INTEGRATE SOCIETAL KNOWLEDGE INTO SCIENCE

Overview

The knowledge that determines whether an intervention works is not held only by the project. Landowners know how water moves across their fields, residents know which streets flood first, and the staff of a municipality know which proposal will survive its committee. Integrating societal knowledge into science is the practice of treating that knowledge as evidence and building it into the models rather than consulting on models already built.

Why it changes the assessment

Where stakeholders hold a different model of the system from the technical one, the difference is informative. It usually identifies a pathway the technical model has omitted — a culvert that is blocked in practice, a land use that changes seasonally, a maintenance arrangement that lapses. Building those into the model improves it. Equally, where a stakeholder group is confident about a causal link that the model does not support, establishing why is a way of testing the model rather than a public relations problem to be managed.

There is also a legitimacy effect that matters for implementation. An assessment that stakeholders helped to construct is one they can defend, and their defence is frequently what carries an intervention through the point where it is contested. This is not a reason to compromise the analysis; it is a reason to make the analysis transparent enough to be argued with.

How it is done

The methods used combine participatory model building with formal analysis of the resulting material. Causal maps are built with stakeholders and then analysed to identify where the system is expected to respond and where it is expected to resist. Social network analysis establishes which actors are connected to which, which relationships are missing, and where the collaboration required for implementation does not exist. The results are then brought back into the integrated assessment, so that the social structure and the physical system are represented in the same framework.

Where to go next

The two children of this page set out the methods in detail: participatory and collaborative modelling for co-creating models with stakeholders, and stakeholder engagement and public participation for the wider process of involving people in a decision.