Post-normal Institutional Identities: Quality Assurance, Reflexivity and Ethos of Care

What is it about?

Given the current crises of legitimacy and quality in science (http://www.andreasaltelli.eu/science-on-the-verge), institutions that produce and govern science and those that provide scientific advice to policy need to change their approach. We advocate for an ethos of care. Post-normal science (an approach for the use of science on issues where ‘facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’ ) may be helpful to nurture such an ethics of care among institutions that provide scientific advice to policy. In Europe, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has the necessary scaffolding to advise policy in view of public interest. The challenge is that the scientists themselves and their institutional counterparts need to be committed to change. Emerging ways of knowing need to be integrated with mainstream institutionalised science in a context of extended participation.

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Why is it important?

A change in the stile of production and use of evidence is made urgent to confront the ongoing erosion of trust in ‘evidence based policy’, anticipating controversies before trust is lost and controversies become intractable.