Drs. Gaston Meskens

Gaston Meskens is a researcher in philosophy, lecturer, writer and artist with an academic background in science (Master in Theoretical Physics with an orientation in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology from the University of Ghent, Belgium). He currently works part-time with the Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Ghent (Belgium) and with the Science and Technology Studies group of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK•CEN (Belgium).

Gaston Meskens has build up twenty years of experience in participative and transdisciplinary research on sustainable development governance (mainly in the area of energy governance) and with working in the agoras of the policy processes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), the United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty process (UN-NPT) and the related research activities of the European Commission. In previous years, he also worked as advisor on the working of science in governance processes and participated as invited expert in European research policy assessments, in Belgian parliamentary and public hearings related to the ethics of risk-inherent technology governance, in Technical Committees of the International Atomic Energy Agency and of the OECD and in UN missions in the frame of sustainable development.

In the UNFCCC context, he is currently steering committee member of the Constituency of Research-oriented Independent Non-Governmental Organisations, the constituency that represents the research community in the climate change negotiation process.

Research interests

A human rights based approach to intellectual capacity building in the interest of ‘fair and effective’ global governance.

The PhD research – under the title of ‘the possibility of global governance’ – is concerned with developing a rationale for a human rights based approach to intellectual capacity building in the interest of ‘fair and effective’ global governance. That rationale shapes as a normative ethics view on a ‘fair dealing with complexity’, with consequent considerations on the implications for (what are put forward as) the three formal ‘interaction modes’ of human intellectual capacity building, being education, research and democracy. The research is based on a critical analysis of the working of the ‘knowledge-policy interface’ in general theoretical sense, and is done in the practical context of on-going global governance policy processes (mainly the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

See the research project website at http://www.the-possibility-of-global-governance.net/

Case-related research on the ethics of scientific assessment / the case of radiological risk governance.

This work is done as part-time researcher and lecturer with the Science and Technology Studies group of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK•CEN.

This research is concerned with the ethical aspects of the societal justification of nuclear technology in the context of energy governance, and focusses on the particular role and responsibility of science as a policy-supportive knowledge producer. In various application-oriented projects, the research explores the normative grounds and practical meanings of the concepts of transdisciplinarity and inclusion as a way to reform science into a reflexive scientific assessment practice that takes into account the social contexts wherein it functions and what it can and cannot do as science. In that spirit, the research is logically not meant to serve a particular advocacy in favour or against nuclear. The ethics of the societal justification of a risk-inherent technology such as nuclear concern the 'quality' of the decision making process and of the use of knowledge in that process, regardless whether the outcome of that decision making is a rejection or an acceptance of the technology.

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