Concluding on the Role of Participatory Approaches in Post-Normal Times

Abstract

There is no perspective for sustainability without dialogical interactions involving a broad range of social actors. Such processes must occur through different organizational levels to avoid ruptures of cognitive exclusion and to enhance the human capabilities of organization and cooperation. Participatory research approaches represent a possibility in that way, aggregating collaborative knowledge and actions, fostering empowerment, and diversity of alternatives for sustainability. The properties of participatory research like sharing power, self-organization, and the possibility of integrating uncertainties make correspondence to post-normal problems, also facilitating extended peer communities for reaching socially robust scientific knowledge. The constant changes, emergent risks, and the interdependent scarcities in the global context replace human beings as uncompleted, and the continuous search for adaptation and resilience must be reflexive, participatory, and democratic.

Then we waited. We rested our rifles for a while, without firing a single shot. We wanted to give them a truce during which to finish of our poor ponies. Even after the last whimper had died on the air, we remained appalled and quiet for a long time, until the sounds and the silence, and the remembrance of that suffering should begin to recede in the distance. After that, everything started up all over again, even more fiercely. And in what I am telling, we see the desolation of the world. God exists, yes, slowly and suddenly. He acts, all right—but almost wholly through the medium of persons, good and bad. The awesome things of this world! The backlands are a powerful weapon. Is God a trigger?

João Guimarães Rosa (From the book “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands”—(Guimarães Rosa 1963). In this prominent and thrilling novel, Riobaldo Tatarana, a gunman fighting in the backlands, raises universal existential questions from his context, and so, making philosophical connections of his distant wilderness with the world).