Making sense in a post-normal world

We have now heard both complaints and hopes for the future, and we have amassed a great deal of information. We have an idea of who the patient might be, although this can change over time as we learn more together with various stakeholders. However, in terms of the Basic Figure, we are still at the clinical exam stage, describing the system and identifying owners. Now we want to move on, to try to make some sense of it all. After all, we haven't been gathering data in this exercise simply to satisfy our general scientific curiosity. We are trying to sift through a range of issues to work with people to devise sustainable, healthy futures.

In many conventional scientific studies, what we are after is the ability to predict what will happen under particular circumstances, and then to either foster or alter those circumstances. In complex eco-social systems, we are faced with a dilemma. Commenting on the official Phillips report on the BSE epidemic in England, an editorial in the New Scientist commented that ‘governments and the governed [must] become comfortable with notions of uncertainty and risk’ (4 November 2000). In a series of publications, Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz have elaborated a public, open, ‘post-normal’ science for sustainability (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993, 1994; Ravetz, 1999). A central task of this new science is to deal with the irreducible uncertainty inherent in eco-social complexity.