Post-normal Research Articles

Pastoral Agriculture in the Post-industrial Age: Building Functional Integrity and Realising Potential

The potential of pastoral land use to create positive environmental, economic, and social outcomes is constrained by a “way of seeing” land and people through the eyes of Modernity and mechanical determinism. That ontology of land is compounded and reinforced by positivism, and the associated hierarchical and dis-integrated epistemology around the culture:nature nexus – including what is seen as “objective” science and technology driving practise. Both the ontology and epistemology of our Modern land use culture drive a reduction of ethics, relationship, and meaning to the measured utility of either production or dollars within a “resource sufficiency” view of the land factory. The consequence is not just the non-realisation of potential synergies and multiple functions underpinning value and resilience within the socio-ecological systems associated with pastoral land. It also degrades the “functional integrity” of those integrated systems and increases the fragility and multiple negative outcomes to local economic, environmental, and social functions. This study examines the underlying philosophical thoughtscapes of Modern agri-business models and contrasts those models with the emerging alternatives: from reducible universally-quantifiable machines to post-industrial thought; including post-normal science, integrated complex adaptive systems, and emerging work shifting homogeneous “economies of scale” industrialism to realising potential “economies of scope” by building functional and self-organising systems. It further examines the potential scope to be gained using three specific examples: multi-functional integrated landscapes, resilience theory specific to drought, and market value chains.

The Post-Normal Challenges of COVID-19: Constructing Effective and Legitimate Responses.

The ongoing COVID-19 emergency clearly presents novel challenges, both in terms of difficulties for maintaining public health and in assuring that governmental responses are ethically sound. Centrally, responses must respect, as best as possible, fundamental human rights and human values. Conflicts among values arise in response to the crisis, and public officials have no choice but to prioritize some while sacrificing others. Utilizing the concepts of effectiveness and legitimacy within the framework of post-normal science (PNS), we investigate and recommend processes and measures to address COVID-19 that support increased public health, while upholding established rights and values. The effectiveness and legitimacy of science-led policymaking requires investigation of how that policy ought to be made (e.g. concepts of policymaking and PNS), as well as how it ought to interact with diversely-constituted publics (e.g. public inclusion in policymaking and policy communication).

ENOVID: AMERICA’S FIRST ORAL CONTRACEPTIVE

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of involving the extended community in risk assessment of the applied sciences. To do this, the paper will be discussing the history of the first oral conceptive in America. Specifically, it discusses the Nelson Pill Hearings which was a very publicized trial intended to evaluate the safety of the oral contraceptive Enovid. The conclusion of this case study is that failing to involve the extended community (mainly, women taking the pill) resulted in a large distrust of authority. This distrust in the scientific community leads to their opinions being largely ignored and damaged the relationship between women and their doctors at the risk of women’s health. It was not until post-normal science ideals were implemented, that more women felt they could trust the safety of the product they were using. Failing to recognize the importance of involving the extended community in scientific breakthroughs created a barrier for the extended community to benefit from said scientific breakthroughs.

PROFESSIONAL CONSULTING, PLANNING AND DESIGN OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE FACE OF INCREASING UNCERTAINTIES AND RISKS

The article reveals features of the ongoing transformations in the field of consulting, planning and design in the field of regional development in the face of increasing uncertainties and risks, primarily related to climate change and biodiversity loss. It shows that the very basis of such work is significantly changing, as the world-system becomes more complex, during the transition from the concept of an “empty” world to a “full” world. This change includes increasing emphasis on ensuring the resilience of human-dominated ecosystems, a change in decision-making, using behavioral a “responsible” human model that best meets the needs of inclusive sustainable development.The authors define features of consulting, planning and design of regional development in the face of increasing uncertainties and risks, as a special type of thinking activity, in a situation of approaching radical uncertainty. The article shows the necessity of supplementing natural science approaches with the tools and practices of post-normal science and the narrative theory of beliefs, as well as the ideas of K. Friston, implemented within his dynamic causal model.Such an approach is based on a systematic approach to decision-making in regional development and pays special attention to the adaptation of individuals and communities to high risks and uncertainties, primarily climatic and natural. It helps to better reflect the diversity of geographical conditions, to clarify the range of effective solutions for sustainable development of regions and increase the long-term resilience of business.

Stacking Complexities: Reframing Uncertainty through Hybrid Literacies

In a context increasingly defined by post-normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), it is acknowledged that complex world problems cannot be addressed by one discipline in isolation. To face increasingly uncertain futures, it is therefore crucial to develop approaches that work with uncertainty. Because of its future-facing nature and current drive to tackle complex world challenges, design has a leading role to play in this endeavor. The article proposes a research framework informed by the development of hybrid literacies – transversal toolkits across design, technologies, and futures studies – that can furnish learners with transdisciplinary skills. These are deemed necessary to address uncertainty and complexity by deploying speculative-pragmatic, imaginative practices that foster modes of working, learning, and unlearning together. To illustrate this approach, the article draws on the ongoing collaboration between two academic institutions renowned, respectively, in the field of Art and Design (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London) and Science and Technology (Tokyo Institute of Technology) to offer a personal reflection and insights around transdisciplinarity and hybrid literacies in action.

Quality Assessment in Co-developing Climate Services in Norway and the Netherlands

Climate services, and research on climate services, have mutually developed over the past 20 years, with quality assessment a central issue for orienting both practitioners and researchers. However, quality assessment is becoming more complex as the field evolves, the range and types of climate services expands, and there is an increasing appeal to co-production of climate services. Scholars describe climate services as emerging from complex knowledge systems, where information moves through institutions and actors attribute various qualities to these services. Seeing climate services' qualities as derived from and activated in knowledge systems, we argue for comprehensive assessment conducted with an extended peer community of actors from the system; co-evaluation. Drawing inspiration from Knowledge Quality Assessment and post-normal science traditions, we develop the Co-QA assessment framework; a checklist-based framework for the co-creation of criteria to assess the quality of climate services. The Co-QA framework is a deliberation support tool for critical dialogue on the quality of climate services within a co-construction collective. It provides a novel, structured, and comprehensive way to engage an extended peer community in the process of quality assessment of climate services. We demonstrate how we tested the Co-QA—through interviews, focus groups and desktop research—in two co-production processes of innovative climate services; an ex post evaluation of the “Klimathon” in Bergen, Norway, and an ex ante evaluation for designing place-based climate services in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. These cases reveal the challenges of assessing climate services in complex knowledge systems, where many concerns cannot be captured in straight-forward metrics. And they show the utility of the Co-QA in facilitating co-evaluation.

SUSTAINABILITY IN ANTHROPOCENIC TIMES: A DIDACTIC PROPOSAL FOR A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL APPROACH OF PROBLEMS OF SUSTAINABILITY

COVID-19 reaffirms that we are living out the consequences of the Anthropocene. In terms of education this affirmation has considerable implications: we must overcome the profound divisions between the fields of Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences while at the same time recognizing the political character of educational and scientific practices.Sustainability is an idea that potentially embodies the elements that respond to these two challenges, but only distancing ourselves from a technocratic-instrumental approximation and assuming a political approach to the idea. Post-normal science provides an adequate framework for this because the emerging problems present democratic challenges that demand other academic and educational treatment.Our intention with this text is to contribute didactic material that incentivizes the introduction of this conceptual debate into the classroom setting. Far from proposing a confrontation between the dominant mode of thought, in this paper we propose an argument that seeks to untangle the basic components of our thesis and show the arbitrariness of all the theoretical constructions that result from that. We hope, in this way, to contribute to a transdisciplinary environmental and sustainability education that consists in uncovering the political dimension of this issue, to repoliticize education, transcend the division between relativism and objectivism and, encourage theoretical positioning without determinisms.

Knowledge and Science Advice During and After COVID-19: Rethinking ‘Expertise’ in Post-Normal Times

As the world contends with a global pandemic, a consistent claim of national governments has been that they are ‘following the science’. In this paper, I look more closely at where the ‘science’ comes from. To do so, I consider the current structures of science advice and the extent to which they reproduce particular ideological and epistemic commitments that narrow the policy horizon. This raises the inevitable question, central to this paper, of what and whose knowledge is or should be sought, which is being side-lined through the choice of particular framings and discourses, and with what consequences for the creation and implementation of ‘evidence-based policy’ during a pandemic and its aftermath. Through the analytical framework of Miranda Fricker’s epistemic injustice, I problematize the expertise that has guided the response to COVID-19 along two lines of narrowness: disciplinary/epistemic and social/experiential. Counteracting a monolithic culture of expertise requires tackling the structural inequalities in the systems of knowledge production to diversify the social and epistemological foundations of science. Drawing on post-normal science (PNS) theory, I suggest that the expertise needed to respond to the challenges of a post-COVID world is one that embraces greater pluralism, avoids groupthink, challenges the accepted orthodoxy and helps us revert old models and rigid path dependencies that so often neglect the lived realities and demands of those left behind. This can only be realized by overcoming epistemic injustice and cultivating the virtue of epistemic democracy in all of society’s institutions.

Slipping by Mohamed Kheir

BOOKS IN REVIEW solve scientific problems when the facts are in question, values are in conflict, and urgent, high-stakes decisions must be made. In this way, one can blend all kinds of knowledge, values, and beliefs to analyze solutions. If the experiences of social media are any measure of how this “post-normal” approach might work, one should approach the authors’ recommendation with skepticism, simply because our brains have a limbic system as well as a cerebral cortex. The danger of “postnormal science” is that we wade around infinitely in a swamp of confirmation bias, where the most inflammatory and emotion -triggering images and statements will prevail. With our reptilian brains, pathos will always devour logos and ethos. Part Three: Collapsosophy is, in essence, applied philosophy, with the dominating metonymy being that of weavers and weaving, to make whole the torn cloth of our world, and by extension, our reality. In it, the authors admonish the readers to shake off the state of permanent adolescence promulgated by a capitalist, consumer-culture world, and to embrace adulthood. The weaving involves bringing together spirituality and the material world to create “rough-weather networks” and to build bridges from new, agreedupon zones: defended, autonomous, sustainable , etc. The key weaving process will take place through social networks, and, like mycelium in the soil, we will be knit together by means of groups where we will listen without judgment, and share our perspectives to solve urgent problems. The book ends by asking the reader to ask, What use does the human species serve among other species, and what is its role in the chain of life? The answer is not given but is tacitly suggested: we must use our intelligence and our abilities to communicate and create technology to be good, facilitating stewards of all life. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Magda Cârneci FEM Trans. Sean Cotter. Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 238 pages. DEFYING DEFINITION AND regaining it only through comparison with formidable authors who take their art seriously , Magda Cârneci’s FEM is a metaautobiographical narration in which the experience of feeling is itself the plot. An extended narration of dream sequences and memories of flowering from girlhood to womanhood, FEM is an exercise in analytical sensuality that is fluid but clear and easy to read, written in an epistolary form in which the narrator dons the guise of Scheherazade as she converses with a soonto -be ex-lover. Language itself is a work of art that Cârneci seems to constantly whittle away at, harmonizing with the unnamed protagonist’s mission as she purposely sublimates her own life and personal history: “I am looking for a coherent image of the world, one that will fit into my mind, one where I can find my place. Or maybe a coherent magic of the world.” The focus of FEM is sex—not necessarily the sexual act but the experience surrounding it, decidedly heightened, for Cârneci is no Philip Roth. If anything, she writes love with rapture, I daresay as well as Anaïs Nin writes it. The dream sequences point to an obvious surrealist influence, but Cârneci also engages profoundly with classical tropes, such as sexual shape-shifting —thus finding creative kin in female authors who have done this so successfully, such as Anne Carson and Alice Oswald. It is certain that Cârneci reworks a personal and universal odyssey of a “sentimental education.” Having also read Magda Cârneci’s poetry , what strikes me as her trademark is a feeling of emotional intensity seeming to continuously rise to a fever pitch, balanced by a patently aestheticized style that nods not only to the author’s background as an art historian but to her nature as a true artist : “He is lilac and translucid, he looks as fragile and as precious as a glass vase, from mysterious Etruscan graves.” As for Sean Cotter’s translation, it is downright transparent, as fluid as the text itself: “I left the earth behind, an Easter egg painted with a lot of blue, a little yellowochre , and dark green, an ever smaller egg, ever farther away. I drifted tranquilly past the moon, with...

Wiedza, władza, niepewność. Koncepcja nauki postnormalnej Silvia Funtowicza i jerome’a R. Ravetza

Celem artykułu jest analiza koncepcji nauki postnormalnej Silvia Funtowicza i Jerome’a Ravetza. W pierwszej części tekstu autorka opisuje jej genezę oraz podstawowe założenia metodologiczne i teoretyczne. W drugiej części dokonuje analizy nauki postnormalnej z perspektywy socjologii wiedzy. Według autorki koncepcja nauki postnormalnej, forsowana przez jej twórców jako nowa metoda uprawiania nauki, jest propozycją politycznego, a być może – z uwagi na pluralizm reprezentowanych stanowisk – publicznego procesu decyzyjnego i stanowi przykład opisanego przez Pierre’a Bourdieu procesu budowania autorytetu uczonego poprzez narzucenie własnej definicji nauki.

Universidade face às questões ambientais: reflexividade e formação de novos profissionais

A universidade é ponto de convergência e motor privilegiado de aspectos do desenvolvimento cultural, social e econômico de uma nação. As emergências e problematicas socioambientais complexas colocam para esse espaço desafios para uma reestruturação curricular e de práticas de ensino interdisciplinares capazes de formar novos profissionais com habilidades de pensamento complexo e analítico para lidar melhor com a multicausalidade dessas questões. Nesse artigo discute-se o papel da universidade perante esse cenário, por meio da argumentação da inexorabilidade das questões socioambientais contemporâneas, e apontando possíveis caminhos de transformação em diálogo com a ciência pós-normal e ciência cidadã de modo interdisciplinar.

Social Media as Tools of Exclusion in Academia?

Social Media as Tools of Exclusion in Academia?

The Primary Care Perspective on the Norwegian National Strategy against Antimicrobial Resistance.

A national strategy to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been subject to cyclic processes in Norway since 1998. In 2020, a renewed process cycle was launched. Here, we describe the process and the approach of the process. In addition, we describe two concepts from philosophy of science that may help to frame the process: AMR is an example of a super wicked problem, and post-normal science provides tools to analyze the problem from a new angle.

Socio-metabolic profiles of electricity consumption along the rural–urban continuum of Ecuador: Whose energy sovereignty?

Integrating energy and land use planning for sustainable and resilient human settlements requires a Post-Normal science perspective where actors’ views are an essential part of the quality of energy policies assessments. Through qualitative content analysis of interviews to diverse actors in Ecuador, we found two broad contrasting narratives on Energy Sovereignty: a “Hard” and a “Soft” path. By using multivariate statistical analysis of socio-demographic, land use and electricity consumption variables, we derived a typology of parishes with distinct socio-metabolic profiles along the “rural–urban” continuum of Ecuador. Four different types and eight subtypes of parishes spatially organize by processes of suburbanization, functional urban specialization and “new ruralities” or “rural multifunctionality”. Urban centers tend to specialize in service and industrial sectors while suburban and intermediate cities, remote rural areas, and dynamic towns tend to be residential and agrarian. Suburban and intermediate cities and periurban dynamic towns are mosaics of land uses and activities where the “rural” and “urban” intertwine. Looking at these results from the two narratives found, we see how centralized grids and large-scale hydropower through the “Hard” path can sustain uneven patterns of electricity consumption. Contrastingly, under the “Soft” path, distributed energy generation could provide opportunities for multiple small-scale projects of diverse renewable sources. This could help facing the heterogeneity of socio-metabolic profiles and provide enabling conditions for a small-scale and spatially distributed industrialization, instead of centralized traditional ways that reproduce uneven development.

Integrating stakeholder knowledge through modular cooperative participatory processes for marine spatial planning outcomes (CORPORATES)

Management of the sea is increasingly complex, riddled with uncertainty and necessitates involvement from researchers across disciplines and stakeholders from multiple policy and practice sectors. This article discusses “The Cooperative Participatory Evaluation of Renewable Technologies on Ecosystem Services” (CORPORATES) research project, which developed an innovative and practical method of linking ecological processes, ecosystem services and benefits. The research was conducted in the context of licensing decisions for offshore wind farms in the North Sea (Scotland, UK).A set of linked, modular participatory processes were developed to foster cross-sector stakeholder engagement. It employed an exchange of ecological, legal, social, economic and cultural knowledge around marine ecosystem services. Workshop exercises included participatory mapping, benefit identification, and developing an understanding of linkages between ecosystem services, benefits, stakeholders’ activities and policy drivers through co-development of conceptual systems maps of the study area.The participatory exercises fostered meaningful dialogue across sectors and an ability to participate equally, despite initial differences in knowledge about ecosystem services. The development of conceptual systems maps facilitated productive discussion about trade-offs in relation to different policies. Reflective discussion identifies ways in which the developed processes could be integrated into future decision making.An assessment of the approach revealed that it operationalised a post normal science framework in terms of process oversight, multiple knowledge claims, and managing uncertainty. It developed a process that linked understanding of ecosystem functioning with the creation and implementation of policy thereby creating an ecosystem approach to marine spatial planning and licensing decisions, as required by law.This approach has extensive transferability to situations where stakeholder engagement is required to develop policy and provide feedback as part of a decision-making process. It is an engagement, outreach tool for communities and can help teach methods and processes for stakeholder engagement which enable new insights.

Post-normal science communication: exploring the blurring boundaries of science and journalism

This article provides a framework for analysing changes and continuities in science communication. The field is challenged by three contexts: (1) ‘post-normal situations’ of coping with uncertainties, value questions, an urgency to take action, and associated political pressures; (2) a dramatically changing media environment, and (3) a polarizing discourse culture. We refine the concept of post-normal science to make it more applicable to analyse public science communication in an era of digital media networks. Focussing on changes in the interactions between scientists and journalists, we identify two ideal types: normal and post-normal science communication, and conclude that the boundaries of science and journalism are blurring and under renegotiation. Scientists and journalists develop new shared role models, norms, and practices. Both groups are increasingly acting as advocates for common goods that emphasize the emerging norms of post-normal science communication: transparency, interpretation, advocacy and participation.

Energy descent as a post-carbon transition scenario: How ‘knowledge humility’ reshapes energy futures for post-normal times

Many studies have concluded that the current global economy can transition from fossil fuels to be powered entirely by renewable energy. While supporting such transition, we critique analysis purporting to conclusively demonstrate feasibility. Deep uncertainties remain about whether renewables can maintain, let alone grow, the range and scale of energy services presently provided by fossil fuels. The more optimistic renewable energy studies rely upon assumptions that may be theoretically or technically plausible, but which remain highly uncertain when real-world practicalities are accounted for. This places investigation of energy-society futures squarely in the domain of post-normal science, implying the need for greater ‘knowledge humility’ when framing and interpreting the findings from quantitative modelling exercises conducted to investigate energy futures. Greater appreciation for the limits of what we can know via such techniques reveals ‘energy descent’ as a plausible post-carbon scenario. Given the fundamental dependence of all economic activity on availability of energy in appropriate forms at sufficient rates, profound changes to dominant modes of production and consumption may be required, a view marginalised when more techno-optimistic futures are assumed. Viewing this situation through the lens of ‘post-normal times’ opens avenues for response that can better support societies in navigating viable futures.

Science for the Post-Normal Age

In response to the challenges of policy issues of risk and the environment, a new type of science-‘post-normal’-is emerging. This is analysed in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy. We use the two attributes of systems uncertainties and decision stakes to distinguish among these. Postnormal science is appropriate when either attribute is high; then the traditional methodologies are ineffective. In those circumstances, the quality assurance of scientific inputs to the policy process requires an ‘extended peer community’, consisting of all those with a stake in the dialogue on the issue. Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity. Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history. After centuries of triumph and optimism, science is now called on to remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system of which it forms the basis. Whereas science was previously understood as steadily advancing in the certainty of our knowledge and control of the natural world, now science is seen as coping with many uncertainties in policy issues of risk and the environment. In response, new styles of scientific activity are being developed. The reductionist, analytical worldview which divides systems into ever smaller elements, studied by ever more esoteric specialism, is being replaced by a systemic, synthetic and humanistic approach. The old dichotomies of facts and values, and of knowledge and ignorance, are being transcended. Natural systems are recognized as dynamic and complex; those involving interactions with humanity are ‘emergent’, including properties of reflection and contradiction. The science appropriate to this new condition will be based on the assumptions of unpredictability, incomplete control, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives. At present, there is no agreed description of what the future will bring, but

From elite folk science to the policy legend of the circular economy

This paper explores the implications of the widespread success of the term circular economy in the institutional and public debate. The concept of circular economy in itself implies a logical contradiction: on the one hand, the concept acknowledges the dependence of the economy on biophysical flows; on the other hand, the proposed solution—a business model guaranteeing a full decoupling of the economy from natural resources—seemingly ignores that biophysical processes are subject to thermodynamic constraints. A biophysical view of the sustainability predicament—the flows exchanged between the technosphere and the biosphere — is depicted to show that the idea of a full decoupling is simply due to ignorance of the knowledge generated in (inter)disciplinary scientific fields other than the dominant economic one. The success of economics as an ‘elite folk science’ is explained by the need of the establishment to ignore uncomfortable knowledge that would destabilize existing institutions. The success of the term circular economy can be seen as an example of socially constructed ignorance in which folk tales are used to depoliticize the sustainability debate and to colonize the future through the endorsement of implausible socio-technical imaginaries. A strategy that can lead to an irresponsible management of expectation: implausible master narratives are impossible to govern. Rather than continuing to impose technocratic plans, as if we knew the optimal thing to do, Post-Normal Science suggests that it is much more effective and responsible to adopt a flexible management approach, exploring the ability of self-organization of social-ecological systems.

Linking deliberative evaluation with integrated assessment and modelling: A methodological framework and its application to agricultural water management

Dealing jointly with both systemic and social complexity is a challenge that we face with sustainability issues. However, joining these two aspects of complexity is more a “post-normal science” call than an effective practice. Roughly speaking, analytical-systemic approaches focus on the complex-system side, while deliberative approaches deal with the multi-actor side. Our framework for evaluating different alternative actions, called the S2CE, is intended to reconcile the two approaches. It takes as premises: the recognition of plural values, which makes competing actions only weakly comparable; and the existence of irreducible uncertainties, which gives a heuristic status to the future. The framework hybridises an integrated assessment and modelling exercise, with a deliberative multi-criteria evaluation one, and concludes with a reflexive stage. Application to agricultural water management illustrates the strength of this cross-fertilization. First, the use of computer simulations has been found to enrich collective deliberation by helping stakeholders form and transform their value judgments, and by raising critical questions about options that appeared consensual. Second, the deliberative evaluation informed the integrated assessment and modelling by revealing some model limitations, along with the model’s unequal capacity to reflect the claims of different stakeholders.