Expertise

This chapter draws upon theoretical and empirical contributions from environmental politics, sustainability studies, and Science and Technology Studies to examine how the specialized knowledge of technical experts and the informal knowledge of non-experts influence debates about sustainability and the environment. It presents an overview of the ascendancy of the technical expert in contemporary society and a summary of some of the most prominent critiques of expertise. The chapter then provides a brief discussion of sustainability, with particular emphasis on how it differs from previous conceptualizations of environmental problems, and question how traditional models of expertise engage in knowledge production practices to address this paradigm. It describes three types of expertise that have emerged since the 1970s to reorient individuals with specialized knowledge toward more sustainable goals: communicative expert, collegial expert, and collaborative expert. The chapter discusses the implications that sustainability has for technical experts in the future.