research is a focus on how this mutual adaptation may promote power redistribution and affect the image of scientists.
This chapter is based on the 7-year participatory process of policy reform in Kyrgyzstan, leading to the adoption of a national forest programme (NFP) based on concepts derived from the international dialogue on forests. The policy process theory of the double spiral is used to explain the evolving link between scientists and policymakers, both of whom are compelled to redefine their mutual relations in a process of reinterpretation and renegotia- tion of goals and means. Indeed, the involvement of scientists resulted not only in an increase in rationalist approaches to policy analysis and policymaking, but surprisingly also in a communicative approach conducive to international principles of sustainable for- est management. As a preliminary comparison, basic information collected from experi- ence with participatory processes in various European countries tends to reveal the same iterative sequence formed with an outward spiral of expanding understanding followed by an inward spiral of focus and clarity evidenced in many situations.
Keywords:Forest policy, modes of governance, participatory process, national forest programmes, power redistribution, Kyrgyzstan.
What Might Policymakers and Scientists Expect from
three main groups of views related to the links between scientists and decision makers: the incrementalists, the rationalists and the cyberneticists.
1. The incremental decision-making school is associated with Charles Lindblom (1959) and his incremental ‘muddling through’ paradigm and stresses the role of scientific analysis as sufficient to solve the political problems faced by public administrators. Its premises are the following:
(a) Due to the fact that decision makers are cognitively constrained in time and other resources, including information, they can never achieve the ideal of comprehensive analysis of all ultimate goals and all available means, rather they typically ‘muddle through’ by focusing on proximate goals and known means. They usually come up with a solution – a means of achieving a desired end – that they believe ‘suffices’, even if it is not optimal, and then move on to the next goal. Thus, decision makers are cognitively constrained from pursuing complexes of long-term goals, and thus analysis is never suffi- cient to achieve the multiple goals encompassed by sustainability.
(b) Reality has a pluralist nature due to differing and conflicting social values, objectives and visions held by actors. It is difficult to ascertain the majority’s preference or to find a preferable consensus; therefore public debate is rarely sufficient to solve the problem of cognitive limits of analysis and reasoning.
(c) Public policy is accomplished through decentralized bargaining in a democratic political economy. Incremental decision making holds a pluralis- tic view of a society as composed of competing interest groups who are lob- bying the government for certain decisions. Decisions are constructed by a series of consultations largely based on people’s actual experiences. Large decisions are distributed among a large number of independent actors, each pursuing their own interest (Lindblom, 1959; Friedman, 1987).
In such a framework, analysts are considered the only ones capable of making a comprehensive analysis with a general and objective view. However, for analysts to indeed be objective, their analysis must be founded upon scientific methodol- ogies. The ultimate ‘scientific analysis’ is done by scientists themselves, and thus scientists are the source of policy analysis for decision making. However, the sci- entists are not viewed as policy actors, but rather as sources of information and analysis that are ‘untainted’ by politics.
2. The rationalist school of management, criticizing the ‘muddling through’
view of decision making, attributes great importance to the power and rationality of the decision maker and the predictability of human behaviour based on assumptions of a ‘rational actor’. In this school, a rational decision maker bases a decision upon analysis and believes that solutions based upon what a ‘rational actor’ should do accurately predict policy outcomes. As commentators note, this assumption of a ‘rational actor’ ignores the actual relationships between ideology, values, events, goals and means (Gunton, 1984). The decision-making process is viewed as a logical rationalist chain: identification of a problem, development of goals, assessment of all possible solutions and the choice of a solution on the basis of the desired results in achieving the goal (Hudson, 1979). Scientific research in this case focuses on developing general theories of behaviour of
natural, social and political systems. The assumption of scientific policy analysis is that the world, including human behaviour, is predictable and stable over time.
3. A third group of theoreticians, drawing from cybernetics, focuses on dyna- mics of social change affecting a decision-making process. They reject the absolu- tism of the two former traditional approaches: (i) that social changes are basically directed by the elite (voluntarism, as promoted by the rational school of manage- ment); and (ii) that social changes are brought about by society as a whole (pluralism, incremental school of decision-making process). Nevertheless, the proponents of cybernetics aim at combining the advantages of incremental and rationalistic planning in three levels of decision making (Etzioni, 1967):
(a) Fundamental political decisions are to be taken at the highest level in order to establish choices aimed at long-term goals (based on scanning of inter- nal and external factors that relate to the problem and proposed solutions).
(b) Opportunistic, incremental decisions will be taken within the frame- work of the fundamental goals (short-term and middle-term policies).
(c) Periodic reviews of the incremental decisions and of the fundamental goals are necessary, based on the criterion of the achieved progress (review of strategy).
Thus the role of the scientists for the definition of long- and short-term goals (ends), analysis of internal and external factors (means) and evaluation of the progress (scientific judgement) is conceived as a part of the process of strategic political decision making.
The cybernetic framework is an implicit theoretical reference for many forest policy reform processes, and is the formal basis in the concept of a
‘mixed model’, developed for combining the involvement of the stakeholders and administration in a forest policy reform process in societies in transition (Buttoud and Samyn, 1999; Buttoud and Yunusova, 2002, 2003). The main feature of the mixed model is to involve all the stakeholders at each step of a rationalist sequence for defining and implementing new decisions, thus com- bining communicative and technocratic aspects and crossing top-down and bottom-up approaches to decision making. It creates a discourse between solu- tions and decisions, which may lead to a continuous negotiation. In this frame- work, the decision makers are confronted by the evolving reality and have to adapt to it.
Such permanent confrontation combined with mutual learning of all the actors involved in the process, followed by their adaptation, both to each other and to the changed reality, and a redefinition of initial positions and strategies, is an iterative process that progressively develops along spirals of learning and focus (Kouplevatskaya-Yunusova and Buttoud, 2005).
Following these theoretical implications, policy scientists have a variety of tasks:
to develop theoretical and methodological advice for the decision makers; to bring to the process not only knowledge but also neutral and objective expertise;
and to contribute their scientific judgement in addressing complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. The role of policy scientists based upon the cybernetic theory and the ‘mixed model’ framework is elaborated by the example of the forest policy reform process in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic.