Facilitating professional normative judgement through science-policy interfaces: the case of anthropogenic land subsidence in the Netherlands

Societal decision making related to the sustainable use of land requires normative judgement. A normative judgment expresses a value judgement on whether a situation is desirable or not based on certain interests or principles. Such a principle can refer to an ideal situation (e.g. sustainability), but also the desired course of a process (legitimacy and/or transparency) or the desired relationship between actors (equality and/or fairness). This requirement has become both more urgent and more daunting over the years due to the wicked and therewith highly politicized nature of sustainable land use issues. Science-policy interactions can both facilitate and hamper professional normative judgement. Our paper sets out to illustrate this point by studying a concrete case study, that of anthropogenic land subsidence in the Netherlands. Anthropogenic land subsidence contributes to relative sea-level rise in the economically important Western peatland areas in the Netherlands. The implementation of mitigation, adaptation and compensation measures is lagging, partly due to science-policy interaction problems potentially leading to conflicts between stakeholders, including agrarians, climate scientists and inhabitants. The paper first inventories and reviews existing science-policy interfaces, here classified as institutions that act as interfaces, interfacing processes and mechanisms, and tools and resources. We find that existing science-policy interfaces have to some extent enabled enlargement of the solution space for addressing land subsidence issues, in particular through collaborative modes of knowledge production facilitated through serious gaming as well as through the development of novel water management options. However, there is room to better incorporate the normative dimension into the knowledge production process and to address the root causes of unsustainable land use, which are related to the allocation of land use functions to plots, an inherently political issue. Not doing this leads to the risk of propelling what in recent publications from the field of public administration is termed a creeping crisis. We conclude that professional normative judgement is enhanced when researchers and societal stakeholders reflect more critically on their role and engage in more inclusive science-policy interactions. This requires science-policy interactions to move further on the path towards more widespread use of post-normal science and trans-disciplinary research. The latter also has implications for the roles of scientists in the knowledge production process, which need to be even more mindful of the normative dimension of their own role.