Gisle Andersen is a sociologist specialising in environmental sociology and the sociology of knowledge. His research examines how nature, climate and the environment become matters of politics: how environmental policy decisions are justified, what knowledge they rest on, and how citizens respond to climate and environmental measures. His work combines historical sociology, French pragmatic sociology and science and technology studies (STS) with qualitative and quantitative methods.
Andersen holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Bergen. His dissertation was developed into the open-access monograph Parlamentets natur (Universitetsforlaget, 2017), a study of how Norwegian environmental and petroleum policy has been justified in the Storting since 1945. His research has informed the evidence base for Norwegian climate policy, including the Norwegian Environment Agency's assessment of climate mitigation measures, and he has contributed an invited input to the 2050 Climate Change Committee (NOU 2023: 25). He is subject editor for environmental policy in the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia (Store norske leksikon) and a co-founder of the European Sociological Association's Research Network 42, Sociology of Democratic Practices.
Knowledge, expertise and environmental governance
A central strand of his research concerns the relationship between science and policy in the environmental domain. Andersen has studied how the Norwegian parliament has justified and valued nature since the Second World War, and how expert knowledge is used in petroleum and marine management. He has also studied how measurement, indicators and statistics shape the governance of ecosystems. He has led EcoLogic, a comparative project on ecosystem-based environmental policy in Norway and Sweden, with cases including forest governance and ecosystem accounting.
Language, concepts and public debate
Andersen studies how the language of nature and the environment changes over time, and what these changes mean for policy and public debate. Together with linguists, he has developed approaches that combine corpus linguistics, quantitative text analysis and interpretive analysis of large text collections. The material includes parliamentary debates, official reports and newspapers, and the work was developed mainly in the project Changing Nature. He also works on public discourse more broadly, including how contested concepts acquire different meanings across arenas.
Attitudes, emotions and societal conflict
A third strand addresses how people relate to climate and environmental policy. Drawing on the Norwegian Citizen Panel and cross-national survey experiments, Andersen has studied public perceptions of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other climate technologies. He has also studied climate anger and conflicts over consumption reduction and land use. He has led the projects perCCSeptions and SCORE, and work packages in OceanNETs (Horizon 2020), CCSMARKET, the gigaCCS research centre (FME) and LANDSCAPE.
Methods
Andersen has broad methodological experience. He uses qualitative interviews, document and archival analysis, focus groups and ethnography. He also works with surveys and survey experiments, deliberative polling and the analysis of open-ended survey responses, as well as corpus-based text analysis and geometric data analysis. He works in R, Python and Stata.
