About

Dr. Richard Barke is an Associate Professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He earned his BS in Physics with a minor in Geophysics from Georgia Tech, which sparked his interest in the intersections between science and public policy. He further obtained his MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester. Dr. Barke has taught at the University of Houston before returning to Georgia Tech, where he played a key role in founding the Ivan Allen College and the School of Public Policy. He has served as the school chair and as Associate Dean of the college. His professional work includes consulting for the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government on reforming congressional science budgeting and advisory processes, as well as serving as a visiting scholar at the University of Ghent in Belgium. His research focuses on the regulation of risk, the roles of politics within science, and science within politics. Dr. Barke has contributed extensively to scholarly discourse, publishing in prominent journals and authoring books such as 'Science, Technology, and Public Policy' and co-authoring 'Governing the American Republic.' He has been recognized with multiple awards for his service and teaching, including Georgia Tech's Outstanding Service Award and the IAC Faculty Legacy Award. His teaching encompasses courses on political processes, intergenerational policy, ethics and risk, and regulatory policy, with a current focus on long-term policy-making.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Physics
• Law
• Economic growth
• Engineering
• Mathematics
• Economics

Selected publications

• Degree Components and Instructional Design

  Routledge eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics

  This chapter explores the fundamental question of “core competencies” in undergraduate programs of public affairs. Demonstrable skills and competencies are essential not only for career advancement but more so crucial for developing effective policy responses to meet pressing public challenges. Defining those crucial competencies, however, is not a straightforward matter because of differences in conceptual understanding in business and academic spheres, forms of competencies, and the overlapping boundaries that exist between competence and mastery. In public affairs education, core competencies are more likely to be accumulated from a range of specialized knowledge and skills acquired from multiple academic disciplines. Still, these competencies differ across undergraduate programs of public affairs due to a great deal of variability in “instruction and curricular designs” and assessment.

  PublisherDOI

• Sustainable Technology/Development And Challenges To Engineering Education

  2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Engineering

  Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2561 Sustainable Technology / Development and Challenges to Engineering Education Richard Barke Georgia Institute of Technology New ideas may require decades to find mature adoption. The organizations that implement innovations often must undergo painful restructuring before their benefits can be applied in novel and appropriate ways. For the electric dynamo significant productivity gains required as much as forty years, during which old manufacturing systems based on steam and water power had to be discarded and new ways of using electricity in manufacturing were developed (David, 1990). A lag also appears in the integration of environmental concerns with technological development. Since publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, environmental groups have become political forces, a multitude of environmental laws and regulations have been enacted, and the limits to growth, global warming, and overpopulation have been debated. Yet the relationship between environmental protection and technological change has not matured but remains largely adversarial, with the developers of technology often characterized as willfully negligent about the impacts of their work, treating the environmental and social consequences of technological change as messy, impossible to model, and therefore outside the design considerations of engineers. Recently the debate about technological development and the environment has been changing. Technological change has not slowed in spite of concerns about its environmental effects and many environmentalists have discarded their calls for an end to development, advocating instead a new type of growth guided by new principles: sustainable development. At the same time, scientists and engineers are recognizing the important relationship between their work and environmental concerns, with sustainable technology emerging as a guiding principle that many hope will permeate engineering. The objectives of sustainable development and sustainable technology seem to be symbiotic, yet many of the problems of sustainability have their roots in traditional practices of engineering, particularly the short-term maximization of technologically- or market-driven objectives through innovation and increases in the productivity of labor. Engineers have generally practiced and taught under the assumption that engineering solutions are, for them, complete. Concepts such as intergenerational equity, nonmarket public values, and impacts on ecosystems have been treated as exogenous, if at all. If old ways of thinking about engineering

  PublisherDOI

• Policy Decisions in Our Data-Driven World

  SMARTech Repository (Georgia Institute of Technology) · 2019-01-30

  article

  Richard Barke , from the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, joins us to discuss our struggle to prioritize and interpret the ever-increasing amounts of data in order to make informed policy decisions. .

  Publisher

• Technology and economic development in the states: continuing experiments in growth management

  2018-03-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the underlying assumptions of state policies for technological growth, the broader context of such policies, and some of the practical implications of succeeding, of failing, and of not trying. The ultimate objective of economic development policy is economic growth, which is generally defined in terms of job creation and wealth. It may result from changes on either the supply or demand side: new resources, new markets, new products, or greater efficiencies in productive technologies. In contrast to basic science, technological change is more commonly used in models or explanations of economic development policy, and is assumed to be more amenable to planning and evaluation. State economic development policies are both nourished and constrained by basic motivations. Many state economic development policies are intended to strengthen the "labor infrastructure", but it is more common to describe the economic infrastructure: physical capital stock that supports more directly productive capital and supports its activity".

  PublisherDOI

• Nanotechnology, Risks, and Regulatory Options

  SMARTech Repository (Georgia Institute of Technology) · 2018-03-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Presented on March 27, 2018 at 12:00 p.m. in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Room 1117, Georgia Tech.

  Publisher

• This I believe / Richard Barke

  SMARTech Repository (Georgia Institute of Technology) · 2012-02-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Presented on February 2, 2012 from 11:00am – 12:00pm in the Office of Undergraduate Studies's Resource Room in the Clough Commons on the Georgia Tech Campus

  Publisher

• How Science Get's Made into Science Policy

  SMARTech Repository (Georgia Institute of Technology) · 2010-10-06

  articleSenior author

  Richard Barke of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy joins us to discuss how science gets translated into policy. Both the science of politics and the politics of science will be addressed.

  Publisher

• Balancing Uncertain Risks and Benefits in Human Subjects Research

  Science Technology & Human Values · 2008-04-29 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Composed of scientific and technical experts and lay members, thousands of research ethics committees—Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the United States—must identify and assess the potential risks to human research subjects, and balance those risks against the potential benefits of the research. IRBs handle risk and its uncertainty by adopting a version of the precautionary principle. To assess scientific merit, IRBs use a tacit ``sanguinity principle,'' which treats uncertainty as inevitable, even desirable, in scientific progress. In balancing human subjects risks and scientific benefits, IRBs use uncertainty as a boundary-ordering device that allows the mediation of the science and ethics aspects of their decisions. One effect is the entangling of methodological and ethical review. Some have suggested these should be more clearly separated, but decisions by research ethics committees depend in part on the negotiating space created by incommensurable approaches to uncertainty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reconciling Scientists' Beliefs about Radiation Risks and Social Norms: Explaining Preferred Radiation Protection Standards

  Risk Analysis · 2007-06-01 · 35 citations

  articleSenior author

  Social scientists have argued about the role of political beliefs in highly charged policy debates among scientific experts. In debates about environmental hazards, the focus of contention is likely to rest on the appropriate scientific assumptions to inform safety standards. When scientific communities are polarized, one would expect to find systematic differences among combatants in the choice of appropriate assumptions, and variation in the application of "precaution" in standard setting. We test this proposition using an experiment applied in a mail survey format to groups of scientists from opposing sides of the nuclear policy debate. Questions were asked about the role of political, social, and epistemological beliefs in reaching scientific and policy judgments about the relationship between radiation dose and cancer incidence in human populations. We find that the precautionary tendency is pervasive regardless of whether the scientist is associated with a putatively pro- or anti-nuclear group. Using a multinomial logit model, we explain a modest percentage of the variation in the choice of preferred judgments about safety standards, but find that distinct sets of political and social values are significantly associated with policy positions among scientists. Implications for scientific advice to policymakers are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Concerns and the New Environmental Paradigm in Bulgaria

  The Journal of Environmental Education · 2006-04-01 · 46 citations

  article

  Little is known about environmental concerns and attitudes among people in former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe despite widespread perceptions of severe environmental problems. The authors addressed this gap by examining Bulgarians' environmental concerns with a focus on whether the new environmental paradigm (NEP) scale can reliably measure their environmental orientations. Three surveys conducted in Bulgaria in 1998, 1999, and 2000 provide evidence of high environmental concern, and proximity to a major petrochemical plant is associated with greater concerns. The 6-item NEP is multidimensional and low in reliability. A scale constructed with 3 items that loaded consistently on 1 factor appears as valid as the 6-item NEP scale and has comparable internal consistency. There is much proenvironmental sentiment in Bulgaria, only part of which the NEP appears to measure. Despite overestimating the magnitude of current government investments in environmental protection, surveyed Bulgarians supported increasing investments in environmental protection. Further attention to both item and scale designs for eliciting environmental orientations in transitional countries is warranted.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hank Jenkins‐Smith

  University of Oklahoma

  4 shared

• Peter J. Ludovice

  3 shared

• Philip Shapira

  2 shared

• Carol Silva

  University of Oklahoma

  2 shared

• Paul M. Griffin

  1 shared

• Robert W. Smith

  University of Alberta

  1 shared

• Susan O. Griffin

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  1 shared

• Robert E. O’Connor

  University of Virginia

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Georgia Tech's Outstanding Service Award
• IAC Faculty Legacy Award
• ANAK Faculty of the Year
• Georgia Tech Student Government Association Faculty of the Y…