Knowledge forms and knowledge sharing

Successful stewardship, especially when with a multistakeholder base, needs to address a variety of challenges about knowledge sharing, i.e. its exchange and ‘translation’, allowing understanding between people in different occupations with different kinds of knowledge, and in their leisure as well as professional situations. In the science/environmental policy/sustainability fields there are many barriers to effective communication and sharing of knowledge.

For example, within the scientific field itself, ‘formal’ scientists and technical experts do not always recognize and reciprocate the informal scientific knowledge, creativity and innovation existing at the grass-roots level of society.

Members of a community living in a given area may often have a rich informal knowledge of what has taken place in the past, of the functioning of ecosystems, of sources of risk and of hazards. Sometimes this knowledge is associated with traditional communities in an area. There is also informal knowledge in industrial contexts. Just as farmers may have good insights into local hydrology, workers in factories and mines may have intimate under-standings of the workings of machines and of the properties of wastes and residuals. Awareness of what has really happened to wastes, and why, can be of great value for the design of remediation programmes and for the monitoring of contaminated sites.

For a variety of reasons, including proximity, the ‘non-experts’ can sometimes ‘read’ or ‘observe’ the world in ways that are not available to formal experts coming from outside. Dialogue and stakeholder consultation can, in principle, ally formal and informal expertise. Stakeholder deliberation can then, in a variety of ways, contribute to the identification of concepts and criteria for a socially satisfying solution. However, this type of pragmatic science based on observation and confronting local and day to day problems is not always articulated or acknowledged. Policy makers and resource managers sometimes evolve filters and structural barriers that prevent them from recognizing the potential that exists for blending formal and informal science.

One reason that informal knowledge may not be used is that the systems for training experts, as well as some bureaucratic tendencies, favour standardized solutions — and so they treat as inconvenient the specificities of sites and ecological (as well as social) heterogeneity. Incentives for investing in knowledge and technologies with a strong site specificity, and hence with limited potential for generalization, are very low [89].

A multicultural panel on Science and Sustainable Development, held at the sixth session of the Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD6) of the United Nations in New York, considered issues such as these and made the following recommendation:

“... every possible effort should be made to improve the processes of generating, sharing and utilizing science for sustainable development, and that this will need to include a commitment to overcome the communi-cation gaps within the scientific community and between scientists, policy makers and the general public” (see Ref. [90]).

The panel statement suggested that appropriate elements of quality assurance, science communication and public policy processes will include:

“new institutions and public procedures for the social evaluation of science advances; technology transfer seen in the framework of reciprocal learning and capacity building; and a reassessment of the forms and locations of the ‘centres of excellence’ capable of contributing knowledge and judgement needed for sustainability” (see Ref. [90]).

Mobilizing knowledge for sustainable development and stewardship requires attention to the forms of knowledge sharing, including their institu-tional, technical, economic, linguistic and cultural preconditions. Social trust and partnerships are constructed through dialogue and cooperation — among scientists and technical experts with policy makers, implementers and stake-holders — including experts with site specific (local) knowledge that complements methodological and coordination expertise. Knowledge as a resource must be accessible to the actors and pertinent to the context of their action [91].

Following these arguments, it is important to adopt a pluralistic approach to building the knowledge base. Science (understood as the activity of technical experts) needs to be considered as an important part of the relevant knowledge base that needs to be developed and mobilized in order to provide evidence in a decision or policy process. However, the ideal of rigorous scientific quality assurance is complemented by a commitment to open public dialogue. Citizens and stakeholders have a fundamental role in a knowledge partnership process.

The strength and relevance of scientific evidence is amenable to assessment by citizens, who contribute to the framing of the issues and to judgements about the acceptability of proposed solutions. In this perspective, all parties come to the dialogue ready to learn. Through this co-production of knowledge, the

extended peer community creates a (deliberative) democracy of expertise [92–

94].

The ‘post-normal’ model of science practice, developed by risk assessment experts Funtowicz and Ravetz [92–94], places the emphasis on quality assurance through extended participation. A pluralistic, participatory and democratic view is developed of the knowledge and judgement base for policy actions:

(a) The old distinction between hard facts and soft values is replaced by a soft facts/hard values framework — admitting the complexity of emergent system properties (and hence uncertainties, etc.), and admitting the plurality of quality and legitimating criteria (e.g. there are different definitions of a problem, different ways of selecting and conceiving its relevant aspects, as well as different definitions of goals, depending not only on conflicts of interest but also on cultural factors).

(b) The highly asymmetrical distinction between experts and non-experts is reframed. In a sense, when facing a post-normal problem, all stakeholders are experts: in different ways, from different points of view and with regard to different aspects of the problem. Thus, it is necessary to extend the number and type of actors, both individual and collective, legitimated to intervene in the definition of problems as well as the selection and implementation of the connected policies. This extension does not only fulfil the requirements of democratic decision making but also improves the quality of decisions. The way of conducting a decision process dramat-ically influences its results. The dialogue between different actors is essential for quality, credibility and legitimacy, and hence the prospects of success of policy implementation.

The efforts to extend the time window for understanding ecosystem behaviour through recourse to what has become known as traditional ecological knowledge may serve as an example of formal and informal knowledge. Traditional ecological knowledge can be defined as any cumulative body of knowledge and beliefs, often partly tacit and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment.

An attribute of many societies with historical continuity in resource use practices is that they are non-industrial or less technologically advanced, many of them indigenous or tribal [95]. A similar characterization is put forward in Ref. [96].

There is little doubt that traditional ecological knowledge can be valuable for developing long term time horizons for system stewardship. Both the habits

of thought and the substantive environmental knowledge can be sources of wisdom. Records of traditional ecological knowledge may be helpful in recon-structing the ecological history of a given area, thus extending our design base over longer time spans. Better supported predictions of future developments might be possible in conjunction with modern system analytical and modelling techniques. As this ‘knowledge’ typically combines digested experience with myth and has no established time frame, it is difficult to deduce the time period for which it would be valid.

However, it should not be assumed that ‘traditional’ practices and the knowledge and values that they embody are automatically aligned to contem-porary site stewardship needs. Some commentators convey the idea that indigenous populations living on the basis of traditional ecological knowledge always do/did so in a sustainable way. This is not necessarily the case. While some behavioural patterns may have been aimed at conservation of resources, for instance those arising from hunting taboos, the lack of baseline data and a detailed analysis of the ecosystems in question make a proper judgement difficult. Historical evidence also shows that traditional ecological knowledge is not always very resilient and adaptive to changes in the ecosystem if the rate of change is too fast. It could even be argued that modern western thinking developed in response to challenges by the surrounding ecosystem. Apparently there were important incentives and drivers for such a development and they outweighed the loss of ‘sustainability’ [58].

Observations of indigenous populations are generally based on a rather short timescale, the observation times typically not extending beyond a few decades into the past. For a given ecosystem and indigenous population, the situation may appear stable over the observation time and the changes induced by the human population may be too small to observe. It is also important to remember that Europe once had an ‘indigenous’ population that, over time, showed itself to be able to shape its environment beyond recognition.