| One of the main strategies for reflexive design is arranging processes of reflexive, transdisciplinary knowledge generation - that is, integrating different pieces of expert knowledge and local knowledge. This often means the enactment of a process in which the actors involved need to go beyond standard assumptions and routines of thinking. For such processes to be successful, non-standard methods and practices for knowledge generation are needed, as well as other mechanisms for legitimating those methods and practices. The question then is: What methods and practices, and which legitimation mechanisms? This research project aims to find out by hindsight what methods, practices and mechanisms of legitimation have been developed in a specific sector in a certain context; Namely, the ones developed by the water boards (waterschappen) in the period 1970-2000, to make it possible for them to comply with the new national policy of Integrated Water Management. Halfway the nineteen eighties, the implementation of this approach in the Dutch water management infrastructure laid bare a lack of knowledge on ecological water management, together with, in most cases, a considerable resilience to change. Especially issues of legitimacy of the development and use of other knowledge bases, as well as the legitimacy of the organizations itself, seem to have played a role here. Finding out how water boards eventually dealt with the challenge to develop other ways of managing water (that needed to be grounded in other knowledge bases) and how this development is intertwined with concurrent legitimacy issues such as a call for transparancy in their way of working from politics and society, as well as with internal struggles within the organizations, is the object of this research project. What can be learned from studying these issues, is how issues of legitimacy affect the process of developing interdisciplinary knowledge within organizations aiming at more sustainable way of working. The aim of this research is to refine the existing ideas on the strategy of developing transdisciplinary knowledge, by paying due attention to the legitimacy issues that may obstruct such processes and, naturally, how these are overcome. |
