Rethinking Evidence Practices for Environmental Decision-Making in the Anthropocene: Dealing with Dissent in Knowledge Societies

Abstract

This chapter discusses the development of invasive species research and policy throughout the 20th century as a paradigmatic model case for reflecting evidence practices and evidence contestation in ecology and environmental decision-making. It reviews how the initial framing of invasive species research and policy formulated in the 1950s–1980s was increasingly contested and how invasion scientists responded to growing dissent and post-normality. It concludes with the proposition that consensus on environmental action, despite uncertain facts and pluralism, depends on the continuous nurturing of an ecological citizenship that builds on a carefully interwoven web of ecological knowledge, social institutions and cultural practices. This can only be reached through collaboration among the ecological, social and human sciences, the arts, nature-based practitioners and civil society to simultaneously address the embeddedness of ecological knowledge in social and cultural contexts and the embeddedness of social and cultural practices in an ecological lifeworld.