From interest consultation to collective knowledge production

Participation is nowadays essential in the policy cycle ¹ of long-term environmental policymaking. Long-term policies, defined as “institutions where current actions have effects in the (far) future, or that respond to problems resulting from current actions that have effects in the (far) future”, have to address long-term problems whose causes and effects have long time lags, which cannot be solved rapidly and involve intergenerational equity and trade-offs (Siebenhüner et al. Chapter 1 in this volume). These features of long-term problems undermine the authority of scientific knowledge regarding environmental problems. On the one hand, the complex interaction between human society and earth ecosystems makes scientific confirmation difficult. On the other hand, as Ulrich Beck (1998: 12–14) claims, scientific knowledge can only provide more or less uncertain factual information about probabilities, but never answer whether risk is acceptable. As a result, scientific knowledge concerning long-term environmental problems has been questioned and the policies based on it have also been challenged.