Extended Peer Review (review by stakeholders)

Extended peer review is the involvement of non-scientific actors in the quality assurance processes of knowledge production and assessment for policy making and risk management. Extended peer review can include all stakeholders engaged in the management of the problem at hand. Stakeholders are those actors who are directly or indirectly affected by an issue and who could affect the outcome of a decision making process regarding that issue or are affected by it.

Stakeholders’ reasoning, observation and imagination are not bounded by scientific rationality. This can be beneficial when tackling ill-structured, complex problems. Consequently, the knowledge and perspectives of the stakeholders can bring in valuable new views on the problem and relevant information on that problem. The latter is known as “extended facts”. Stakeholders can contribute to the quality of knowledge in a number of ways. These include improvement of the quality of the problem formulation and the questions addressed by the scientists; the contribution of knowledge on local conditions which may help determine which data are strong and relevant or which response options are feasible; providing personal observations which may lead to new foci for empirical research addressing dimensions of the problem that were previously overlooked; criticism of assumptions made by the scientist, which may lead to changes towards assumptions that better match real life conditions; and, creative thinking of mechanisms and scenarios through which projected environmental and hydrologic changes may affect different sectors of society.

Resources required
Extended peer review requires well-developed communication and group moderation skills, along with a good understanding of public perceptions of risks and of science in general. Didactic skill is also required to help stakeholders to understand the sometimes complex and abstract concepts used in scientific assessments. Involving social scientists in the design and implementation of extended peer review processes is recommended.

Strengths and limitations
+ Allows for the use of extra knowledge from non scientific sources
+ Increases the level of public accountability in knowledge production
+ Promotes a development from knowledge consumption towards knowledge co-production
- Scientific and non-scientific participants are often not reciprocally accountable
- Public tends to get co-opted according to dominant view
- May reproduce power asymmetries.

References
David Bidwell (2009) Is Community-Based Participatory Research Postnormal Science? Science Technology and Human Values 34(6) 741-761.

Funtowicz SO and Ravetz JR (1996) Risk Management, post-normal science, and extended peer communities. In: Hood C and Jones DKC, Accident and Design, Contemporary debates in Risk Management. UCL Press, 172-182.

Healy S (1999) Extended peer communities and the ascendance of post-normal politics. Futures, 31, 655– 669. Fuller S (2003) On the need to extend peer review: A reply to Kihara. Social Epistemology, 17 (1), 74-78

Kihara H (2003) The Extension of Peer Review, How should it or should not be done? Social Epistemology, 17 (1), 65–73.

Pellizzoni L (1999) Reflexive Modernization and Beyond: Knowledge and Value in the Politics of Environment and Technology. Theory, Culture & Society 16(4): 99-125.