Browsing by Author "Brugnach, Marcela"

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Toward a Relational Concept of Uncertainty: about Knowing Too Little, Knowing Too Differently, and Accepting Not to Know
(2008) Brugnach, Marcela; Dewulf, Art; Pahl-Wostl, Claudia; Taillieu, Tharsi
"Uncertainty of late has become an increasingly important and controversial topic in water resource management, and natural resources management in general. Diverse managing goals, changing environmental conditions, conflicting interests, and lack of predictability are some of the characteristics that decision makers have to face. This has resulted in the application and development of strategies such as adaptive management, which proposes flexibility and capability to adapt to unknown conditions as a way of dealing with uncertainties. However, this shift in ideas about managing has not always been accompanied by a general shift in the way uncertainties are understood and handled. To improve this situation, we believe it is necessary to recontextualize uncertainty in a broader way relative to its role, meaning, and relationship with participants in decision making because it is from this understanding that problems and solutions emerge. Under this view, solutions do not exclusively consist of eliminating or reducing uncertainty, but of reframing the problems as such so that they convey a different meaning. To this end, we propose a relational approach to uncertainty analysis. Here, we elaborate on this new conceptualization of uncertainty, and indicate some implications of this view for strategies for dealing with uncertainty in water management. We present an example as an illustration of these concepts."
Uncovering the Origin of Ambiguity in Nature-Inclusive Flood Infrastructure Projects
(2014) van den Hoek, Ronald E.; Brugnach, Marcela; Mulder, Jan P. M.; Hoekstra, Arjen Y.
"We aimed to uncover the origin of ambiguity in flood infrastructure projects using Building with Nature (BwN) design principles. BwN is a new approach in flood management that simultaneously integrates societal goals, such as flood safety and recreation development, with nature development goals by actively using natural dynamics and materials in the projects design. Because BwN projects affect multiple stakeholders and several societal functions, participatory project development is of key importance to successfully implement these projects. In such a multiactor decision-making process, a diversity of actors are involved, all of whom have their own view of the project based on their interests, values, beliefs, backgrounds, and past experiences. As a consequence, BwN projects are susceptible to being hampered by the presence of ambiguity, a kind of uncertainty that results from the simultaneous presence of multiple frames. For two BwN case study projects, we identified where the ambiguities potentially affecting project development resided, derived the different actor frames, and addressed the attributes underlying these frames. Our main finding was that ambiguity in BwN projects seems to originate from a contradiction between the beliefs held by different actors. Furthermore, our results suggest that in the current practice of BwN projects the scientific knowledge of experts is perceived as more legitimate than the local knowledge and experiences of lay actors, which implies that experts have a more powerful position in multiactor decision making. Thus, our research underlines the difficulty of bringing local knowledge and past experiences of lay actors into collective decision making."