TY - JOUR
T1 - Introduction to themed issue
T2 - Ignorance and uncertainty in environmental decision-making
AU - Birkenholtz, Trevor
AU - Simon, Gregory
N1 - Funding Information:
This special issue emerged from a series of AAG sessions in 2019 and benefitted greatly from audience participation and feedback. We would like to thank all who participated in those sessions. We also thank the authors who contributed to this special issue and the reviewers for their timely and insightful comments. We are particularly indebted to Rob Fletcher for his comments on our introduction and for his generosity, patience and keen insights in shepherding these papers through the publication process.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - There is growing scholarly engagement with the role of uncertainty in questions of environmental decision-making. Yet ignorance, while prevalent in the STS literature, has received less attention in geography and cognate disciplines. In our introduction to this special collection, we review the literature on ignorance and uncertainty to make two contributions. First, we engage each concept to demonstrate that, in general, ignorance is a ‘lack of knowledge’ (or the appearance of lack of knowledge) while uncertainty is a ‘lack of knowledge clarity’ (or the appearance of lack of knowledge clarity). Second, we argue that while it is useful for theory building to distinguish between the two concepts, it is helpful also to view them as interrelated and processual. We demonstrate this relationality and the different forms it takes by introducing a process-based typology: ignorance and uncertainty as outcome; ignorance and uncertainty as resource; and ignorance and uncertainty as obstacle. The six papers in the collection offer a diverse set of engagements with ignorance and uncertainty including grounded case-studies and theoretical interventions focused on environmental decision-making.
AB - There is growing scholarly engagement with the role of uncertainty in questions of environmental decision-making. Yet ignorance, while prevalent in the STS literature, has received less attention in geography and cognate disciplines. In our introduction to this special collection, we review the literature on ignorance and uncertainty to make two contributions. First, we engage each concept to demonstrate that, in general, ignorance is a ‘lack of knowledge’ (or the appearance of lack of knowledge) while uncertainty is a ‘lack of knowledge clarity’ (or the appearance of lack of knowledge clarity). Second, we argue that while it is useful for theory building to distinguish between the two concepts, it is helpful also to view them as interrelated and processual. We demonstrate this relationality and the different forms it takes by introducing a process-based typology: ignorance and uncertainty as outcome; ignorance and uncertainty as resource; and ignorance and uncertainty as obstacle. The six papers in the collection offer a diverse set of engagements with ignorance and uncertainty including grounded case-studies and theoretical interventions focused on environmental decision-making.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.12.003
DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.12.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85121730556
SN - 0016-7185
VL - 132
SP - 154
EP - 161
JO - Geoforum
JF - Geoforum
ER -