Knowledge Democracy

The concept of knowledge democracy is meant to enable a new focus on the relationships between knowledge production and dissemination, the functioning of the media and our democratic institutions. The emerging concept of knowledge democracy moreover obliges us to realise that the institutional frameworks of today’s societies may appear to be deficient as far as the above mentioned undercurrents, trends and other developments demand change. We explored the directions for institutional change during the conference.

Democracy is without a doubt the most successful governance concept for societies during the last two centuries. It is a strong brand, even used by rulers who do not meet any democratic criterion. Representation gradually became the predominant mechanism by which the population at large, through elections, provides a body with a general authorisation to take decisions in all public domains for a certain period of time. Representative parliamentary democracy became the icon of advanced nation-states.

The recent decline of representative parliamentary democracy has been called upon by many authors. On the micro-level the earlier consistent individual position of an ideologically-based consistent value pattern has disappeared. The values are present but the glue of a focal ideological principle is not any longer at stock. Fragmentation of values has lead to individualisation, to uniqueness but thereby also to the impossibility of being represented in a general manner by a single actor such as a member of parliament. More fundamentally media-politics destroy the original meaning of representation. On the meso-level the development of political parties to marketeers in the political realm destroys their capacity for designing consistent broad political strategies. Like willow trees they move with the winds of the supposed voters’ preferences. And on the macro-level media-politics dominate. Volatility therefore will probably increase.

The debate on the future of democracy in advanced national societies has not yet led to major innovations. Established political actors try to tackle populism with trusted resources: a combination of anti-populist rhetoric and adoption of the populist agenda. Some of the media have responded by attempting to become “more populist than populists themselves”, almost always at the expense of analytical depth.

Meanwhile, the worldwide web provides for a drastic change in the rules of the game. A better educated public has wide access to information, and selects it by itself instead of by media filters. Moreover citizens themselves have become media. They may produce world-famous YouTube pictures.

The crucial combination of a network society and media-politics provides new problems and tensions. The political agenda is filled with so-called wicked problems, characterised by the absence of consensus both on the relevant values and the necessary knowledge and information. Uncertainty and complexity prevail.

Advanced societies are characterised by an increasing intensity and speed of reflexive mechanisms. Reflexive mechanisms in a more or less lenient political environment cause overwhelming volatility of bodies of knowledge related to social systems. As all available knowledge is utilised to facilitate reflexive processes, the result of such processes might establish new relationships that undermine the existing knowledge. Social reality has then become unpredictable in principle.

The relationships between science and politics demand new designs in an environment of media-politics, wicked problems and reflexivity. The classical theory on boundary work in order to master the existing gaps between science and politics is nowadays widely accepted among experts. The underlying insight is that scientific knowledge by its very structure never directly relates to action, because it is fragmented, partial, conditional and immunised. This observation is valid for both mono- and multi- disciplinary knowledge. So translation activities are always necessary in order to utilise scientific knowledge for policy purposes.

The literature on transdisciplinary research is dominated by process-directed normative studies. It appears clear to me that the core concept of transdisciplinarity is to be defined as the trajectory in a multi-actor environment from both sources: from a political agenda and existing expertise, to a robust, plausible perspective for action.

In this volume 20 selected and carefully edited essays represent the harvest of the international conference “Towards Knowledge Democracy” which took place on 25–27 August 2009 in Leiden, the Netherlands. The introduction to the harvest is presented in Chap. 2.

The final part of our study is devoted to observations on quiet and turbulent democracies as very different typologies of potential evolutionary patterns of knowledge democracy.

The harvest of the conference “Towards Knowledge Democracy” ¹ is only partially collected in this volume. We have selected the most promising contributions that illustrate aspects of knowledge democracy. Of course, this selection is not objective at all. We will introduce the selection in this chapter in a more or less neutral manner, and draw some conclusions in the final chapter.

We did not attempt to introduce the concept of knowledge democracy as either a consistent theoretical framework or as a closed well-defined concept at the conference nor in this book. Our objective was to focus on a group of crucial relationships, in order to draw attention.

Knowledge democracy serves as an inspiring new vision for the relationship between knowledge production and use, to replace the old and discarded speaking truth to power and information deficit models. However, a closer look at what is envisioned makes it clear that knowledge democracy has a problematic Utopian character. Knowledge democracy is based on technocratic and scientific Utopian ideals complemented with Utopian governance and participation ideals. It refers to a society with empowered, competent citizens and public actors who: (1) have unrestricted access to scientific information; (2) contribute to its production and/or assessment and (3) utilise it to make informed and rational decisions. This chapter uses two examples in environmental governance (the Water Framework Directive and sustainability certification) to argue that – as has been demonstrated for many other Utopia – putting knowledge democracy into practice may have undesirable technocratic and anti-democratic implications.

The present paradigm shift away from laissez-faire creates a window of opportunity to improve the flow of structured information or knowledge by making individual access to excludable public benefits conditional on ascertainable efforts to limit claims, as agreed upon in situational contracts. Contracts are situationalwhen agents in delivery are mandated to allow for differences in ability to perform of beneficiaries and to offer customised enabling facilities to improve their capabilities, in line with the vision on fairness of the government in charge. Degrees of freedom and transaction costs are controlled through political guidance in protocols and mandates, on the basis of apply-or-explain. Mutual adjustment in situational response reveals individual preference in direct democracy, improves goal convergence and the fit between supply and demand, reduces opportunism, furthers trust and induces open innovation. The chapter reports on a successful application in The Netherlands.

“One man, one vote” is the core idea of modern democracy. It is a slogan that has been used in many parts of the world, and in many public campaigns for universal suffrage. It became particularly prevalent during the period of emerging parliamentarism, and later during the phase of decolonisation and the global struggles for national sovereignty. Today, while modern societies are being challenged by non sustainable developments, the concept of knowledge democracy is emerging. This concept emphasises direct, participative forms of coping with challenges of increasing knowledge production and of applying this knowledge to solve problems of very long term and fundamental characteristics. With this, the slogan “one man, one vote” gets a new connotation and gains renewed relevance for societies in dealing with their debt to the future. In this chapter we will argue that it will even expand its relevance if combined with the fundamental idea of environmental justice as expressed by the idea of “one man, one vote, one carbon footprint”, and that this also requires that the debate on sustainable development will be better informed.

As a result of technological developments over the past two decades citizens have become increasingly connected, both socially and virtually. Now, more effective use of the collective knowledge and expertise of a group of citizens can be made in a way that improves knowledge and produces greater insight into information. This phenomenon is widely referred to as the “”.

The experts interviewed in this study use “wisdom of crowds” to refer to a range of phenomena, with differing degrees of social interaction and different numbers of decision-makers. Their definitions do not necessarily, therefore, comply with the traditional definitions of “wisdom” and “crowds”.

We developed a framework to map these phenomena in terms of numbers of decision-makers and amounts of knowledge. This involved identifying three stages of development, with interaction between governments and citizens increasing from Stage 1 to Stage 3. At the same time, decision-making processes are becoming more and more complex, and the traditional role of governments is increasingly being challenged.

More effective social interaction and greater involvement of citizens in decision-making processes are predicted to lead to more “wisdom of crowds”. In order to unlock the full potential of this, more knowledge about social interactions in the “crowd” is needed, as well as progress in the technological tools available to facilitate coordination and collaboration.

The crisis of representation is felt in both social sciences and democracy. I describe the main features of this crisis and sketch the outlines of a possible way out. Starting from an optimistic viewpoint on what social sciences might accomplish once evolved to a next level, I present a scale for social research that facilitates new ideas about democracy and discuss the notion of “public ” as a collection of people that can be identified after an event, because they share common experiences during the event. These experiences are expressed in narratives. The method I propose is based on narrative research and transdisciplinary processes to co-create knowledge and meaning. The research process is democratic and the outcomes offer opportunities for social change.

In our rapidly changing societies there is an on-going and increasing demand for research and development of science and technology. Therefore defining of research agendas becomes of great importance for the societal development. In a democratic perspective the process of defining relevant and proactive research agendas could in many respects gain from consultation of citizens. The citizens are the carriers of the concerns and expectations for the future and with the right facilitating methods, such concerns and expectations can be collected and trans-formed into relevant research agendas. In the case of involving citizens in identifying new and emerging needs for S&T, these added qualities to the analysis are extremely relevant. The need for high political credibility and for counteracting the risk of lobbying taking over the search for new research agendas is prominent. The knowledgebase needs to be widened into social life in order to be able to identify the emerging issues among the public. The new research agendas may very well be found among some of the tensions and frictions in our societies, for example social problems, health challenges and work life balance, and the citizens have special qualifications for identifying those.

Europe has built up a profound experience of citizen consultation on science and technology issues during the last 20 years, mainly through technology assessment activities in the member states, but a few also trans-national experiences¹. These examples show that lay citizens are fully capable of contributing with strict analysis, unique and original perspectives, and relevant value-based assessments on highly complex and specialised issues.

In this chapter we argue that the creation of European citizen participation processes will allow for analysing different sets of knowledge about everyday reasoning, daily life and locality that contain cultural values and biases within a societal, social and cultural context, and transform this analysis into relevant re-search agendas for European research and development. We focus on an on-going action research project, CIVISTI, which aims at identifying emerging issues for European S&T and producing a set of policy options of relevance to future European framework programmes. We present and discuss the ideas behind and the methodology for consulting European citizens. On the basis of the CIVISTI case we argue that involving citizens in defining research agendas will contribute to the democratisation of knowledge and knowledge production. This is in our view a corner stone in a knowledge democracy.

This chapter focuses on how governments can deal with knowledge-intensive issues. Especially it seeks to understand why information and knowledge could thwart democracy. Using the public debate about a mega-stable in a small town in the Netherlands, we demonstrate the role of communication and research in establishing and losing trust. In this town, citizens protested against the arrival of a mega-stable in their backyard, while politicians and researchers strongly supported the concept because of its alleged sustainable character. The more information and knowledge by means of research reports and information exchange evenings became available, the more people began to distrust their administrators and vice versa. Configuration theory, a social-cognitive approach to change, provided the theoretical basis to analyse this paradoxical situation. A configuration is characterised by a group of people with an intensive interaction pattern, agreed upon interaction rules and shared meanings. By being aware of the different configurations in which stakeholders operate, and using arguments which relate to these configurations, one might escape fixations in the decision-making process and the negative spiral of losing trust.

The purpose of this chapter is to present a conceptual framework for the functioning of the media, democracy and governance. Politics function like a television reality show in which the media frame the debate. Mediacracy has its own language and rules; it simplifies content. Cyber democracy has increased the participation of the creative user, who co-creates the content. These developments create the conditions for the reality show. This chapter contributes to an understanding of the media, democracy and governance. It contains both hope and a wish – the hope for more democracy, but also a wish to improve this institution.

In any society, a wide diversity of actors has relevant knowledge concerning important societal problems. In a knowledge democracy both dominant and non-dominant actors have equal access and ability to put this knowledge forward in the process of solving societal problems. In order to enable these actors to contribute meaningfully to decision-making around public policy and research agendas, we argue that a transdisciplinary research process is needed. In this chapter we critically reflect on the principles, concepts and core methods of transdisciplinary research. We first look at the national historical roots of transdisciplinary research, specifically focussing on two countries – Switzerland and The Netherlands. Next we develop a typology of transdisciplinary research. From the perspective of knowledge democracy, we can distinguish two important dimensions in research approaches: the degree of knowledge input of lay groups that is included in a specific transdisciplinary project and the degree in which non-dominant actors are explicitly involved in the decision-making of the development process of policies or research agendas. This results in two different styles of transdisciplinary research. We discuss the similarities and differences of these different styles and approaches. We close this chapter with a discussion on transdisciplinary research styles in relation to forms of democracy – on the one hand basic and representative democracy and on the other hand deliberative democracy.

In this chapter we analyse the process of knowledge production between experts, bureaucrats and stakeholders. From our two in-depth Dutch case studies we conclude that the interplay between experts and bureaucrats is not very problematic in knowledge production, because of discipline congruence and institutionalised relations between the two in the field of water management. The interplay between stakeholder knowledge on the one hand and expert and bureaucratic knowledge on the other is more problematic and leads to problems of legitimate knowledge production and decision-making.

This chapter is about a new agenda for inquiry into the relationships between science and public policy. So far, most research has conceptualised this relationship in terms of knowledge utilisation and downstream impact on the policy process. However, this leads to over-instrumentalisation and serious attenuation of expert advice. Therefore, I propose a new perspective: interaction through boundary work, a concept expressing how expert advice simultaneously demarcates and coordinates science and public policy. Research shows that there are many different types of boundary work depending on various types of policy problems. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a multilevel model, which enables us to understand the variety in types of boundary work, and discriminate conditions of success and failure of boundary arrangements and boundary work practices on several levels of analysis.

The creative and innovative power of cities and regions is of decisive importance in materialising the knowledge-based economy on such a scale, that it will ultimately have a positive impact on the prosperity of citizens (Grotenhuis 2007, Van Winden et al. 2007, Florida 2005). Similar to what usually confronts businesses, cities and regions are faced with a global competition for talent, as is generally reflected in the form of a race between cities and regions that strive to be as attractive as possible for talented, on average highly educated, and creative workers (Hospers 2003, Florida 2005, Malecki 2001). Knowledge will likely further increase in importance, but it is not yet clear how knowledge can be put to practical use in cities and regions, how it can or should be managed in the context of an appropriate democratic structure and to what extent measurable economic and societal effects occur, especially amidst the clustering of knowledge industries in supra-regional and supra-national economic mega-regions. The knowledge challenge is where cities and businesses converge into a clear, but as yet not explored, shared interest: (creative) businesses locate where (creative) human capital is present (Florida 2005). Participation of creative citizens – both individual as well as company citizens and civil organisations – in the governance of a city is imperative. The concept of the knowledge democracy, and more specifically the way in which the democratic knowledge potential of cities is used through collaborative learning processes, can be further developed by transdisciplinary research into knowledge management policies and practices from business management (Tissen and Van Rijn 2007).

This chapter concentrates on the use of (scientific) knowledge by policy-makers. The first part of this chapter takes the point of view of policy-makers. There may be many reasons why research is sometimes not welcome, but the most common reason seems to be that the research is not considered as usable in a certain situation. The timing may be wrong (too early, too late), or the results does not match with the way the political problem has been framed or reframed. It will be argued that the dominant governance style of the policy-making process may show a preference for certain qualities of the produced research, such as the authority of the researchers, the discourse on the quality of the research, or the price. Policy-makers should therefore be aware that scientists do often not know the finesses of political decision-making and its consequences for the usability of knowledge, and should develop a “metagovernance” of usable knowledge. The other way around also applies: it is important that scientists understand the process of political decision-making.

Horizon scanning is a foresight tool that is created to think, debate and shape the future in the direction of societal desires in a systematic way. Recently three countries (United kingdom, Denmark en the Netherlands) applied this tool on the national level for different purposes, such as the development of more resilient policies and research agenda-setting.

This chapter describes a set of theoretical aspects of horizon scanning that are based on the comparison of these three national scans that took place within the ERA Net For society. It focuses on the way in which issues are selected and prioritised as well as the use of horizon scanning for multiple purposes in a democratic knowledge society and its close relationship with this society.

This chapter outlines an analysis of policy-making about the long-term and affecting the long-term, in particular but not solely in the context of sustainable development, taking a broad “governance” perspective. It provides a framework for looking at different types of future-oriented decisions and the long-term effects of policy decisions (which may be oriented at short-term objectives), and discusses the role of knowledge in each of these cases. It argues that future-oriented knowledge production is scientifically valid and employs specific procedures, but is fundamentally about handling uncertainty. It then assesses how different national policy cultures address futures issues and makes a list of recommendations.¹

Coordination between actions of individuals can be realised by a specific form of governance: hierarchical governance, network governance or market governance. In current policy processes with regard to climate change, spatial planning and water management, a fourth type of governance emerges which we call knowledge governance. This form of governance is aimed at developing new insights, competencies and ideas via public investments in knowledge development and dissemination, which contribute to the emergence of new pathways for collective action.

In this chapter we answer the question how knowledge governance can contribute to the untangling of collective problems which cannot be solved by hierarchical, network or market governance. We illustrate our argument with an in-depth case study of a Dutch regional planning process. We conclude that knowledge governance is a distinct mode of governance which can contribute to the capacity of actors to coordinate their actions by the development of public ideas, competencies and arguments.

To deal with a variety of difficult matters, Dutch politics, as well as politics in other countries, makes good use of a well-known and well-tried instrument that is simultaneously highly debated and controversial: the commission or committee. In a knowledge democracy, where the development of knowledge is democratised itself, in which new forms of deliberation and negotiation appear and in which the balance of power between groups is shifting, this classical arrangement of using commissions is given a new interpretation. In current practice we may witness new and innovative forms of commissions that are, by the way, mostly variations of well-known organisational forms, rather than a completely new phenomenon. Be it citizens’ assemblies, hubs, or even cascade commissions, these are all new variations on classical commissions with distinctive and characteristic features. This contribution to the book on knowledge democracy discusses societal changes that can be seen in the practices of government, as well as the shift in the use of commissions that occurs as a result of those changes.

Web 2.0 offers citizens and politicians new opportunities for exchanging information and knowledge. For citizens it has become much easier to inform politicians about their wishes, questions, complaints and ideas, while it has also become easier for politicians to reach their constituents. Despite these new opportunities, the extent to which Web 2.0 is actually used for knowledge sharing is unclear, as is the question of what kind of knowledge is shared with whom. In this chapter, we look at the contribution of the Dutch online social network Hyves to knowledge exchange. Twelve Hyves profile pages initiated by politicians and nine initiated by citizens were analysed. Our analysis shows that in practice interaction between initiators and members of Hyves pages remains limited and can be characterised as very informal. Although the primary purpose of these networks appears to be to give citizens an opportunity to voice their opinions, in a large majority of the cases analysed there was no interaction, dialogue or knowledge exchange.

Sustainable development is a societal goal, requiring innovations in products, services and thinking. What are the requirements for an innovation system that produces more sustainable products and services? What elements should be taken into consideration when analysing a SD innovation system? A combination of elements known to be important for SD research and for innovation at the micro level can serve as an analytical framework. Elements of this framework can also be used for designing the conditions for SD innovation. Analysis of sector innovation systems shows governance aspects are very important too in stimulating or blocking innovation for sustainable development. The institutional embedding of SD research and innovations in the present science system is problematic. From a point of view of knowledge democracy, a lot has to be done to get “people” (one of the three Ps) more into the SD innovation system. So-called “hybrid spaces” (for interaction between scientists, businessmen and other stakeholders) should be an important constituent part of the science and innovation system, allowing more public participation in research into complex societal problems as sustainable development is.