The Precautionary Principle: governance of innovation and innovations in governance - 2016

The course is designed as a strategic knowledge and experience sharing course at the intersection between a research-oriented course and a professional development course, dedicated to collaborative exploration and learning. It will provide intensive research training, but also allow for policy discussions in a variety of sector and contexts and, through a knowledge co-creation approach, help to identify and find solutions to course-related issues in the participants’ research or policy application fields.

It will build extensively on the seminal work of the European Environment Agency in the two 'Late Lessons from Early Warnings' reports (EEA 2001, 2013). These reports show that there are still many open and pressing questions around the precautionary principle and its application, ways of doing research, science-policy-society interfaces, the governance of innovations and risk governance in the framework of sustainability transitions. In the current political context, notably in the European Union, there is a need for intellectual rigour around the concept, both from a research and a praxis point of view.

Applications are invited from researchers (advanced PhD students, postdocs) and practitioners from policy-making institutions, NGOs, business and international organizations.