| Professors in the Field |
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Halina Szejnwald Brown
Professor of Environmental Science and Policy
Phone: (508) 793-7172
Email: hbrown@clarku.edu |
Program Director of the Environmental Science Undergraduate Major
Coordinator of the Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science & Policy
After receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry from New York University, HALINA BROWN conducted research on cancer induction by chemical carcinogens. Interest in environmental cancer policy led her in 1980 to become chief toxicologist and public health policy advisor to the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. In 1985 she joined the faculty at Clark University. During two decades at Clark, Professor Brown’s interests expanded to include: the role of modern corporation in sustainable development; the interplay of technology, culture, institutions and markets in achieving a transition to a sustainable economic system; cross-country comparative environmental policy, with emphasis on Poland and the European Union; and corporate management of environmental and occupational hazards in a global economy. Professor Brown is Fellow of the International Society for Risk Analysis, Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, Board Member of the Greening of Industry Network, and has served on numerous advisory committees for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She has consulted extensively on matters of health risk assessment, toxicology, and public policy.
Current Research and Teaching
Dr. Brown's research interests include: Use of information disclosure as a regulatory instrument for sustainability; Socio-technical system innovation in sustainability transition; Corporate accountability and governance; Social learning and institutional theory; Comparative international environmental policy; Environmental public health policy; Environmental toxicology; Management of risks from toxic substances.
During the past 5 years Brown has conducted research in two areas. The first area concerns the role of small scale experiments as the means for affecting a transition to more sustainable large scale socio-technical systems. She has carried out some of this work as a visiting professor at two Dutch institutions: Technical University of Delft and University of Utrecht. The second area concerns the process of institutionalization of voluntary reporting on environmental and social performance as an instrument for holding corporations accountable to the society. This project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
In 2002, Dr. Brown was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The honor is bestowed on scholars “whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications is scientifically or socially distinguished.” With other new Fellows, she was honored at the Fellows Forum in February 2002, during the AAAS annual meeting in Boston, MA. (Click here to read more.)
She studied the institutionalization of Global Reporting Initiative, supported by a grant from NSF, for which she interviewed about two dozen representatives of NGOs, companies, investment fund managers, consulting firms and others in the U.S., Netherlands and the U.K. The research also included two workshops of the international research team: one in the Netherlands and one in the U.S.
Brown is IDCE’s Acting Director for the calendar year 2008. Continuing from Fall 2007 into her directorship, Brown has been prolific in activism and professional service as a member of a taskforce on public education, a group that advises the Undersecretary of Energy in Massachusetts. The taskforce has started developing an educational program on energy for Massachusetts public school children in grades five and six. Volunteers who work for the state of Massachusetts will outreach at schools and deliver educational modules on energy uses and conservation beginning this spring. She is also a member of Newton Citizens’ Energy Commission, which advises the mayor of Newton, Mass. As a result of their work and influence, all the street lights in Newton have been changed from inefficient mercury-based bulbs to much more efficient high pressure sodium lights, with additional savings in energy for the city.
Last year, she presented “The Rise of the Global Reporting Initiative as a Case of Institutional Entrepreneurship” ‘Earth System Governance: Theories and Strategies for Sustainability’ at the Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change in Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. This paper was based on research funded since 2005 by the National Science Foundation. She participated in a workshop in Paris in June, which involved the presentation of her research entitled: “Innovative Approach to Designing Zero-energy Residential Building in Boston: Enhancing and Monitoring Learning” for the Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange (SCORE!) Network. SCORE! is an EU-funded network project that supports the U.N.’s 10 Year Framework of Programs on Sustainable Consumption and Production. The network will be active from 2005 to 2008, and it consists of 29 institutions, all aiming to involve and help structure a larger community of hundreds of professionals in sustainability, in the European Union and beyond. The SCORE! philosophy assumes that sustainable consumption and production structures can only be realized if experts that understand business development, (sustainable) solution design, consumer behavior and system innovation policy work together in shaping them. She followed up with the success of the workshop in Paris with another SCORE! Workshop in Milan in November. The theme of the November workshop was developing policy for change.
This spring, she participated in the Focus on the Nation event by presenting “Green buildings as a new way of building and living” and lead a session with Vergragt on Defining a Good Life in a Sustainable Society as part of the semester-long Difficult Dialogues symposium on climate change.
Further, she traveled internationally to Austria where she gave an invited lecture at the University of Graz. While in Austria, she participated in a workshop at the Institute for Technology Assessment and investigated the Green Building Program in Austria. This spring, she presented “Building Institutions Based on Information Disclosure: Lessons from GRI’s Sustainability Reporting” at the conference of International Studies Association in San Francisco, taking part in the session on Transparency in Global Environmental Governance.
Brown published “Institutional Transplantation within Borders: Transformation of Environmental Regulatory System in Poland during the 1990s” in Knowledge, Technology, and Policy in the Winter 2007 edition: 26- 43. With P. J. Vergragt, she co-authored “Sustainable Mobility: From Technological Innovations to Societal Learning” in the Journal of Cleaner Production 2007, 15: 1104-1115 and “Bounded Socio-Technical Experiments as Agents of Systemic Change: The Case of a zero-Energy Residential Building” in Technological Forecasting and Social Change 75: 107-130. Her article with P.J. Vergragt entitled “Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: New Approaches to Generating Societal Consensus” is posted by Technological Forecasting and Social Change on Science Direct, and is scheduled to appear in print in the Spring of 2008.
Presentations
September 2006. Attended a conference at University of Sussex, Brighton, UK: SPRU 40th Anniversary Conference - The Future of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy where she presented the paper: “Innovation for sustainability: The case of sustainable transportation”
July 2006. Attended a conference of Greening of Industry Network at University of Cardiff, U.K., where she presented two papers:
1. Institutionalization of Reporting of Sustainability Performance: The Case of Global Reporting Initiative.
2. Social learning through small scale experiments: a conceptual framework and a case study
October 2007. Attended the Annual Conference of Global Reporting Initiative in Amsterdam. This was part of the research she is conducting on the institutionalization of Global Reporting Initiative, GRI.
Publications
Brown, H.S., Sustainable Mobility: From Technological Innovations to Societal Learning. Journal of Cleaner Production. Forthcoming in March 2007.
Brown, H.S., Institutional Transplantation within Borders: Transformation of Environmental Regulatory System in Poland during the 1990s. Knowledge, Technology, and Policy. Winter 2007: 26- 43.
Brown, H.S. and C. Carbone, Learning through Technological Innovation in Personal Mobility: The Cases of Gismo and Sparrow. Greener Management International. Forthcoming in July 2006.
Brown, H.S. and P. J. Vergragt. Bounded Socio-Technical Experiments as Agents of Systemic Change: The Case of a zero-Energy Residential Building. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Available on Science Direct (Forthcoming in Spring 2007).
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