---
title: "Post-normal science"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:43.904474+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Post-normal science (PNS) was developed in the 1990s by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz. It is a problem-solving strategy appropriate when "facts [are] uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent", conditions often present in policy-relevant research. In those situations, PNS recommends suspending temporarily the  traditional scientific ideal of truth, concentrating on quality as assessed by internal and extended peer communities.
PNS can be considered as complementing the styles of analysis based on risk and cost-benefit analysis prevailing at that time and integrating concepts of a new critical science developed in previous works by the same authors. 
PNS is not a new scientific method following Aristotle and Bacon, a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, or an attempt to reach a new 'normal'. It is instead, a set of insights to guide actionable and robust knowledge production for policy decision making and action in challenges like pandemics, ecosystems collapse, biodiversity loss and, in general, sustainability transitions.

== Context ==
According to its proponents Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, the name "post-normal science" echoes the seminal work on modern science by Thomas Kuhn. For Carrozza PNS can be "framed in terms of a call for the 'democratization of expertise'", and as a "reaction against long-term trends of 'scientization' of politics—the tendency towards assigning to experts a critical role in policymaking while marginalizing laypeople". For Mike Hulme (2007), writing on The Guardian, climate change seems to fall into the category of issues which are best dealt with in the context of PNS and notes that "Disputes in post-normal science focus as often on the process of science - who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy - as on the facts of science". Climate science as PNS was already proposed by the late  Stephen Schneider, and a similar linkage was propose for the workings of the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
From the ecological perspective post-normal science can be situated in the context of 'crisis disciplines' – a term coined by the conservation biologist Michael E. Soulé to indicate approaches addressing fears, emerging in the seventies, that the world was on the verge of ecological collapse. In this respect Michael Egan defines PNS as a 'survival science'. More recently PNS has been defined as a movement of 'informed critical resistance, reform and the making of futures'.
Moving from PNS Ziauddin Sardar developed the concept of Postnormal Times (PNT). Sardar was the editor of FUTURES when it published the article 'Science for the post-normal age' presently the most cited paper of the journal. A recent review of academic literature conducted on the Web of Science and encompassing the topics of Futures studies, Foresight, Forecasting and Anticipation Practice identifies the same paper as "the all-time publication that received the highest number of citations".

== Content ==
"At birth Post-normal science was conceived as an inclusive set of robust insights more than as an exclusive fully structured theory or field of practice". Some of the ideas underpinning PNS can already be found in a work published in 1983 and entitled "Three types of risk assessment: a methodological analysis" This and subsequent works  show that PNS concentrates on few aspects of the complex relation between science and policy: the communication of uncertainty, the assessment of quality, and the justification and practice of the extended peer communities.
Coming to the PNS diagram (figure above) the horizontal axis represents 'Systems Uncertainties' and the vertical one 'Decision Stakes'. The three quadrants identify Applied Science, Professional Consultancy, and Post-Normal Science. Different standards of quality and styles of analysis are appropriate to different regions in the diagram, i.e. post-normal science does not claim relevance and cogency on all of science's application but only on those defined by the PNS's mantram with a fourfold challenge: 'facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent'. For applied research science's own peer quality control system will suffice (or so was assumed at the moment PNS was formulated in the early nineties), while professional consultancy was considered appropriate for these settings which cannot be 'peer-reviewed', and where the skills and the tacit knowledge of a practitioner are needed at the forefront, e.g. in a surgery room, or in a house on fire. Here a surgeon or a firefighter takes a difficult technical decision based on her or his training and appreciation of the situation (the Greek concept of 'Metis' as discussed by J. C. Scott.)

== Complexity ==
There are important linkages between PNS and complexity science, e.g. system ecology (C. S. Holling) and hierarchy theory (Arthur Koestler), see e.g. the work of Joseph Tainter, Timothy F. H. Allen and Thomas W. Hoekstra on transition from fossil to renewable fuels. In PNS, complexity is respected through its recognition of a multiplicity of legitimate perspectives on any issue; this is close to the meaning espoused by Robert Rosen (theoretical biologist). Reflexivity is realised through the extension of accepted 'facts' beyond the supposedly objective productions of traditional research. Also, the new participants in the process are not treated as passive learners at the feet of the experts, being coercively convinced through scientific demonstration. Rather, they will form an 'extended peer community', sharing the work of quality assurance of the scientific inputs to the process, and arriving at a resolution of issues through debate and dialogue. The necessity to embrace complexity in a post-normal perspective to understand and face zoonoses is argumented by David Waltner-Toews.

== Extended peer community ==

In PNS extended peer communities are spaces where perspectives, values, styles of knowing and power differentials are expressed in a context of inequalities and conflict. Resolutions, compromises and knowledge co-production are contingent and not necessarily achievable.