Misaligned or mismanaged? Exploring the role of expectations and tacit negotiations in expert advice - the case of environmental science-policy in the

For my PhD project I intend to study the institutions of advice-giving in UK environmental science-policy. I argue that,
over the past few years, the implicit contract between science and society has markedly changed, and yet certain dated
expectations and behaviours about how science relates to policy persist. This is particularly severe in the case of climate
and environmental science-policy, which has typically been qualified as post-normal and where many scientists continue
to uphold the belief that better science and evidence will lead to better policy outcomes. Existing scholarly work has
examined the various roles and configurations of scientific and expert advice. However, no one has systematically looked
into how internally-held expectations shape the ways in which scientists and experts engage with policy advice, and how
these expectations are (tacitly) negotiated. I suggest that such a research project must examine both the politics of
knowledge and the role of communication and knowledge-brokering within boundary organisations involved in policy
advice. I have identified potential sites of study - including formal science advisory bodies (UK CCC and Defra SAC) and
informal science-policy networks (CSaP and NERC Policy Placement Fellowship Scheme). Finally, in order to study the
civic and institutional epistemologies of these organisations, I propose to triangulate three qualitative methods: expert
interviews, qualitative content analysis, and ethnography.