Integrated assessment of sustainable development: multiple perspectives ininteraction

Integrated assessment (IA) is a maturing research approach aiming at provid ing decision support on complex. environment-related problems. Although int erdisciplinary research is a pre-condition for IA, in order to reach the go als that IA has set it is necessary to go beyond interdisciplinary research efforts alone. There are two major reasons for this: (i) the nature of dem ocratic decision-making, and (ii) the nature of complex issues. The views held by stakeholders and the public at large are an integral part of democratic decision-making processes. Integrated assessments, which aim to support decision-making in an appropriate and relevant way, should ther efore synthesize interdisciplinary scientific insights with a wide variety of societal views. Furthermore, this paper argues that the sustainability i ssues with which IA is concerned are complex problems, in the sense that th ey cannot be fully described or solved in any unique way. One of the reason s for this is the essentially contested character of the concept 'sustainab le development'. Against this background the search for techniques of artic ulation and interaction of multiple perspectives is a major challenge for t he IA community. Where the nature of democratic processes asks for taking into account views of a diversity of actors, the nature of the issues considered demands that multiple perspectives are included in integrated assessments. Decision sup port building on a single scientific description is therefore not at all su fficient for addressing complex problems in a democratic decision-making co ntext. To this end, this paper argues that it seems promising to develop te chniques that combine scientific assessment tools with public participation methods. In order to contribute to the search for such new IA techniques, this paper discusses some new avenues in IA modelling, and the application of a well-established social scientific tool, namely focus groups, in integ rated assessment.