TY - JOUR
T1 - Rethinking the relationship between technical and local knowledge
T2 - Toward a multi-type approach
AU - Negev, Maya
AU - Teschner, Naama
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the editors of this special edition, Karen Buchanan, Yola Georgiadou, Esther Turnhout, and especially Anna Wasselink, for their helpful and interesting comments, which helped improve this paper. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their important suggestions. The first author thanks Prof. Nadav Davidovitch and the Center for Health Policy Research in the Negev at Ben Gurion University for supervision and partnership in conducting this HIA. This research was conducted as part of a doctoral fellowship of the first author, funded by the Environment and Health Fund, Israel , for which she is extremely grateful. Most importantly, our gratitude goes to the stakeholders who took part in the HIA, and agreed to be interviewed for the purpose of this research.
PY - 2013/6/1
Y1 - 2013/6/1
N2 - In the field of policy-making, technical knowledge is generally regarded as objective, true, and sufficient. It is typically positioned in contrast to local knowledge, which is considered subjective and irrelevant to policy-making. This paper follows a growing scholarly trend of re-examining the relationship between technical and local knowledge, in order to show that technical knowledge may be disputable, uncertain, and based on problematic presuppositions, while local knowledge often employs objective and systematic methods. The dichotomy between local and technical knowledge is thereby questioned, with the proposal that there exist multiple types of knowledge that are of relevance to policy-making. In addition, the paper shows that the boundary between individuals who hold different types of knowledge is blurry, and that, in fact, policy-making stakeholders simultaneously employ several types of knowledge. The empirical data for this study comes from a stakeholder participation process in Health Impact Assessment, which focused on land uses in the vicinity of a national hazardous industry and waste site.
AB - In the field of policy-making, technical knowledge is generally regarded as objective, true, and sufficient. It is typically positioned in contrast to local knowledge, which is considered subjective and irrelevant to policy-making. This paper follows a growing scholarly trend of re-examining the relationship between technical and local knowledge, in order to show that technical knowledge may be disputable, uncertain, and based on problematic presuppositions, while local knowledge often employs objective and systematic methods. The dichotomy between local and technical knowledge is thereby questioned, with the proposal that there exist multiple types of knowledge that are of relevance to policy-making. In addition, the paper shows that the boundary between individuals who hold different types of knowledge is blurry, and that, in fact, policy-making stakeholders simultaneously employ several types of knowledge. The empirical data for this study comes from a stakeholder participation process in Health Impact Assessment, which focused on land uses in the vicinity of a national hazardous industry and waste site.
KW - Health
KW - Interpretive policy analysis
KW - Knowledge
KW - Policy-making
KW - Stakeholder participation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84877599435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.envsci.2012.10.011
DO - 10.1016/j.envsci.2012.10.011
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84877599435
SN - 1462-9011
VL - 30
SP - 50
EP - 59
JO - Environmental Science and Policy
JF - Environmental Science and Policy
ER -
