Overview

This book deals with a pivotal issue often marginalized by sociological analysis: the relationship between energy and society, with different contributions from several European scholars. The articles cover a series of topics concerning energy policies, risk communication, and sustainable development. The increasingly complex social organization emerging from the energy shifts of the last two centuries, incorporates an increasing quantity of expert knowledge. Quite paradoxically, when the expert systems seem to be realizing the dream of total control on the uncertainty of the events, any occasional accident reveals to be a check for them contributes to undermining their credibility. Following the idea of a post-democratic turn, this kind of mistrust can be considered a different face of political elites and politics in general, in the frame of a radical change concerning political culture in the last several decades. This change is clear in areas such as risk communication, governance, and energy policies.