Knowledge co-production for anticipatory governance

It has been almost 30 years since Funtowicz and Ravetz published their seminal article that introduced the concept of postnormal science. The title of that paper is markedly similar to the title of this webinar. Instead of science for the postnormal age, we now talk about knowledge coproduction for anticipatory governance. In this talk, our speaker, Prof. Dr. Esther Turnhout will discuss how and to what extent perspectives on what needs to change in the production of knowledge have shifted over time, focusing on the environmental domain. She will also discuss the challenges and obstacles in realizing the long-standing ambitions to transform the production of knowledge to better fit with current societal needs. Drawing on recent work with Myanna Lahsen, Dr Turnhout suggests that these challenges and obstacles are fundamentally interlinked with interests and incentives within the research system as well as with values of neutrality and policy relevance. Persistent failure to address these obstacles results in research reproducing the status quo and hindering the transformative changes that that same research calls for.

Prof. Dr. Esther Turnhout is chair of Science, Technology and Society at the Section of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist with expertise in science and technology studies, environmental studies and political science. Her research and teaching focuses on the interactions between science and lay, Indigenous and local knowledge systems, and on policy and governance for biodiversity and sustainability transformations. She has published numerous articles on the biodiversity science-policy interface and other topics in high impact journals and she is also the first author of the book Environmental Expertise: Connecting Science, Policy and Society’ with Cambridge University Press. She is editor in chief of the interdisciplinary journal Environmental Science & Policy. She plays several active roles in the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and was an author of the IPBES Global Assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Since January 2022, she is the Scientific Director of WTMC - the Dutch Graduate Research School for Science and Technology Studies.