Berger, Gerald | Austria

Gerald Berger was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1972. He studied political science and communication studies at the University of Salzburg (1991-98), and then worked as a project researcher at the Austrian Society for Environment and Technology (ÖGUT) in Vienna on a nation-wide survey study of environmental mediation in Austria. From 1998 to 1999 he studied at Cardiff University, UK for an MSc in sustainability, planning and environmental policy.

From 1999 until summer 2000 he was a research assistant at the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, working on an EU-funded project about environmental supply chain management in Industrial South Wales. From October 2000 to March 2001 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society, Graz.

His main research interests are: environmental policy-making; theories of sustainable development and ecological modernisation; environmental management in industry; environmental and social implications of technological innovations; urban and regional sustainability strategies.

Project at IAS-STS: Design-for-the-environment as part of a strategy aimed at ecological modernisation: Evaluating technological innovations in industry and their promotion using instruments of environmental policy-making.

The research will focus on design-for-the-environment (or eco-design) as an important part of a strategy working towards ecological modernisation. There will be an evaluation of the technological innovations in industry aimed at incorporating ecological issues into the design or re-design of products, processes and technologies, and how these technological innovations for environmental improvements are promoted using different instruments of environmental policy-making (either regulatory or co-operative policy instruments). The basic theoretical framework of the research project is the theory of ecological modernisation as it is (besides and as a form of sustainable development) underlying the environmental policy-making and strategies of industrialised countries. Ecological modernisation proposes that policies for economic development and environmental protection can be combined to give synergistic effects.

The work will use the theoretical assumptions of ecological modernisation to analyse empirically the use of technological innovations for environmental design in a selected number of companies and industrial sectors. Important questions in this empirical work will be:- what kinds of technological innovations have been used for design-for-the-environment; can synergies be observed between economic goals and environmental issues (and if so, what kind of synergies); what instruments of environmental policy-making are fostering environmental technologies; to what extent are suppliers of products and users of manufactured products integrated into the design process.

Overall, the research should contribute to environmental social science research concerning the following issues:- applying and evaluating the use of the theory of ecological modernisation in analysing strategies of design-for-the-environment and technological innovations; investigating instruments of environmental policy-making that could foster design-for-the-environment application by industry through technological innovations; integrating suppliers and users of products into the design of environmentally compatible technological innovations.  

Selected Publications

Berger, G.; Flynn, A.; Hines, F; and Johns, R. (forthcoming) "Ecological Modernisation as Basis for Environmental Policy: Current Environmental Discourse and Policy and the Implications on Environmental Supply Chain Management".

Berger, G. (1998) Machbarkeitsstudie: Umweltmediation in Österreich, ÖGUT, Wien.