Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
12.5 Landscape Ecology and Landscape Democracy
12.5.1 A True Landscape Democracy and Deliberative
Landscape Science
What directions do these examples suggest about ways to reconcile the commu-
nicative rationality of deliberative landscape planning with the more technical and
problem focused methods of landscape science? For this we need to return to the
question of values. Responding to the imperatives of the European Landscape
Convention, Arler (
2008
) has discussed his notion of 'a true landscape democracy'
(an expression used in the explanatory report of the convention) that recognises
three complementary types of values and decision making: self-determined, co-
determined, and objective. Self-determined values express personal feelings and
preferences, and express the dimension of landscape values that are most typically
emphasised by economists and many social scientists, based on psychophysical or
cognitive measures, and are widely used in landscape modelling. Co-determined
values arise from informed and open deliberation over collective decisions- they
are more than the aggregate of individual feelings, and express values arrived at
socially. Objective values are based upon evidence and rational argument rather
than power or rights, and correspond to the conventional 'truths' of science.
In recognising these different but complementary 'truths' of landscape, and the
different ways in which they are shaped and identified, Arler then argues that they
create a suite of possible and desirable roles for experts, as collaborators, brokers,
mediators, and connoisseurs, as well as the source of conventional technocratic
expertise. Involvement in landscape deliberations in what he describes as a true
landscape democracy thus requires science experts to become participants in a
conversation in which their knowledge is no more privileged than any other.
Hobbs (
1997
) prefigured this shift, arguing that the future is made collaboratively,
and Johnson and Campbell argued that implementing strategies to strengthen links
between ecological science and public involvement will require 're-conceptuali-
sation of the roles of both scientists and stakeholders so as to improve the inte-
gration of applied ecological science with democratic decision making' (Johnson
and Campbell
1999
: 502). Alternative futures planning based on collaborative
institutions can provide one model, and other potential models that may help
integrate science and collaboration include adaptive ecological management
(Holling
1978
; Williams and Brown
2012
), and various forms of decision support,
such as mediated modelling (Van der Belt
2004
) and structured decision making
(Gregory et al.
2001
). The critical feature throughout, however, remains that which
lies at the heart of the deliberative planning paradigm- the need to subsume the
power of expertise within a situated process of collaborative deliberation.
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