Scientific assessments to facilitate deliberative policy learning

Abstract

Putting the recently adopted global Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Agreement on international climate policy into action will require careful policy choices. Appropriately informing decision-makers about longer-term, wicked policy issues remains a considerable challenge for the scientific community. Typically, these vital policy issues are highly uncertain, value-laden and disputed, and affect multiple temporal and spatial scales, governance levels, policy fields, and socioeconomic contexts simultaneously. In light of this, science-policy interfaces should help facilitate learning processes and open deliberation among all actors involved about potentially acceptable policy pathways. For this purpose, science-policy interfaces must strive to foster some enabling conditions: (1) "representation" in terms of engaging with diverse stakeholders (including experts) and acknowledging divergent viewpoints; (2) "empowerment" of underrepresented societal groups by codeveloping and integrating policy scenarios that reflect their specific knowledge systems and worldviews; (3) "capacity building" regarding methods and skills for integration and synthesis, as well as through the provision of knowledge synthesis about the policy solution space; and (4) "spaces for deliberation", facilitating direct interaction between different stakeholders, including governments and scientists. We argue that integrated, multi-stakeholder, scientific assessment processes-particularly the collaborative assessments of policy alternatives and their various implications-offer potential advantages in this regard, compared with alternatives for bridging scientific expertise and public policy. This article is part of a collection on scientific advice to governments.

Objectives for Stakeholder Engagement in Global Environmental Assessments

“…Engagement activities during this assessment process, in multi-stakeholder meetings for example, but also in developing scenarios and in other instances, explicitly sought information from a broad diversity of knowledge systems relevant to decision-makers at multiple scales and to many different scientific disciplines [5,9]. The UNFCCC has, beginning in 2013, conducted four Structured Expert Dialogue sessions closely linked with IPCC AR5, which successfully brought together scientific experts from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and national government representatives in open discussions away from the pressures of a negotiation to foster learning [1,62]. A third example of success with regards to the indicator of high participants diversity can be found in the case of IPBES, which places more emphasis on indigenous and local knowledge than any other GEA to date, and already includes actors coming from a diversity of cultural backgrounds and with different types of knowledge in meetings such as the pre-plenary Stakeholder Days [10,14,15].…”

“…Next, to explore the potential contribution of different categories of objectives to the realization of deliberative policy learning, which has been identified in the literature as plausible normative rationale for engagement in GEAs [1,31], an exploratory keyword analysis was conducted. A list of keywords was developed associated with four major building blocks for deliberative policy learning based on the literature (see Table 3).…”

“…The major goals of GEA processes are to frame and analyze the drivers, impacts and potential solution pathways associated with global environmental problems in a legitimate, credible and salient manner, and to communicate these findings to their target audiences [1,2,5]. More than 140 GEAs have been initiated to date, covering topics such as climate change, agricultural production, ozone depletion and relative merits of different options.…”

“…Doing so can present significant challenges in terms of legitimacy, credibility and policy-relevance, in particular when addressing wicked sustainability problems, which are transboundary, long-term and uncertain in nature, and where facts and values are inherently intermingled [1][2][3][4]. Perhaps the most prominent, elaborate and legitimate mechanism currently in place for navigating this interface is the collaborative synthesis of policy-relevant knowledge in global environmental assessments (GEAs).…”

Tropical forest-transition landscapes: a portfolio for studying people, tree crops and agro-ecological change in context

“…the reality of the place) and (3) legitimacy (research that does not include local perspectives) (Clark, Tomich, et al 2016;Leimona et al 2015;Kowarsch et al 2016;Posner et al 2016).…”