ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical review of the roles played by knowledge, expertise and trust in controversies relating to environmental planning and sustainability. Despite the tenacity of a technical-rational view in which impartial assessments of ‘the facts’ alone can supposedly underpin optimal planning decisions, the chapter advocates a critical view of all forms of environmental knowledge and evidence as autonomous cognitive variables which both shape and are shaped by wider value judgements and power structures in society. Consequently, rather than associating environmental experts with the possession of knowledge per se, the chapter suggests that expertise ultimately involves making judgements about knowledge claims in the light of broader social, economic, cultural, political and ethical contexts. Trust and credibility, meanwhile, should be understood not as fixed dispositions but rather as the negotiated outcomes of social and institutional engagements between actors engaged in situated, place specific environmental planning debates. The chapter concludes by suggesting that planning processes would stand to gain from a greater attunement to the diverse knowledge production practices – whether scientific or vernacular – through which the objects and objectives of environmental planning processes are rendered visible and meaningful.
