Climate Change and Post-Normal Science
August 31, 2009 09:48PM
From the 1993 article' "Science for the Post-Normal Age," by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz:
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. …
Now that the policy issues of risk and the environment present the most urgent problems for science, uncertainty and quality are moving from the periphery, one might say the shadows, of scientific methodology, to become the central, integrating concepts. …
Science cannot always provide well-founded theories based on experiments for explanation and prediction, but can frequently achieve at best only mathematical models and computer simulations, which are essentially untestable. On the basis of such uncertain inputs, decisions must be made, under conditions of some urgency. Therefore policy cannot proceed on the basis of factual predictions, but only on policy forecasts. …
To characterize an issue involving risk and the environment, in what we call ‘post-normal science’, we can think of it as one where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. In such a case, the term ‘problem’, with its connotations of an exercise where a defined methodology is likely to lead to a clear solution, is less appropriate. …
Post-normal science has the paradoxical feature that in its problem-solving activity the traditional domination of ‘hard facts’ over ‘soft values’ has been inverted. … A good example of such an inversion is provided by the actions that will need to be taken in preparation for mitigating the effects of sea-level rise consequent on global climate change. The ‘causal chain’ here starts with the various outputs of human activity, producing changes in the biosphere, leading to changes in the climatic system, then changes in sea level (all these interacting in complex ways with varying delay times). … But all the causal elements are uncertain in the extreme; to wait until all the factsare in, would be another form of imprudence. … Public agreement and participation, deriving essentially from value commitments, will be decisive for the assessment of risks and the setting of policy.
From the 2008 article, “Post-Normal Science,” by Funtowicz and Ravetz on Encyclopedia of Earth:
There are now many initiatives, increasing in number and significance all the time, for involving wider circles of people in decision-making and implementation on health and environmental issues. … This we call an ‘extended peer community’, consisting not merely of persons with some form or other of institutional accreditation, but rather of all those with a desire to participate in the resolution of the issue. …
Extended peer communities are already being created, in increasing numbers, either when the authorities cannot see a way forward, or when they know that without a broad base of consensus, no policy can succeed. They are called ‘citizens’ 'juries’, ‘focus groups’, ‘consensus conferences’, or any one of a great variety of other names. Their forms and powers are correspondingly varied. But they all have one important element in common: they assess the quality of policy proposals, including a scientific element. They have proved their competence using the science they master during the exercise combined with their knowledge of their own situation in all its dimensions. And their verdicts all have some degree of moral force and hence political influence.
