Welcome to my (still work-in-progress) personal website. I figured that rather than hosting wmy ramblings and publications on scattered platforms, it was about time to cre my own website, as the cool researcher's playbook requires. Here you can find links to my past academic work, ongoing projects, and a few quite random things I have been working on.
Policy, knowledge and learning have been the keywords I have been working with over the past few years. In different ways and contexts, I have been trying to understand with the role of knowledge in policymaking – whether scientific knowledge, impact assessment reports, professional know-how or even just personal knowledge – and how different actors work with it to. Learning, more specifically policy learning, has been my go-to conceptual lens, which I have used (and misused, one may argue) to wrap my head around this puzzle. In a nutshell, the argument goes, we can understand policymaking as a process wherby actors of different sorts engage in constant sense-making and learn (or fail to do so) how to get a hold over ever more complex problems.
This is not to say that power doesn’t matter and everyone’s genuinely endeavouring to learn how to do things better. Learning is not neutral, and the meaning of ‘better’ is contextual, constructed, and value-laden. But looking at how people, politicians, bureaucrats and interested parties of sort try to figure out what the best course of action is, for them, is a powerful analytical device.
While I have been working on different topics, over the years, my recent research has been focusing on energy and climate governance, in the specific context of the European Union (EU). I have spent more time than I would have imagined grappling with the idea of energy efficiency as a central concept of EU energy governance and the ways in which EU policies for the green transition shape – and are, in turn, shaped – by the measurment infrastructures, knowledge validation procedures and mundane administative practices that organise policymaking.
I can tell you all about the different schemes to reduces energy consumption, energy performance in buildings, or the tools measuring energy savings. At the same time, and here’s the irony, I have spent four years working on energy efficiency policy but I still would not be able to explain and would probably get flustered if asked about how domestic heating works. But that’s also what I found fascinating about the work we, social scientists of sorts, do: we inquire about people’s understandings of things, what they do with knowledge(s) they have, how they frame, order, govern certain objects or phenomena, rather than the inherent properties of the objects they work with and upon.
Research, however, often felt somewhat disconnected from what was happening on the ground. In parallel with my theoretical ramblings, I recently tried to work in the direction of shorten what I perceive as gap between my – and others’ – research and the ways in which policies are made. I had the chance to explore this idea of science-for-policy initatives so collaborating with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and I am now looking for new avenues where to pursue this idea of making science and policy talk to each other – and, perhaps, realise that they are not as separate as people seem to suggest.