Scientific, Traditional and Experiential Knowledge in Collaborative Governance

• In Event: Engagement in Environmental Issues

Abstract

Scholars of environmental policy, and public policy more generally, have long noted the tensions between the aims of expert-driven policymaking and democratic accountability. An additional aim is inclusivity of decision processes, corresponding to the rise of collaborative governance and multi-stakeholder forums. Balancing these three aims in environmental governance requires navigating different kinds of information and different ways of knowing. Information can be drawn from a variety of sources, including science, traditional knowledge, and experiential knowledge. Some ways of knowing may be linked to a particular scale, for example experiential knowledge about a particular place (e.g., a stream segment), scientific knowledge about larger scale phenomena (e.g., a river basin), and traditional knowledge, accumulated over generations, held by culturally distinct peoples with ties to a specific locale (e.g., environmental conditions over time). This raises important questions for environmental governance including:

• How do actors in collaborative organizations navigate and make use of different kinds of knowledge?
• How might actors combine different knowledge types for sustainable resource management?
• Where do scale mismatches arise between actors, institutions, and information in different organizations and jurisdictions?

This study examines ecosystem restoration across multiple scales in the Puget Sound, USA. Substantial attention and investment in this region over several decades have generated a science-rich and institutionally thick context for collaborative restoration planning and actions. Our analysis compares the use of natural and social science to other forms of knowledge by actors across different types of collaborative organizations. Survey results (n=203) indicate natural science is seen as the most important type of information, followed by traditional knowledge, experiential knowledge, social-ecological systems science, and then social science. While these multiple ways of knowing are all seen as important, respondents overwhelmingly expressed the view that science should be privileged over other kinds of knowledge. They also indicated the extent of barriers to accessing science and other information, which center mainly on lack of labor/time to find it and the desired information doesn’t exist. Moreover, respondents indicated cross-scale challenges including the importance of locally relevant scientific information, aligning science with the scale of other organizations and jurisdictions, and the degree to which people in larger scale jurisdictions value information provided from smaller scale organizations. Within the collaborative organizations, only 4% of respondents described their primary expertise as traditional knowledge, while 22% indicated experience-based environmental information, and nearly half (44%) indicated science as their primary expertise. Overall, this study highlights the challenges of integrating scientific and non-scientific knowledge in collaborative processes for ecosystem restoration.

Authors

• Tomas Koontz, University of Washington Tacoma

• Craig W. Thomas, University of Washington

• Katherine Rose Cheng, University of Washington