Knowing where to draw the line? Problem-framing, values, and science in the exploration of Malta’s environmental capacities

Abstract

The increasingly participative preparation of land use plans charged with promoting sustainable development involves planners in navigating through a complex and often conflictual web of scientific and lay environmental knowledge. When policy tools such as environmental capacity assessment, with its emphasis on criticality and thresholds, are used, tensions between different forms of knowledge come to the fore. This paper draws on empirical research into environmental capacity thresholds in the Maltese Islands, revealing the complex dynamics of how knowledge, values and science interact in the trans-scientific arena of environmental capacity assessment. Two principal findings emerge from this research. First, that facile substitutions of public understandings of environmental concerns with expert perspectives will not result in popular policy that is supported by public concern. For capacity assessment, this means that thresholds must be forged through both expert and public framings of environmental ‘problems’. Second, although lay constructions of the environment are wider and sometimes deeper than expert ones, they are also malleable and changeable. For this reason, care must be taken with the institutions used to gauge these values. On the basis of these findings the paper makes a number of theoretical and practical recommendations for environmental capacity assessment.