Mobilising high-quality knowledge through dialogic environmental governance: a comparison of approaches and their institutional settings

An increasing tendency to classify environmental issues as ‘wicked’ has seen a wavering confidence in models of ‘resource management’ in favour of models of ‘environmental governance’. This has come with an attendant shift in epistemological perspectives for the mobilisation of knowledge in support of society’s collective deliberation and decision-making, with governance fields increasingly espousing a ‘dialogic’ approach. Looking through an ‘interactive governance’ lens, this article reveals a diversity of different forms of dialogue for the mobilisation of knowledge, before focusing on those forms that: a) are inclusive of all knowledge systems; b) bring together knowledge through reciprocal dialogue; c) allow for the negotiation of knowledge quality in terms of ‘credibility, salience and legitimacy’. To this end, it unpacks and compares three specific approaches for the dialogic mobilisation of knowledge; deliberative democracy, collaborative learning and post-normal science.