Institutional framework - NTNU Sustainability
Institutional framework
Knowledge areas: philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, interdisciplinary studies of culture, industrial economics and technology management, industrial ecology.
Sustainable adaptations demand clear goals. They require us to take advantage of technological possibilities and to establish attitudes and incentives ensuring that the players in society reproduce the factors essential to their existence and improve rather than worsen them. Our commitment to this focus area overrides the others, and is intended to help ensure that opportunities are realized for both industrialized countries and developing countries.
Research questions:
- How can attitudes be influenced so that participants make decisions that support sustainable development?
- Should the design of social institutions be different if they manage non-renewable resources compared to if they manage renewable resources?
- How to conduct good governance to stimulate sustainable solutions?
- Which conditions are necessary for Norwegian sector to contribute to sustainable development?
Previous and ongoing projects
NFR-SAMKUL 2013–2017.
This project will examine how industrially made food and industrial systems of food production have been integrated into the everyday lives of people. Furthermore, it will deal with how a dual system of food security and user trust was created.
This involves examining not only the discourses that were associated with this development but also the technologies, mechanisms and labels that are designed to ensure the food chain. This includes examining sustainability objectives contained in these relationships. This project runs from 2013 to 2017 within the large project NFR SAMKUL where Professor Per Østby is the project manager.
The project examines various problematic issues tied to the environment and expertise such as energy and the building of cabins, the recycling of oil rigs, the pollution of lakes as well as the Norwegian Research Councils environmental projects themselves and new aspects of the environmental movement.
The projects show that expert knowledge is often overridden by political factors but that experts also supply various and ambiguous answers to the issues they examine. The relationship between experts and the needs and wishes of people neither coincide nor are they often taken into account. Expertise needs to be translated between different experts or to people. NFR Environment 2015 began in 2013 and Professor Per Østby is the project manager.