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Paper short abstract

The paper analyses the challenges of dealing with non-knowledge in crises and advocates a pluralistic approach to scientific policy advice. It proposes an integrative model that can be applied in practices that synchronise the past, present and future in order to manage future crises.

Paper long abstract

The paper argues that in future crises, scientific policy advice should ensure a pluralism with regard to the scientific and political strategies for dealing with non-knowledge that are involved. This is further increased by the fact that the future is becoming a more central reference point in current crises. However, the future (whether as a framework for solutions or a disaster scenario) is open, which is why uncertainty and dealing with it in the present takes on a systemic status.

In a first step, the paper demonstrates the influence that the processing of ignorance have on the political and social handling. During the COVID-19 crisis in Germany a certain epistemic community with specific strategies for dealing with non-knowledge dominated the advisory process. Scientific advisors and political decision-makers formed a non-knowledge regime that succeeded in portraying other non-knowledge approaches from the scientific community as illegitimate. This excluded alternative approaches to policy advice from the crisis response. In a second step, an integrative model of knowledge-based policy advice is developed from the experiences with the non-knowledge regime in the COVID-19 crisis. The model implements epistemic pluralism in the advisory process, recognising all scientific and non-scientific non-knowledge strategies as equal. In a third step, the resilience of this model in solving future crises is discussed by addressing the increased production of uncertainty. This requires the successful application of pluralistic non-knowledge strategies in the crisis-related practices of synchronising the past, present and future.