Post-Normal Governance: An Emerging Counter-Proposal‪.‬

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to attempt to bring together three bodies of interrelated thought (complexity, governance and civics) in order to begin to develop the concept of post-normal governance as a counter-proposal to the notion of managerial ecology. Managerial ecology has developed, or coevolved, with human institutions over the past several decades as a pervasive, but almost implicit, framework for environmental decision-making. It is characterized by top-down, 'command and control', often bureaucratic structures, which can be seen to short-circuit more participative, democratic decision-making. It will be argued, based on insights gleaned from complex systems thinking, that due to the high uncertainty and high decision stakes associated with making decisions within complex systems that a more ethically-sound, 'post-normal' approach to science and decision-making, in which the 'peer community is extended', should be explored. This notion of post-normal science will be contextualized within recent governance literature and related to a civics approach to planning developed by Nelson and others in an effort to explore an extension of Funtowicz and Ravetz' notion of a post-normal science to governance.