ALARM Area 10 : Knowledge Quality Assessment

Scientific assessments of complex risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss, bird flu, natural resource depletion, or particulate matter involve uncertainties of many sorts, not all of which can be effectively controlled in practice. Decisions need to be made before conclusive supporting evidence is available, while at the same time the potential impacts of wrong decisions can be huge.

According to the classic conception of scientific policy advice, certainty is necessary for the management of complex problems. However, uncertainty is a fact of life. Scientific assessments have to integrate information covering the entire spectrum from well-established scientific knowledge to educated guesses, preliminary models, and tentative assumptions. In such contexts, uncertainty can mostly not be remedied through additional research or comparative evaluations of evidence by expert panels searching for a consensus interpretation of the risks.

Social studies of scientific advice show that for many complex problems, the processes within the scientific community as well as between this community and the 'external' world - policy makers, stakeholders and civil society - determine the acceptability of a scientific assessment as a shared basis for action. In the 'Knowledge Quality Assessment' Area, discover processes concern, among others, framing of the problem, choice of methods, strategy to gather the data, review and interpretation of results, distribution of roles in knowledge production and assessment, and  function of the results in the policy cycle.

See also: http://keralarm.kerbabel.net/node/6/6?q=node/38/17