Rationalist and Public Action Theories of Knowledge in Climate Change Debates

Abstract

Whatever our uncertainty about climate change knowledge, what matters is how we respond to this and what action we take. Devising appropriate action for policy for climate change generates much debate and disagreement. This chapter discusses differing approaches to policy making for climate change, beginning with dominant rationalist, mostly linear, approaches. It suggests that both scientific positive and normative assertions that are embedded in a rationalist approach are also reflected and reinforced through discussions, often heated, on action and policy making. However, prescriptive linear policy ‘from above’, surfacing from a ‘nanny state’, is often resented by the public. Policy also needs public support which determines how far governments can enforce it when there are several tensions around finding common ground, conflicts over resource priorities and ethical and moral issues of social justice and equity. Also, individual rationalisation based on personal perceptions and lived experience can be more powerful, overriding, challenging and cancelling rationalist contention. Altogether, such considerations generate several problems for a linear rationalist approach. For these reasons, a preferred alternative is a non-linear public action approach which arguably has a better, wider fit with how policy is actually made. In this approach, policy at all scales is a perpetual social process of being made and remade, rather than shaped through an expert-led prescription. It recognises that robust policy and intervention is constructed from the engagement of both scientific knowledge and lived experiential knowledge. There are, however, real issues of power at play in such engagement, concerning whose knowledge counts, and the political use of contested knowledge to cancel evidence claims. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, difference and diversity are sources of social learning and new knowledge. As Chap. 8 has argued, we require a productive transboundary engagement and social imagination to expand knowledge boundaries. We don’t learn by being the same.