogarsi sugli approcci adeguati a renderne conto. A lungo la disciplina è stata dominata dal dibattito tra realismo e costruttivismo, de facto privilegiando quest'ultimo. La "svolta ontologica" nelle scienze sociali e umane ha portato alla ribalta materialismi anti-dualisti, id...
Human material dependency is hardly questioned as such. However, there are different understandings of humans’ connection with their biophysical milieu. In this paper, we discuss four basic accounts, which differ according to whether dependency and agency are assumed to be strong or weak. Though these accounts, which we label as Cartesian, Kantian,...
The case for post-work is not new but has been recently gaining momentum, in coincidence with a growing hypostatisation and precarisation of work. It comprises claims about less work, more pleasurable work and a withdrawal from unjust work relations, often intertwining arguments about the overcoming of alienated work and of necessitated work. Thoug...
The idea of pricing nature for saving it has gained major traction with the rise of carbon trading and the economy of ecosystem services. However, this has not corresponded to significant effects on climate change, biodiversity loss and other ecological challenges. Is this because nature has not been marketized enough, or because of a fundamental f...
The rise of post-truth seems to indicate that the confusion between knowledge and opinion has reached a point of no return, making scientific expertise indistinguishable from any kind of assertion. However, the weakening of the epistemic authority of science in the public sphere does not correspond to a weakening of its effectiveness. To support th...
The modern outlook on emancipation has made its quest inseparable from a quest for endless enhancement, based on an ever-more intensive exploitation of the biophysical world. This accounts for how unsustainable ways of living are reiterated worldwide, in spite of evidence of their deleterious effects. The underpinnings of unsustainability, and a ma...
En prenant appui sur le débat qu’ont suscité en Italie les mesures restrictives liées à la pandémie de la covid-19, souvent ramenées à l’idée d’un « état d’exception », le sociologue de l’environnement Luigi Pellizzoni1 propose, dans cet article écrit au départ au printemps 20202, de réfléchir sur la façon dont le pouvoir recompose la fracture onto...
Sustainable development, ecological modernisation, eco-efficiency and the like have reframed material limits as conventional barriers to growth. Even in recent arguments for degrowth, limits recede to the background in favour of self-limitation. To reclaim limits as the grounds for an effective environmental politics. I reconstruct how the case for...
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has elicited renewed attention to an approach to emergency which has come to the forefront in recent years, namely preparedness. Scholars have argued that its rationale is profoundly divergent from the securitarian outlook of prevention and precaution, entailing different techniques and ostensibly also a different, non-(o...
The chapter illustrates in a comparative perspective the strategies of the Italian and Spanish governments on the circular economy. In particular, critical points and strengths of both approaches are highlighted, with a multifocal view on the impact of both national experiences for the construction of a circular economy governance at European level...
Science and technology have been contentious topics for Marxism. Marx elaborated 'science' as a critical method for analysing how reification and fetishism naturalise capitalist social relations, yet prevalent Marxist approaches have adopted or imitated positivist science. Marx understood the productive forces as collective knowledge, capacities an...
The theme of the commons has long been debated, taking in recent years an increasing
sense of urgency, arguably not unrelated with economic stagnation, environmental threats and political insecurity. A number of meanings and perspectives has stratified, often blurring analytical and normative purposes. In a way or another, however, capitalism is a...
Prefigurative mobilizations replace protest with direct action, means and ends becoming ideally one and the same. Analytically this entails a two-step movement: first, subtraction (withdrawal) from some arrangement; second, affirmation of an alternative. Both positive and critical assessments focus on the strength or lack of affirmativeness. Howeve...
The paper addresses the evolution of the issue of responsibility in the context of current societal transformations relsted to sustainability. It deals first with the meaning of responsibility, how some features of modern society affect it and the problem of collective responsibility. Subsequently, it elaborates on the evolution of the problematic...
The paper addresses the controversy over the notion and the narrative of the Anthropocene. It is shown that the scientific diatribe on the beginning of the alleged new era interweaves with that over its social and political implications. Concerns about the post-social, post-political and post-natural ontology entailed by the notion are addressed. O...
The rise of post-truth has called into question STS, mostly in the defendant's role. A critique from outside, such as Lee McIntyre's, provides a debatable account of science deconstruction and its appropriation by "right-wing postmodernism". Within STS, post-truth has revamped discussions on the implications of the symmetry principle, or elicited a...
The paper addresses the controversy over the notion and the narrative of the Anthropocene. It is shown that the scientific diatribe on the beginning of the alleged new era interweaves with that over its social and political implications. Concerns about the post-social, post-political and post-natural ontology entailed by the notion are addressed. O...
This Crossing Boundary hosts contributions accounting for ex-periences and theoretical perspectives which may look distant for how they address the socio-technical transition in the energy field but, we believe, when put in conversation, help common questions and tentative answers come to the fore. Giorgio Osti, Paul Upham, Paula Maria Bögel and Pa...
Republicanism gives non-domination a central role. However, the modes of domination change over time. Expertise and anticipation have gained growing relevance in this respect. An emergent form of anticipation is pre-emption. This represents a peculiar ‘politics of time’, whereby an eschatological event is set and continuously postponed, past, prese...
As a politics of time, pre-emption establishes a ‘messianic’ relationship between past, present, and future, whereby an indeterminate but certain eschatological event is posited and indefinitely postponed. This gives reality plasticity while obstructing actual change. Pre-emption plays a growing role in environmental politics, building on two types...
In Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour takes issue with globalization and its élites vis-à-vis the ecological crisis. The former, he claims, is the result of modernity’s universalistic aspiration, for actualizing which the planet is not big enough. The latter have decided that, faced with ever-more worrisome ecological...
The workshop was conceived as a moment of reflection and confrontation in order to start thinking about the issue of participation in civil protection planning with a broad scope, thus laying the foundations for building a robust robust scientific contribution also in the area of political science and public law, given the complexity and importance...
The theme of the commons has long been discussed, with a variety of meanings. The chapter addresses basic questions and approaches from an environmental sociology perspective. It first looks at the origins of the debate, marked by Hardin’s seminal article and Ostrom’s path-breaking research. Second, it deals with discussions associated with the glo...
The article elaborates on the current debate over the commons and its genealogy. Hardin’s formulation of the issue emerged in the context of a «limits to growth» problematization of the social, economic and environmental crisis of embedded liberalism. Backdrop of Ostrom’s work, instead, is the post-Fordist reorganization as «growth of limits», with...
Ethic of responsibility and ethic of ultimate ends are most discussed Weberian concepts. The article reflects on their heuristic value in the present. A common interpretation claims that, in a rationalized society, the ethic of responsibility supplants or integrates the ethic of ultimate ends. The two ethics, however, fundamentally differ according...
Environmental sociology was born forty years ago as a result of emergent ecological concerns. After the New Ecological Paradigm and the first eco-Marxist analyses the interest prevailed in the “social construction of environmental problems”. Subsequently the perspective of practices has gained salience. “New materialism” has seen the discipline act...
The seminar aims to offer an opportunity of discussion between Italian scholars, working both in Italy and abroad, who share an interest in the problem-area identified at the intersection of three words: politics, ontology, ecology. On this issue scholars belonging to various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities are at work. Communicat...
This section draws from the opening plenary session of the 6 th STS Italia Conference "Sociotechnical Environments" (Trento, 24-26 No-vember 2016). The section was dedicated to the topic "Sociotechnical Environments: actors, technologies, geographies and new kinds of action". It is composed by three contributions which articulate different relation...
A common thread in the contributions to this special issue can be found in the Foucauldian notion of intensification. Technoscientific imaginaries and publics have long been embroiled; yet, elements of novelty in their relationship can be detected in the ambivalence of the overcoming of traditional purification work; the expanding production of ‘pr...
Abstract: A striking aspect of current debt is that it seems characterized by limitlessness in space and time. Benjamin’s account of capitalism as a permanent cult gives a clue to its peculiar infinity. Debt shows the traits of a messianic time. More precisely, it partakes in the increasingly dominative temporality of preemption,
where a catastroph...
Environmental sociology was born to study the interaction of human societies with the material world, yet the concept of matter has been neglected. Possibly for this reason, the material (or ontological) ‘turn’ taking place in social theory has involved the discipline more marginally than other fields. The relevance of new materialist positions to...
There is an increasing demand for improvement of the quality of decisions about flood risk mitigation by fostering public participation in decision-making. However, the extent and way in which formalized participation guarantees good outcomes is still a matter of discussion. This paper analyses different approaches to decision-making for flood risk...
The participatory, and especially deliberative, turn is a major political phenomenon of last decades. Deliberative democracy has spread quickly, regardless of differences in institutional layouts and traditions. An equally fast-evolving debate has addressed its virtues and problems, gradually shifting from theory to practice and from a focus on del...
There is little doubt that deliberative democracy represents the most important innovation in the democratic debate and practices of recent decades. In the 1990s, after the pioneering phase, scholars progressively elaborated on both the conceptual and the operational problems of deliberative processes. Moreover, the internal dynamics of deliberativ...
This book explores the intertwining of politics and ontology, shedding light on the ways in which, as our ability to investigate, regulate, appropriate, 'enhance' and destroy material reality have developed, so new social scientific accounts of nature and our relationship with it have emerged, together with new forms of power. Engaging with cutting...
Calls for more broad-based, integrated, useful knowledge now abound in the world of global environmental change science. They evidence many scientists' desire to help humanity confront the momentous biophysical implications of its own actions. But they also reveal a limited conception of social science and virtually ignore the humanities. They ther...
According to Giorgio Agamben, the most devious operation of power today is not its hold over our potentiality – what we can do – but over our impotentiality – what we can not do. Following this insight the paper interrogates the recent turn in cutting-edge social theory from cultural constructionism to new forms of materialism and naturalism. On on...
Some of the most interesting developments in social theory are presently occurring at the cross-roads of environment and technoscience scholarship. The paper aims to interrogate two especially salient, and remarkably overlapping, trends. The first one is the return of ‘materiality’. This trend has been around for some years especially in the form o...
The debate on realism and constructionism has transferred to environment and science studies a long-standing philosophical controversy over the constitution of, and human cognitive access to, nature. Quite lively years ago, the dispute has been gradually sidestepped by approaches that, without merging into a full-fledged theory, counter the subject...
Sloping down?
Deliberative democracy has spread quickly, regardless of differences in political and administrative traditions. An equally fast-evolving debate has addressed its virtues and problems, gradually shifting from theory to practice and from a focus on deliberative arenas to a concern for their policy and institutional context, without que...
Scienza incerta, un paradosso per il senso comune e non solo. Una scienza della probabilità, una scienza che prospetta scenari complessi rispetto a questioni complesse, una scienza che vede gli esperti contrapporsi tra loro nella formulazione di tali scenari. Alla formulazione “scienza incerta” il libro accosta quella di “scienza conflittuale”, poi...
Original English version of the paper published in French (translated by Laurent Vannini) as:'Une idée sur le déclin? Evaluer la nouvelle critique de la délibération publique', Participations, 2, 2013, pp. 87-118 (special issue 'Critique de la participation et gouvernementalité')
Deliberative democracy has spread quickly, regardless of difference...
Two features characterize new and emerging technosciences. The first one is the production of peculiar ontologies. The human agent is confronted with a biophysical world the contingent, indeterminate character of which does not hamper but expands the scope of purposeful action. Uncertainty is increasingly regarded as a resource for an expanding wil...
‘Environmental justice’ is a label long-applied to social movements which, at different scales and with different ideological orientations, seek to connect environmental protection with social justice. A similar case, on specific theoretical grounds, has been made by Marx-inspired, ‘political ecology’ movements and intellectuals. Yet in the last tw...
Political consumerism is consumer choice beyond self-interest. Allegedly blurring the public–private threshold and overcoming the limits of traditional politics, it epitomizes in many respects late modern governance. Reflecting on the meaning and scope of consumer political agency, scholarship has engaged with the governmentality perspective. Impor...
Flood risk mitigation decisions pose key challenges not only from a
technical but also from a social, economic and political viewpoint.
There is an increasing demand for improving the quality of these
processes by including different stakeholders - and especially by
involving the local residents in the decision making process - and by
guaranteeing...
Il rapporto turismo-ecologia č oggetto di crescente attenzione da parte di operatori, utenti e studiosi, intrecciandosi con temi quali la protezione della natura e delle culture locali, la sostenibilitŕ dello sviluppo, la responsabilitŕ individuale. Il concetto di ecoturismo si trova al centro di un viluppo di termini, definizioni e pratiche dalle...
This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the connection between processes of neoliberalization and the advancement and transformation of technoscience. Drawing on a range of theoretical insights, it explores a variety of issues including the digital revolution and the rise of immaterial culture, the rationale of psychiatric reforms and biot...
The relationship between expertise and politics has traditionally been described in terms of science speaking truth to power. Science strengthens governmental effectiveness and depersonalises power, linking legitimacy to the credibility of observation. The environment is a case in point: what we know about it is largely associated with science. Tod...
Recent years have witnessed the spread of an array of market-inspired environmental governance approaches, often associated with neoliberal ideas, programs and policies. Drawing on the governmentality framework and focusing on the examples of biotechnology patenting and the financialisation of climate and weather, the article argues that the concep...
Anni Cinquanta: il petrolio affiora in Sicilia e le popolazioni accolgono tripudianti l'arrivo degli stabilimenti petrolchimici. "La Sicilia come il Texas", č quello che molti pensano. Mezzo secolo dopo il conto del sogno č servito: malformazioni, malattie da industrializzazione, risorse idriche devastate e sottratte ai territori, criminalitŕ organ...
Deliberative democracy is spreading in environment-related policy-making as a reply to the legitimacy crisis of traditional
policy processes; a crisis where the saliency of uncertainty plays a major role, and which brings into question the dominant
division of labor between science, politics, business and society at large. In this chapter the basic...
Recent criticisms of traditional understandings of risk, responsibility and the division of labour between science and politics build on the idea of the co-produced character of the natural and social orders, making a case for less ambitious and more inclusive policy processes, where questions of values and goals may be addressed together with ques...
1950s: Oil appears in Sicily, and the population welcomes the petrochemical plants. Sicily as Texas', is what common people think. Fifty years later, the cost of the dream is apparent: malformations, industrial diseases, devastation of water sources, organized crime. Gela is one of the Italian capitals of the petrochemical industry: the resistance...
Precaution has been for years a controversial issue. Some regard it as a major regulatory innovation, others as an inherently flawed concept. Some consider it an approach still in its infancy, others believe it is a passing fashion. A narrow understanding of its relationship with knowledge and its distributional effects may explain why discussions...
Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the relate...
1. Introduzione Il presente articolo ha per oggetto la democrazia deliberativa applicata alla governance dei conflitti tecnologici e ambientali. Il tema e oggi di indubbia rilevanza. Vecchi e nuovi fronti di conflitto offrono spazio crescente alle procedure deliberative. Le speranze si intrecciano alle delusioni; le critiche ai giudizi positivi. E...
The article argues that the crisis of legitimacy of environmental policy is closely connected with its declining effectiveness and efficiency in front of the growing saliency of uncertainty. Trust and responsibility are relevant analytical dimensions for addressing this issue. Contrary to the former, the latter has been poorly explored in its appli...
In the debate on governance the concept of responsibility is frequently invoked but remains underdeveloped. This article aims at showing its analytical relevance as a means of interpreting ongoing changes in policy approaches and for evaluating their ability to cope with environmental challenges. Four dimensions of responsibility are singled out: c...
Radical uncertainty plays a major role in the transformation of the social production of knowledge by questioning the centrality of scientific-technical expertise. Important changes are occurring in the discursive and social divisions characterizing the production and management of knowledge, but the ability of these innovations to cope with the ch...
The article deals with some implications of radical uncertainty for participatory democracy, and more precisely for Participatory Technology Assessment (PTA). Two main forms of PTA are discussed. One is aimed at involving lay citizens and highlighting public opinion. The other is addressed to stakeholder groups and organisations, not only in terms...
The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture and food production is the object of an intense and divisive debate. Drawing on a study on the public perception of agricultural gene technologies carried out in five European countries, the article deals with the policy aspects of the issue, and more precisely on the relation between...
The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture and food production is the object of an intense and divisive debate. Drawing on a study on the public perception of agricultural gene technologies carried out in five European countries, the article deals with the policy aspects of the issue, and more precisely on the relation between...
Power in communication takes two main forms. As ‘external’ power, it consists in the ability to acknowledge or disregard a speaker or a discourse. As ‘internal’ power, it is the ability of an argument to eliminate other arguments by demonstrating its superiority. A positive or negative value may be ascribed to these forms of power. Four ideal‐typic...
Participation is a major issue in environmental research and policy. Public Risk Perception and European Environmental Policy (PRISP), a cross-national inquiry on people's orientations about chemical risks, offered the opportunity to investigate some aspects. In two Italian case studies, interest was focused on the relation between experts and lay...