Crafting the expert-advocate: training and recruitment efforts in the carbon dioxide capture and storage community

Abstract

This article presents a case study of recruitment efforts around carbon capture and storage (CCS) to explore how expert communities internalize the societal dimensions of envisioned pathways for energy transitions. Members of the CCS community see the technology’s realization as being dependent on traversing a range of “barriers”, such as public fears and resistance that exacerbate struggles for policy support. Community-supported training venues prime recruits for practical interventions that target these barriers. Events also uphold necessary interpretive flexibilities that support heterogeneous advocacy coalition with at times diverging interests in energy transitions. The concept of expert-advocates, experts primed for interventions across technical-social systems, is proposed as a new analytic aid for future studies of socially reflexive expert communities.

Keywords:

• advocacy coalitions
• energy transitions
• carbon capture and storage
• epistemic communities
• expert-advocates
• technical-social systems

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the editors and two anonymous referees, as well as to Elizabeth Barron, Sheila Jasanoff, Nils Markusson, Jennie C. Stephens, and Göran Sundqvist, for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. Some of the material reported on here was previously presented at a Global CCS Institute webinar, and in the Science and Technology Studies Group at the TIK Centre, University of Oslo. Informants’ time and insights are gratefully acknowledged. The article derives partly from work carried out during a Visiting Fellowship at the Program on Science, Technology and Society, at Harvard University.

ORCiD

Mads Dahl Gjefsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8862-7582

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway [grant number 209247/V11]; the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund; Legatet “Patrick Geddes-samlingen”; Ella og Robert Wenzins legat ved Universitetet i Oslo; Jansons legat; as well as the Norway–America Association’s Ragnhild Marianne Løkens Education Fund and King Olav V Stipend.