Planet Earth, the only place we call our
home, is confounding, complex and inexplicable, mostly opaque to precise understanding.
Our capacity to understand with certainty and intervene precisely in the world
has been the quest of the ages. As scientists we are trained to simplify things
in order to understand them.. This is our folly.
Science has made progress by narrowly
framing a range of allowable questions and having consensus on the rules that
permit the inquirer to arrive at precise answers. This philosophical heritage,
which has been termed reductionism, denigrates modes of inquiry outside conventional
ranges of allowable questions.
Science is the basis of the material
culture, which characterizes our world. Science evidence is also the primary
paradigm of legitimation for our debates and policy prescriptions. As we have
come to understand, especially in the last two centuries, decision-making is
not the exclusive territory of an exact science. Problems for which, we often
need urgent solutions are characterized by situations where facts are
incomplete, knowledge is uncertain, values are culturally and ideologically contested and decision stakes
are high. In such settings, methods that rely on precise, unambiguous
scientific assessments are woefully constrained and there is need to
accommodate more pluralistic approaches to knowing in constructing our
understanding of the world.
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, authors
of the book Uncertainty and Quality in
Science Policy, advanced the use the term post-normal science to
characterize an approach to inquiry where important facts are uncertain or
unknowable, values are contested, stakes are high and decisions are urgent. With
its assumption of perfection and an attitude of exactitude, traditional science
is inadequate as tool for decision-making and policy processes in the
cotemporary world.
In the sense of Funtowicz and Ravetz,
inquiry must be an act of collaborative learning and knowledge integration,
where the role of the expert is not about giving correct advise but sharing
information about options, plausible outcomes and trade-offs. In this frame,
reductionism and uncertainty are not marginalized but appended as critical
dimensions of a broader decision frame an incorporated into a richer but less
predictive understanding of the world.
The notion of a less predictive
understanding of the world must make a lot of people uncomfortable. We are so
deeply wired in the action mode and the illusion precision, where nuance and
uncertainty are deemed as impotence. This is absolutely understandable
especially when you consider that precise diagnosis is necessary for treatment
and healing. However, the world we live in complex and messy, facts are
incomplete or unknowable.
Nationally and globally, decision makers have
to grapple with urgent and consequential decisions on public health, poverty
reduction, education, economics, energy, urbanization, agriculture and
conservation without the capacity to interrogate or integrate multiple perspectives.
Free primary education is a perfect example. While the intent of this novel
policy prescription was to expand access, which it does, retention and
completion are dismal, early childhood education has suffered and learning
outcomes are deplorable. Two logical questions beg; are we getting value for
money and could we have anticipated the unintended consequences?
Another example is the huge Gibe III
hydropower dam on the Omo River investment by the Ethiopian government and the
tacit support for it by the Kenya government and the decision by the World Bank
fund transport of the power into Kenya’s grid. The obvious benefit here is huge
amounts of new power and revenue to the
Ethiopian exchequer as well as new cheap power to Kenya’s grid. However, these
benefits must not overshadow the potentially irreversible ecological damage to
Lake Turkana and the annihilation of the delicate balance of livelihoods and
cultures of the communities of the Lower Omo and Turkana basin. Another example
is the introduction of the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria in the 1950s, a decision
now wieldy considered as an unmitigated socio-economic and ecological disaster.
While not a panacea, systems thinking offers
insights for decision-making in a complex and uncertain world. Systems thinking
is about patterns of relationships, their interactions, feedback and how these
generate emergent or hitherto unanticipated behavior or outcomes. Along with
systems thinking, decision makers must apply scenario analysis, which consist
of simulations of best-and-worst-case outcomes. Hence, the outcomes of policy
can be understood and anticipated by planning for all possibilities.
Underlying systems thinking is the premise
that systems behave as a whole, and as
Aristotle said, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.
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