Nine lives of uncertainty in decision-making: strategies for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance

Together with my colleague Robbert Biesbroek, I have published a paper on decision-making under uncertainty, in the journal Policy and Society.

Nine lives of uncertainty in decision-making: strategies for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance

Governing complex environmental issues involves intensive interac- tion between public and private actors. These governance pro- cesses are fraught with uncertainties about, for example, the current state of environmental affairs, the relevant set of decision alternatives, the reactions of other actors to proposed solutions or the future developments likely to affect an issue. Uncertainty comes in different shapes and sizes and different strands in the literature, which has placed emphasis either on the substance of the issue (e.g. in environmental sciences) or on the decision-making process (e.g. policy sciences). In this paper, we bring together these different strands of literature on uncertainty to present a novel analytical framework. We build on the argument that the nature ofuncertainty consists of three types: epistemic uncertainty (involving the lack of knowledge about a particular system), ontological uncertainty (irre- ducible unpredictability due to inherently complex system beha- vior) and ambiguity (conflicts between fundamentally different frames about the issue at hand). Scholars have also argued the importance of differentiating between three different objects of uncertainty: substantive uncertainty (uncertainty about the content of decisions or policy issues), strategic uncertainty (uncertainty about the actions of other actors in the strategic game of deci- sion-making) and institutional uncertainty (uncertainty about the rules of the game in decision-making). The framework is useful for analyzing and addressing the nine lives of uncertainty in decision- making. Better understanding of the range of uncertainties is crucial to design more robust policies and governance arrangements and to deal with wicked environmental problems.

Dewulf, A., & Biesbroek, R. (2018). Nine lives of uncertainty in decision-making: strategies for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance. Policy and Society, 37(4), 441–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1504484 (Open Access)

I presented this as a poster at the Annual Workshop of the Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty at the University of  Oxford in November 2017: