Narrative Descriptions and the SOHO model: The role of scientists in an ecosystem approach
James J. Kay
© COPYRIGHT 1999
In the post-normal paradigm, the scientist's role in decision making shifts from inferring what will happen, that is making predictions which are the basis of decisions, to providing decisions makers and the community with an appreciation, through narrative descriptions, of how the future might unfold.
These narratives consist of several scenarios of how the ecological (natural and societal) system, described by the SOHO model, might evolve.
These narratives focus on a qualitative/quantitative understanding that describes:
- the human context for the narrative
- the hierarchical nature of the system;
- the attractors which may be accessible to the system;
- how the system behaves in the neighbourhood of each attractor, potentially in terms of a quantitative simulation model;
- the positive and negative feedbacks and autocatalytic loops and associated gradients which organize the system about an attractor;
- what will enable and disable these loops and hence will promote or discourage the system from being in the neighbourhood of an attractor; and
- what is likely to precipitate flips between attractors.
These narratives are in the service of informing decision makers and the community about:
- possible future states of organization of the system;
- understanding of conditions under which these states might occur;
- appropriate schemes for ensuring the ability to adapt to different situations;
- and perhaps most importantly the appropriate level of confidence that the narrative deserves, this is our degree of uncertainty.
Having painted a picture of the possibilities in the future, it remains for scientists to suggest ways of mitigating and adapting to the inevitable surprises, both surprises in the form of unexpected flips to known attractors and those that involve flips to new attractors which correspond to heretofore unknown manifestations of system organization.
Updated 1 July, 1999
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