[MUSIC] Hello, welcome back. This is the second lesson of week eight. And in this lesson, we will talk about the epistemological challenges of participation and we will look at an example from the field. So the goal of this session is to understand the challenge of bringing together different stakeholders and different types of expertise. In the next ten minutes, we will explain the challenges linked to participatory integrated assessments. And look at one example of this. So, the issue of multiple perceptions can be described in the following way. If you have a given system, each different observer will perceive this system in different ways. So for example, if you take an ecologist, they will establish what are the relevant attributes according to the ecologist perspectives to observe about the system. These attributes will be encoded in order to produce a representation of the system, which we can think of as a model. And then this model can be used to make predictions about the behavior of the system. So these predictions are decoded to see if they match with what is actually observed. So the same process can be repeated for an economist. And they will define the relevant attributes in a different way. And therefore, build a different model of the same system. Same thing for a biologist, for an engineer, for a sociologist. So what we have is that different representations are made of the same system and they may or may not overlap. Now this is important when talking about social-ecological systems because as we have seen through the course, there are different representations we can build of this types of systems. So, for example, we can make an End Use Matrix, a Metabolic Pathways, or we can make an Externalization Matrix or an Environmental Loading Matrix. Now, when putting together all of these different representations, what we have is a discussion of the feasibility, viability and desirability domain. So it's important to know these representations, if they overlap or not, if they can talk to each other or if they are non-equivalence to each other because this matters in terms of decision making. >> Hello. Think about the elephant. The elephant is a different thing to different people. Think about blind people trying to define the elephant. One could touch the belly and say it's a big fleshy thing. One could touch the tusks and say it's a long curved thing. One could touch the mouth and say it's a long floppy thing. And another one could touch the ears and say it's papery, it's big and it flips. So different people see the elephant differently. But then for many years the development professionals had been talking about a stable development. And they have mainly been talking about the principle of economy growth. They have been talking about achieving social objectives. They have been talking about ecological conservation. Talking about achieving the ecological objectives. But maybe it's about time that we look at the complexity within sustainable development. Look at that complexity that's brought about by scale. The local scale, the national scale, and the global scale. We should also look at the complexity that brought up by boundary factors. These factors include politics. They include political views. They include peace and tranquility. They also include how institutions and administration is arranged. Perhaps we should be talking about sustainable communities instead of talking about sustainable development. And that is what I would suggest. The whole mark of sustainable communities are self determining, sustainable communities have freedom of speech,association and of choice. In sustainable communities, there are multiple stakeholders with multiple interests. And these interests may actually be conflicting. So we need to look at this interest and see at which scale this interest come. This interest could come from the capital where the policy is made. It could come from the field where the policy is implemented and that interaction is very important. We need to be bold enough to ask important questions like whose resource belongs to? We need to ask who is claiming the resource that is an input development. Who has access to this resource? Who benefits from this resource? Who makes decisions about this resource? And that I highlight because I think who makes decisions about a resource and the use of that resource is very important. Who should own this resource? I have as that, about what taught in Botswana. And I have found that different stakeholders give different answers, to who owns it and should have access to it. So, you have several types of stakeholders. You have stakeholders that are vulnerable. These are stakeholders who have high interest in the resource but has no power of decision making. You also have stakeholders that are key to the development process. These are stakeholders who have high interest in the resources and even have high decision making powers. You also have stakeholders who are low priorities. These are stakeholders who have neither. We have low interest and low power in the resources. And then you have the critical and perhaps dangerous stakeholders who have very high power but have no interest in the resource. So when I create my study to find out about all these stakeholder interactions, I found the invisible hand which came mainly from the role of experts in academics. In general, and they have enormous strength in that they either direct or create narratives for the powerful players. That dominance is fueled by the power of knowledge, and the definition and exclusive tendencies. The donors hand is not so invisible, they openly provide financial support for powerful governments. What do we need to do about it? We need to check our support motives. Should the powerful country support the powerful? The powerful supporting the powerful takes away potential for the self determination that we're talking about. First of all, it has been found to bring about a breakdown of local government system. It also brings about gross under development. It also takes down or brings a loss of local skills. So what needs to happen is for us to create a platform for bargaining and negotiating access to sustainable livelihoods and local investments in order to form sustainable communities. Thank you very much. >> So how we put together different perceptions matters in terms of what type of science we want to do. So one can have an elite type of science where the experts decide what is relevant information and how to put it together. Or a more participatory type of science, like in the example we saw in talk about the sustainable communities. So if we want to aim for a more participatory science, there are different steps that needs to be taken in this process. We have, there are three different types of quality checks that we have to do. In order to ensure that the different perceptions are taken into account. So the first step is a quality check on the issue definition, and in this step what is important is to look at what are the relevant story-tellings. And whether they have been included in the analysis. So how many of these perceptions of different stakeholders that we have are part of the definition of the problem. The second step is a quality check of the integrated analysis so on the method of analysis itself. And in this step what we check is whether the attributes that are being considered are pertinent and whether the integrated assessments that we are doing when we put together all these different attributes is congruent. And the third is the quality check on the deliberative process. So in this third step what we do is to look at whether the process itself of putting together the different stakeholders and putting together the different attributes in the integrated assessment was fair. And we check whether this process leads to an effective deliberation or if it, for example they get into some inconsistencies or controversies and may now proceed forward. So if there are problems at any of these three steps of the quality assessment, what we have to do is to go back to the previous step. And so these three steps have to be understood as an iterative process, as something that maybe has to be repeated many times over. And the difference that they feed into each other.
