Routledge Explorations in Sustainability and Governance

Routledge Explorations in Sustainability and Governance aims to explore new approaches at the interface between decision-making and the production of knowledge, in which researchers, formal decision-makers and other social actors could form an extended peer community. When dealing with complex sustainability issues – i.e. wicked problems - it is impossible to generate a uniquely defined and "uncontested" problem structuring that leads to the identification of "optimal solutions". Accordingly, society should move to a strategy of governance IN complexity rather than governance OF complexity. Post-Normal Science provides a framework for such strategies, whereby scientists collaborate with the entire extended peer community in the choice of concerns to be addressed, the framing of problems to be solved, and the design of models through which variables and data are combined. That is, from the post-normal perspective, scientific inputs, to be useful for governance, have to fit into socially mediated modes of decision making rather than supplant them.

We invite book proposals that address relevant issues in relation to: (i) the production and use of sustainability knowledge in the move towards governance in complexity; (ii) diagnostics of dangerous cases of "governance OF complexity", including the suppression of uncomfortable knowledge that threatens dominant but unsustainable policy narratives; (iii) practical approaches and procedures (including quantitative analysis to be used for decision support) that can improve the robustness, usefulness and fairness of the framing of sustainability problems; (iv) developments in theoretical and practical approaches to governance in complexity.

To submit proposals, please contact the Editor, Grace Harrison ([email protected]).