A postmodern reconstruction of floodplain management methodology
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Authors
Date
1995
Type
Thesis
Fields of Research
Abstract
A critical reconstruction of floodplain management methodology has been carried out in an attempt to explicitly incorporate ethics; including an appreciation of sustainability. This has been undertaken by adapting a social constructionist and pluralist approach to appreciate the multi-disciplinary context of Aotearoa/New Zealand where diverse knowledge systems occur, and to theoretically ground public participation in resource management.
Social constructionism has been construed to be a process of modelling, in accordance with systems theory. Integrative modelling including: hydrological, risk, economic, sociological and ecological analyses has been attempted. It has been carried out within the tradition of Soft Systems Methodology. It has been found that crucial to the success of integrating ethics into this process has been the overcoming of privilege being given to any discourses from particular disciplines, professions, cultures or publics. It is argued that this has been achieved, without resort to relativism, by incorporating analysis of the quality of information by realistic analysis of imprecision and uncertainty through the use of possibility theory and fuzzy logic, as well as probabilistic and deterministic calculi. It is further argued that a pragmatic epistemology based on a nesting of metaphors, with the use of an organismic metaphor defining functionality as central, is able to structure a hierarchical decision-making methodology enabling Expert System algorithms to be developed which can aid in the decision-making process.
It is concluded that such hierarchically structured Expert Systems can encourage social construction of situations which can help integrate actors' views and enable flexible floodplain management to co-evolve with the floodplain. Theoretically this should produce better conditions than existing at present, for sustainable occupation of floodplains, while also increasing the meaningfulness of professional engineering practice.