Complexity theory in quality assessment: Case studies in sustainability science for governance
- Autores: Zora Kovacic
- Directores de la Tesis: Mario Giampietro (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2015
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Louis Lemkow Zeiterling (presid.), Jeroen van der Sluijs (secret.), Angela Guimarães Pereira (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
This dissertation is an investigation of science-policy issues in the field of sustainability science that are characterised by high levels of uncertainty and complexity. I focus on situations in which the view of scientific knowledge as the best available knowledge is questioned and a plurality of non-equivalent knowledge claims exists within science. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the challenges of complexity and uncertainty for the science-policy interface.
I argue that in the case of sustainability issues that are not well governed, the challenge is not just a matter of sloppy science or of corruption in either the scientific or political processes, but there is a need for (i) a better understanding of the implications of complexity and uncertainty for science for governance, and (ii) for a quality assessment of the representations of sustainability issues used to inform policy. In order to address this challenge, I apply the conceptual and analytical tools of complexity theory to quality assessment. I focus on the criteria of pertinence and usefulness as a way of carrying out both an epistemic and a pragmatic quality assessment.
More specifically, I provide a multi-scale representation of the issues considered and allocate the plurality of representations used for the governance of those issues to different scales of analysis. The approach developed does not offer any answers as to what is to be considered pertinent of useful, but it provides a representation of complexity that makes it possible to adopt a reflexive stance with respect to the pre-analytical choices and normative stands implied by different representations.
I apply these tools to three case studies in order to analyse how pertinence and usefulness unfold in practice. In the first case study, I analyse the pertinence and the usefulness of the mono-scale representations of the neo-classical economics knowledge base in the context of the financial crisis of 2007-08. In the second case study, I analyse the pertinence and usefulness of the plurality of representations and knowledge claims used in the governance of water in Israel. In the third case study, I analyse the pertinence and usefulness of the future visions of smart grids in the context of the European Union in relation to the complex energy systems of modern economies.
