ABSTRACT
In this chapter the relationship between science and global environmental policy is explored using climate change as a case study. I will present four different accounts of the interpolation of science and policy: scientism; science as politics by other means; scepticism; and new forms of science.1 Some of the examples used are very specific and microsociological, reflecting the use of ethnographic or close observational methods; other examples draw on existing scholarship in the social sciences. The aim is to assess critically what different approaches might offer in the way of useful insights into the relations between knowledge, policy and action, and to briefly raise some normative issues which arise.
