International audienceThis article proposes an original analysis of the international debate on climate change through the use of digital methods. Its originality is twofold. First, it examines a corpus of reports covering 18 years of international climate negotiations, a dataset never explored before through digital techniques. This corpus is particularly interesting because it provides the most consistent and detailed reporting of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Second, in this paper we test an original approach to text analysis that combines automatic extractions and manual selection of the key issue-terms. Through this mixed approach, we tried to obtain relevant findings without imposing them on our corpus. The originality of our corpus and of our approach encouraged us to question some of the habits of digital research and confront three common misunderstandings about digital methods that we discuss in the first part of the article (section ‘Three misunderstandings on digital methods in social sciences’). In addition to reflecting on methodology, however, we also wanted to offer some substantial contribution to the understanding of UN-framed climate diplomacy. In the second part of the article (section ‘Three maps on climate negotiations’) we will therefore introduce some of the preliminary results of our analysis. By discussing three visualizations, we will analyze the thematic articulation of the climatic negotiations, the rise and fall of these themes over time and the visibility of different countries in the debate

This chapter offers an original account of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as a technology that scripts collective action through black-boxing the politics of governance. After tracing the global trajectory of the instrument, the chapter looks at EIA struggles in the case of pulp mills on the River Uruguay. As actors seeking to halt projects because of their potential harmful impact follow the choreography of EIA, the authoritative governance script is reinforced rather than undermined. There is a tragic aspect to this, in that those wishing to block a project are actually making it stronger. This points to a subtle de-politicization resulting from the evolution of instruments in use, and a need for their re-politicization.

This article addresses the role of universities in the sustainable management of metropolitan areas, drawing on the outputs from a workshop that brought together academics, professionals and politicians responsible for the urban environmental management of the metropolitan areas of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and São Paulo, Brazil. Urban environmental management is both a field of knowledge regarding the problematic relationship between society and the urban ecosystem and a way of intervening in this relationship. Two issues arise with regard to the role of the university in urban governance when considering the dialogue between knowledge and action implied by this statement: the challenges implied for the university in producing knowledge of urban environmental sustainability, and the most salient characteristics of the intervention of university scholars in metropolitan environmental management projects. Based on five case studies of management projects related to different urban environmental problems presented during the workshop, we identified some of the main challenges faced by university‐based experts participating in the city's environmental management, that is, when operating in the interface between academic knowledge and politics.

S’il est admis que les techniques d’enquête en sociologie — et les modes de raisonnement qui leur sont associés — sont étroitement liées à leurs contextes institutionnels et intellectuels d’apparition, comment le développement des écosystèmes numériques transforme-t-il actuellement les manières de savoir sur le social ? Dans cet article introductif, nous observons la façon dont les sciences sociales computationnelles (SSC) et les humanités numériques mettent en tension la sociologie. D’un côté, les sciences sociales computationnelles concurrencent la sociologie en traitant de ses objets les plus classiques, mais dans une perspective prédictive qui ne lui est pas familière. D’un autre côté, les humanités numériques s’imaginent comme le chapiteau des sciences sociales, mais avec une offre numérique qui s’inscrit dans la tradition méthodologique de l’exégèse textuelle de laquelle les sociologues cherchent à se distancier. La sociologie se trouve comme prise dans l’étau des sciences sociales computationnelles et des humanités numériques. Nous avons observé trois types de réactions face à cette situation — la protection, la conservation et l’adaptation — qui montrent à quel point le numérique pénètre progressivement la discipline sociologique, depuis son propre coeur. Pour que celle-ci devienne pleinement numérique, il convient néanmoins de faciliter les conditions d’accès aux données numériques, notamment en discutant le cadre juridique, économique et technique des écosystèmes numériques de la recherche publique.