Life After DPIR - Dr Knut Erik Solem, Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Alumni 1968,
Summary
I am currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Trondheim, Norway where I was a Member of the Board of Directors of NTNU’s Centre for Environment and Development as well as its Program of Industrial Ecology (IndEcol), which I helped to create and which is the only one of its kind in Norway.
My degrees are from the Universities of Oslo (Norway), Manitoba (Canada) as well as Leicester and Oxford Universities, where I carried out research on political and economic integration. I have written and published extensively on these subjects as well as on energy, science and technology, forecasting, long term planning, and strategic questions. For several years I taught and lectured widely in the US, Canada and Europe and advised governments as well as the private sector, having both practical and theoretical experience from the IAEA and IIASA, Vienna; United Nations, New York; NATO, Brussels and the Canadian Government (External Affairs and National Defense), Ottawa.
Most recently, my presentation in Slubice, Poland to the Collegium Polonicum in 2010 was published as a chapter entitled “Democracy, Integration Theory and Community Building in Small States: The Case of Norway” in Policies and Politics of the European Union by Jaroslaw Janczak (Ed), Adam Mickiewicz University Press, 2010. A second publication which also saw the light of day was my article “Foresight in Government. Is it possible? Is it likely?” summarizing many of my main concerns throughout the years and based on theoretical analysis as well as working experience from several international and national agencies and organizations (UNITAR, United Nations, Canadian Government, NATO, OECD, and IAEA). This article is available in FORESIGHT Vol. 13, 2011 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited) as well as on the internet.
At the request of Tony Scanlan, past Editor of BP’s Statistical Survey in London and Andrej Konoplyanik, Consultant to the Board of Gazprombank, Professor of the Russian State Oil and Gas University, and an old Russian friend from my “Energy and Strategy” days, I wrote a chapter in the forthcoming Volume II of Liber Amicorum A. A. Arbatov, a commemorative work on an internationally renowned energy expert with whom I met and briefly worked. This chapter is entitled “Arbatov: An Extraordinary Man” and is due to be published in 2013.
My institute (ISS), meanwhile, has brought forth a few very promising younger scholars with whom I have had the odd co-operation, such as the “In Variate Harmonia” working group on - inter alia - Political Sociology. We also had the pleasure of a visit and private session from Barry White, U.S. Ambassador to Norway and a friend of ISS/NTNU on 28th March, 2012, including his talk, “Looking ahead to the 2012 Presidential Election.”
I have recently also had the pleasure of traveling to Canada, California, Spain, and within Norway on both a professional and personal basis.
