Practices for reflexive design: lessons from a Dutch programme on sustainable agriculture

Not coincidentally, deliberative policy analysis has been practiced often in cases that in a very essential sense involve value dissent and major uncertainties: cases of what Beck, Giddens and others have designated "reflexive modernisation". Deliberation, under such circumstances, is to support a synthesising kind of judgment across existing differentiations and distinctions, that is a process of judgement in which assumptions, knowledge claims, distinctions, roles and identities, normally taken for granted, must be critically scrutinised. Thus, existing institutions tend to provide inadequate guidance for such "reflexive design". In this paper, we shed some light on this challenge by telling and reviewing the story of Programme 348: "Future Livestock Production Systems" for the reflexive modernisation of Dutch agriculture, following major crises in the country's husbandry sector. Although an institutional arrangement had been created that was rather favourable to reflexive design, the programme encountered significant difficulties, which we argue are rooted in the institutions that have emerged throughout agricultural modernisation over the past century. We then use Wenger's insights on "communities of practice", as a framework to both understand how established institutions could manifest themselves in P348's reflexive arrangement, and how these difficulties have been dealt with in more or less successful ways. With the insights thus gained, we wish to contribute to the still underdeveloped literature on reflexive design in the trail of recent work by Forester and Fischer.