David Demeritt
Biographic Data
| ID | 106754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Demeritt |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Demeritt |
| SIGNATURE | DEMERITT D |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2030-0807 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1061 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Regulating through disclosure
This paper provides the first assessment of China’s twenty-year experiment with food hygiene barometer rating systems, originally developed in the West for publicly communicating the grades awarded by food safety inspectors to individual businesses. This approach to regulating through disclosure is often celebrated for efficiently ‘nudging’ improved business compliance by empowering consumers to make ‘better’ decisions, but little is known about …
Carrying the black pot
This paper explores the struggles of China's party‐state to address chronic food safety problems by adopting international best practices of risk‐based regulation. Despite formally adopting risk‐based approaches for targeting inspections and enforcement in 2002, implementation has been halting and uneven, as we show in the first analysis of risk‐based regulation beyond its OECD heartlands. Drawing on policy document analysis and 36 key informant …
Why regulators assess risk differently
This article advances scholarship on comparative regulation by moving beyond the conventional focus on formal law and EU comitology to assess the extent of ‘practice convergence’ in the implementation of EU regulation. Drawing on 50 key informant interviews, a survey, and policy document analysis, we compare how regulators in England, Germany, France and the Netherlands have implemented EU requirements that food safety inspections be ‘risk‐based’…
Steering by their own lights
Despite widespread faith that quality indicators are key to healthcare improvement and regulation, surprisingly little is known about what is actually measured in different countries, nor how, nor why. To address that gap, this article compares the official indicator sets--comprising some 1100 quality measures-- used by statutory hospital regulators in England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The findings demonstrate that those countries' r…
The boundary conditions for regulation
Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Net…
The nature of metaphors in cultural geography and environmental history
This chapter reviews metaphors in environmental history and cultural geography which is intended to point the way towards some new metaphorical terrain, indicated by the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In cultural geography, the appeal of new landscape metaphors is bound up with a critique of Sauer's methodological discussions of landscape. Cultural geographers appropriated metaphors of cultural production to turn attention towards the so…
Varieties of risk regulation in Europe
This article tests the extent to which the organization and stringency of occupational health and safety regulation complements the dominant mode of coordination in the political economy. While the UK explicitly sanctions risk-cost-benefit trade-offs, other European countries mandate ambitious safety goals. That contrast appears to reflect cleavages identified in the Varieties of Capitalism literature, which suggests worker protection regimes are…
Accounting for failure
In this paper, we examine why risk-based policy instruments have failed to improve the proportionality, effectiveness, and legitimacy of healthcare quality regulation in the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Rather than trying to prevent all possible harms, risk-based approaches promise to rationalise and manage the inevitable limits of what regulation can hope to achieve by focusing regulatory standard-setting and enforcement activity on…
Paperwork and the decoupling of audit and animal welfare
This article uses the case of animal welfare to contribute to academic debates about audit and better regulation reforms designed to reduce administrative burdens and increase regulatory effectiveness. Combining desk-based policy document analysis, on-farm field visits, and 31 interviews with livestock farmers and animal health and welfare inspectors in England, it explores farmers' record-keeping practices and the contrasting role regulatory rec…
Adaptive and risk-based approaches to climate change and the management of uncertainty and institutional risk
This paper focuses on how scientific uncertainties about future peak flood flows and sea level rises are accounted for in long term strategic planning processes to adapt inland and coastal flood risk management in England to climate change. Combining key informant interviews (n = 18) with documentary analysis, it explores the institutional tensions between adaptive management approaches emphasising openness to uncertainty and to alternative polic…
Environment and sustainable development scholarship
The right stuff? informing adaptation to climate change in British Local Government
Local government has a crucial role to play in climate change adaptation, both delivering adaptation strategies devised from above and coordinating bottom-up action. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset to measure progress in adaptation by local authorities in Britain, comparing results from a national-scale survey and follow-up interviews conducted in 2003 with a second wave of research completed a decade later. Whereas a decade ago…
Mobilizing Risk
Using comparative methods of policy analysis, this paper explores the institutional factors shaping the transfer and adaptation of risk-based approaches to regulation within and between the regimes for occupational health and safety (OHS) and food safety in the UK. Over the past two decades successive governments have enthusiastically promoted risk as a key concept for regulatory reform and 'better regulation'. Rather than trying to prevent all p…
Flooding and the framing of risk in British broadsheets, 1985–2010
Our analysis of 2707 news stories explores the framing of flooding in Britain over the past quarter century and the displacement of a once dominant understanding of flooding as an agricultural problem of land drainage by the contemporary concern for its urban impacts, particularly to homes and property. We document dramatic changes in the volume and variety of reporting about flooding since 2000 as the risks of flooding have become more salient, …
Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management
Risk communication plays an increasingly central role in flood risk management, but there is a variety of conflicting advice about what does – and should – get transmitted, why, how, and to whom. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the underlying normative and conceptual models on which those competing assessments of ‘good’ risk communication depend. To that end, the paper identifies four broad models, or approaches, to risk communication: a ri…
Old wine in new bottles
Communicating probabilistic information from climate model ensembles—lessons from numerical weather prediction
Climate model ensembles are widely heralded for their potential to quantify uncertainties and generate probabilistic climate projections. However, such technical improvements to modeling science will do little to deliver on their ultimate promise of improving climate policymaking and adaptation unless the insights they generate can be effectively communicated to decision makers. While some of these communicative challenges are unique to climate e…
Flood-Risk Management, Mapping, and Planning
Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for flood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defining and communicating flood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, official statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional conflicts over the use of the Environment A…
Pathways to Sustainability
There is no abstract for this paper
Harnessing Science and Securing Societal Impacts from Publicly Funded Research
There is no abstract for this paper
A Companion to Environmental Geography
A Companion to Environmental Geography is the first book to comprehensively and systematically map the research frontier of 'human-environment geography' in an accessible and comprehensive way. Cross-cuts several areas of a discipline which has traditionally been seen as divided; presenting work by human and physical geographers in the same volume. Presents both the current 'state of the art' research and charts future possibilities for the disci…
Companion to Environmental Geography
Un-ethical review? Why it is wrong to apply the medical model of research governance to human geography
The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Ou…
From externality to inputs and interference
Geography and the promise of integrative environmental research
The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science
Having outlined a theory of heterogeneous social construction, this article describes the scientific construction of climate change as a global-scale environmental problem caused by the universal physical properties of greenhouse gases. Critics have noted that this reductionist formulation serves a variety of political purposes, but instrumental and interest-based critiques of the use of scientific knowledge tend to ignore the ways in which a pol…
What is the 'social construction of nature'? A typology and sympathetic critique
This paper seeks to clarify what is meant by the 'social construction of nature', which has become a crude but common term used to describe very different understandings of nature, knowledge and the world. I distinguish two broad varieties of construction talk in the social sciences: construction-as-refutation and construction-as-philosophical-critique. The first uses the construction metaphor to refute false beliefs about the world and is consis…
Scientific Forest Conservation and the Statistical Picturing of Nature's Limits in the Progressive-Era United States
This paper explores debates over the statistical picturing of the nation's finite forest resources in the Progressive-era United States. This picturing was made possible by a variety of new quantitative and graphical practices that made maps and statistics appear as objective evidence of the natural limits those objects appeared to exhibit. Drawing on the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this appearance was generated through more generalize…
Science studies, climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique
Starting from the debates over the 'reality' of global warming and the politics of science studies, I seek to clarify what is at stake politically in constructivist understandings of science and nature. These two separate but related debates point to the centrality of modern science in political discussions of the environment and to the difficulties, simultaneously technical and political, in warranting political action in the face of inevitably …
The nature of metaphors in cultural geography and environmental history
This chapter reviews metaphors in environmental history and cultural geography which is intended to point the way towards some new metaphorical terrain, indicated by the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In cultural geography, the appeal of new landscape metaphors is bound up with a critique of Sauer's methodological discussions of landscape. Cultural geographers appropriated metaphors of cultural production to turn attention towards the so…
The right stuff? informing adaptation to climate change in British Local Government
Local government has a crucial role to play in climate change adaptation, both delivering adaptation strategies devised from above and coordinating bottom-up action. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset to measure progress in adaptation by local authorities in Britain, comparing results from a national-scale survey and follow-up interviews conducted in 2003 with a second wave of research completed a decade later. Whereas a decade ago…
Ecology, objectivity and critique in writings on nature and human societies
Un-ethical review? Why it is wrong to apply the medical model of research governance to human geography
The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Ou…
Social Theory and the Reconstruction of Science and Geography
Whereas discussions in human geography about the social construction of scientific knowledge have focused on theoretical discussions of representation, sociologists of scientific knowledge have made close empirical studies of the practices by which scientific representations are actually produced. Their social constructivism is much more convincing but it too has become mired in epistemological discussions of representation per se. Such debates d…
Climate change and sustainable development
The New Social Contract for Science
This paper considers recent changes in US and UK science policy designed to make academic research more publicly accountable and relevant. To this end, relations between public sector funding bodies academic researchers, andthe wider public are being reorganized in terms of customer‐contractor relations, though cultural and institutional differences mean these broad trends have produced different outcomes in the US and UK to which geographers wil…
From externality to inputs and interference
Geography and the promise of integrative environmental research
Envisioning the Livable City
This paper describes the close relationship in urban planning practice between the “Sin City” motif of urban decay and the “Sim City” discourse on the livable and sustainable city. Stock images of urban dysfunction advance and legitimate urban reform and revitalization of the type imagined by Sim City discourse, but these alternative representations of the city are not simply contrasting; they are mutually constitutive, and in Canada their meanin…
Democratising Science? The Politics of Promoting Biomedicine in Singapore's Developmental State
Drawing on Jasanoff's concept of coproduction [2004 States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (Routledge, London) and Ong's notion of 'graduated' sovereignty [2000 Theory, Culture and Society17(4) 55-75], we analyse Singapore's promotion of the biomedical industry. To secure its place in the knowledge-based economy, Singapore's developmental state is determined to change the mind-set of its population and inculcate the in…
Flood-Risk Management, Mapping, and Planning
Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for flood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defining and communicating flood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, official statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional conflicts over the use of the Environment A…
Adaptive and risk-based approaches to climate change and the management of uncertainty and institutional risk
This paper focuses on how scientific uncertainties about future peak flood flows and sea level rises are accounted for in long term strategic planning processes to adapt inland and coastal flood risk management in England to climate change. Combining key informant interviews (n = 18) with documentary analysis, it explores the institutional tensions between adaptive management approaches emphasising openness to uncertainty and to alternative polic…
Why regulators assess risk differently
This article advances scholarship on comparative regulation by moving beyond the conventional focus on formal law and EU comitology to assess the extent of ‘practice convergence’ in the implementation of EU regulation. Drawing on 50 key informant interviews, a survey, and policy document analysis, we compare how regulators in England, Germany, France and the Netherlands have implemented EU requirements that food safety inspections be ‘risk‐based’…
Mobilizing Risk
Using comparative methods of policy analysis, this paper explores the institutional factors shaping the transfer and adaptation of risk-based approaches to regulation within and between the regimes for occupational health and safety (OHS) and food safety in the UK. Over the past two decades successive governments have enthusiastically promoted risk as a key concept for regulatory reform and 'better regulation'. Rather than trying to prevent all p…
The UK Climate Change Programme and communication with local authorities
Carrying the black pot
This paper explores the struggles of China's party‐state to address chronic food safety problems by adopting international best practices of risk‐based regulation. Despite formally adopting risk‐based approaches for targeting inspections and enforcement in 2002, implementation has been halting and uneven, as we show in the first analysis of risk‐based regulation beyond its OECD heartlands. Drawing on policy document analysis and 36 key informant …
The boundary conditions for regulation
Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Net…
Varieties of risk regulation in Europe
This article tests the extent to which the organization and stringency of occupational health and safety regulation complements the dominant mode of coordination in the political economy. While the UK explicitly sanctions risk-cost-benefit trade-offs, other European countries mandate ambitious safety goals. That contrast appears to reflect cleavages identified in the Varieties of Capitalism literature, which suggests worker protection regimes are…
Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management
Risk communication plays an increasingly central role in flood risk management, but there is a variety of conflicting advice about what does – and should – get transmitted, why, how, and to whom. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the underlying normative and conceptual models on which those competing assessments of ‘good’ risk communication depend. To that end, the paper identifies four broad models, or approaches, to risk communication: a ri…
Research relevance, ‘knowledge transfer’ and the geographies of Case studentship collaboration
The Co‐operative Awards in Science and Engineering (CASE) studentship programme of the UK Research Councils provide one example of wider efforts internationally to encourage so‐called ‘knowledge transfer’ and thereby harness publicly supported university research more closely to the goals of national competitiveness, regional economic development and local regeneration. In this paper we describe the implications of how the various UK research cou…
Ecology, objectivity and critique in writings on nature and human societies
Dealing in diversity
Social Theory and the Reconstruction of Science and Geography
Whereas discussions in human geography about the social construction of scientific knowledge have focused on theoretical discussions of representation, sociologists of scientific knowledge have made close empirical studies of the practices by which scientific representations are actually produced. Their social constructivism is much more convincing but it too has become mired in epistemological discussions of representation per se. Such debates d…
Representing the "True" St. Croix
Climate change and sustainable development
Envisioning the Livable City
This paper describes the close relationship in urban planning practice between the “Sin City” motif of urban decay and the “Sim City” discourse on the livable and sustainable city. Stock images of urban dysfunction advance and legitimate urban reform and revitalization of the type imagined by Sim City discourse, but these alternative representations of the city are not simply contrasting; they are mutually constitutive, and in Canada their meanin…
Figuring the Costs of Climate Change
In this paper we examine the evidence for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimate that the costs of global climate change will be on the order of 1.5-2.0% of world gross domestic product (GDP). Although this estimate is widely and authoritatively repeated, it rests on a handful of preliminary studies, chiefly of the United States and performed by a select group of economists. We examine the methods and assumptions of these s…
The New Social Contract for Science
This paper considers recent changes in US and UK science policy designed to make academic research more publicly accountable and relevant. To this end, relations between public sector funding bodies academic researchers, andthe wider public are being reorganized in terms of customer‐contractor relations, though cultural and institutional differences mean these broad trends have produced different outcomes in the US and UK to which geographers wil…
Islands of Truth , Spaces of Contact and the Genealogy of the Imperial Archive
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science
Having outlined a theory of heterogeneous social construction, this article describes the scientific construction of climate change as a global-scale environmental problem caused by the universal physical properties of greenhouse gases. Critics have noted that this reductionist formulation serves a variety of political purposes, but instrumental and interest-based critiques of the use of scientific knowledge tend to ignore the ways in which a pol…
Scientific Forest Conservation and the Statistical Picturing of Nature's Limits in the Progressive-Era United States
This paper explores debates over the statistical picturing of the nation's finite forest resources in the Progressive-era United States. This picturing was made possible by a variety of new quantitative and graphical practices that made maps and statistics appear as objective evidence of the natural limits those objects appeared to exhibit. Drawing on the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this appearance was generated through more generalize…
Dialogue, metaphors of dialogue and understandings of geography
Increasingly, human and physical geographers alike describe their research practices as involving dialogue of some kind. However, the widespread popularity of the term belies some very different understandings of its meaning and methodological implications. In this paper we reflect on these different conceptions of ‘dialogical’ geography as a way, first, of illustrating the broad range of understandings of research methodology now current in the …
What is the 'social construction of nature'? A typology and sympathetic critique
This paper seeks to clarify what is meant by the 'social construction of nature', which has become a crude but common term used to describe very different understandings of nature, knowledge and the world. I distinguish two broad varieties of construction talk in the social sciences: construction-as-refutation and construction-as-philosophical-critique. The first uses the construction metaphor to refute false beliefs about the world and is consis…
Research training and the end(s) of the Ph.D
The UK Climate Change Programme and communication with local authorities
The UK Climate Change Programme and communication with local authorities
Sarah Whatmore Hybrid Geographies Organiser
Research relevance, ‘knowledge transfer’ and the geographies of Case studentship collaboration
The Co‐operative Awards in Science and Engineering (CASE) studentship programme of the UK Research Councils provide one example of wider efforts internationally to encourage so‐called ‘knowledge transfer’ and thereby harness publicly supported university research more closely to the goals of national competitiveness, regional economic development and local regeneration. In this paper we describe the implications of how the various UK research cou…
The Promises of Collaborative Research
Science studies, climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique
Starting from the debates over the 'reality' of global warming and the politics of science studies, I seek to clarify what is at stake politically in constructivist understandings of science and nature. These two separate but related debates point to the centrality of modern science in political discussions of the environment and to the difficulties, simultaneously technical and political, in warranting political action in the face of inevitably …
Ensemble predictions and perceptions of risk, uncertainty, and error in flood forecasting
Under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, there are a number of international initiatives to promote the development and use of so-called ensemble prediction systems (EPS) for flood forecasting. The campaign to apply these meteorological techniques to flood forecasting raises important questions how the probabilistic information these systems provide can be applied for what in operational terms is typically a binary decision of…
Un-ethical review? Why it is wrong to apply the medical model of research governance to human geography
The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Ou…
From externality to inputs and interference
Geography and the promise of integrative environmental research
Dictionaries, disciplines and the future of geography
Political science (35 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Economics (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Geography (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Business (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Public Administration (11 works)