Byline: David. Rose

In response to unexpected election results across the world, and a perceived increase of policy decisions that disregard scientific evidence, conservation scientists are reflecting on working in a ‘post-truth’ world. This phrase is useful in making scientists aware that policy-making is messy and multi-faceted, but it may be misused. By introducing three different scenarios of conservation decision-making, this perspective argues that a mythical era of ‘science or truth conservation’ has never existed. Since an ‘extended peer community’ of decision-makers (policy-makers, practitioners, stakeholders) are present in multi-layered governance structures, conservation has always been ‘post-normal’. To decrease the chances of ‘post-truth’ decision-making occurring, the perspective encourages scientists to think carefully about scientific workflows and science communication. Developing a conservation narrative which does not see values, beliefs, and interests, as key parts of modern functioning democracies risks upholding a perception of the disconnected ivory tower of science. Rather, co-productive relationships should be established with decision-makers, and we should harness the power of storytelling to engage people on a personal level. This perspective encourages scientists to take heed of research on stakeholder engagement and storytelling, and to embrace workflows suited to post-normal conservation, rather than trying to deny that a post-normal world exists.

Introduction

The scientific community has reacted with dismay to the rise of a so-called ‘post-truth’ politics (e.g., Tollefson et al . 2016; Gewin 2017; Wilsdon 2017). In the aftermath of unexpected election results in the UK and USA, and threats to pull out of international environmental agreements, the science community has struggled with a decision-making environment that seems to undervalue the importance of scientific evidence. It has been claimed that selective, or biased, use of evidence may be enhanced by the rise of nationalistic governments across the globe (Ross and Jones 2016), who put forward arguments in favour of their own citizens, even in the face of the global science-based accords such as the Paris Climate Change Agreement (Tollefson et al. 2016). According to some, decisions about conservation and the environment can also be post-truth (Begon 2017) as policy-makers selectively use, or ignore, scientific evidence to support political arguments. Indeed, at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting in December 2016, a conference attended by 1200 ecologists from 50 countries, the phrase ‘post-truth’ was repeated so frequently that one delegate added it to a ‘plenary bingo-card’ as a key theme of note. The resurgence of Japanese whaling is one such issue in which conservationists argue that senior policy-makers are ignoring scientific evidence for their own gain (WDC 2017).

Here, I present a spectrum of conservation decision-making along which the influence of science varies [Figure 1]. I argue that conservation policy and practice has never had a ‘truth phase’ (Scenario 1), where policy was based purely on scientific evidence. Since conservation is never just a technical, scientific issue, we gain little from reminiscing about a mythical bygone age where conservation decision-making was based on scientific evidence alone (see Sarewitz 2017 for a broader analysis).{Figure 1}

Rather, there is more to...