Prof. Robert Hoppe

Organisation	University of Twente, the Netherlands
Function	Professor
Session 3.2 Mainstreaming Citizen Participation

Robert Hoppe holds a chair in Policy Studies and Knowledge at the University of Twente’s Faculty of Management and Governance. In 2005 he joined and helped establish the Department for Science, Technology, and Policy Studies (STəPS). In 2001 he published (jointly with Matthijs Hisschemöller, Bill Dunn and Jerry Ravetz) Knowledge, Power and Participation in Environmental Policy Analysis, Policy Studies Review Annual Volume 12, (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London).

Fields of interest are long term policy dynamics and innovation, especially the role of technology; methodological and institutional implications of deliberative policy analysis; and the governance of expertise.  

In 1986-1997 he was affiliated to the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Political and Socio-Cultural Sciences, as professor and chair of Public Administration. In addition to other books and articles, in 1989 he co-authored (with dr. H. van de Graaf) the Dutch standard introductory textbook to policy science, Policy and Politics (Coutinho, Bussum, 1996, 3^rd edition).

In 1992-3 he spent a year as visiting professor and Fulbright Fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey, doing research and teaching in issues of Science, Technology, Society and Public Policy. In 1993 he published (with Aat Peterse) Handling Frozen Fire. Political Culture and Risk Management (Westview Press, Boulder).

In 1974-1986 he worked as assistant and associate professor of Political Science at the Free University Amsterdam. From this university he earned a Ph.D. in the social sciences. His dissertation was published under the title, Economic Affairs Drafts a New Policy. Policy Design and Decision Making on a Non-incremental Policy, Free University Press, 1983, for which he received the Dutch Association for Public Administration’s Annual Van Poelje Award for best dissertation of the year.

 

Robert Hoppe is chair of session 3.1, Boundary Work and Transition Management and 3.6, Implications for the Science-Policy Interface and panel speaker in session 3.2, Mainstreaming Citizen Participation.

 

You are kindly invited to join the research: Scientific advice and public policy: expert advisers’ and policymakers’ discourses on boundary work. by professor Hoppe. He conducted this research before on a select group of 20+ boundary workers employed by official advisory bodies in the Netherlands (like the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), The Center for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), the Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL, former MNP), and several government departments at the national level. The Knowledge Democracy conference offers an opportunity to capture a much larger segment of the population called ‘boundary workers’; and to get lots of international input, opening up the opportunity to compare previous ‘national’ research findings against an international set of respondents. So, if you feel your job is adequately described as ‘boundary worker’ in the domain of the science/policy interface, please participate as respondent in this exciting research project. In the end, we may have much improved insights into how boundary workers themselves think and talk about managing the tensions implied in mediating between sound science and policy-relevant advice, in the dilemmas of both demarcation and coordination between science and policy/politics simultaneously.

Robert Hoppe: “We only imperfectly understand the world’s complexity, yet want to shape it to our ideals. This condemns us to permanent trial and error learning. The competition of experiments creates myriads of problems that need to be made governable, somehow, in order for the trials not to result in self-destructive errors. Good governance of problems entails democracy, which is, like almost everything else we do, a form of cooperation between lay persons and experts. Therefore, at first sight, ‘knowledge democracy’ looks like an oxymoron. But, on some reflection, it is not! The notion expresses the never-ending challenge to maximize the intelligence of democracy by fostering mutually creative links between the wisdom of the crowds and innovative expert knowledge in intelligent, fast, and sustainable trial-and-error learning.”