ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that the growing relevance of various types of knowledge and nonknowledge in contemporary societies is applicable to all policy fields, its significance is particularly high in the field of environmental politics. Environmental politics is surrounded by an extensive knowledge infrastructure (and related epistemic communities, see Haas 1990) that produces a huge body of technical and scientific expertise, shapes discourses on sustainability and influences political decisions. Furthermore, the environmental policy arena provides fertile ground for the investigation of new governance arrangements and emerging architectures of knowledge. What has often been observed in environmental decision making is the marked gap between expert knowledge, scientific knowledge and technical knowledge on the one side and local or everyday knowledge on the other. It has been suggested that this gap may be closed by the development of decentralized and participatory procedures associated with particular modes of governance (e.g. network modes and civil society involvement). For instance Fischer has defined one variant of these procedures for creating and accessing local knowledge as participatory inquiry (Fischer 2000: ch. 11). Participatory inquiry describes the various processes of creating and circulating previously unformulated knowledge. Planning theory and practice offer us a huge variety of instruments and procedures for the implementation of participatory
inquiry. Potentially, it opens up new methods for the creation and integration of new forms of non-scientific technical or environmental knowledge into both public discourse and the decision-making process. Indeed it has been argued that these new forms of knowledge may actually improve the policies that result; for instance Fischer (2000: 222) has argued: ‘Today, deliberative participation is not only seen as a normative requirement for a democratic society but serves increasingly as a counter to the uncertainties of science’. Thus the sustainability issue provides an ideal testing ground for examining the construction of and the interrelationships and interactions between governance arrangements and knowledge.
