Parsha
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Parsha is a research project applied from the Academy of Finland in September 2016. Its main objective is to test and implement the method of shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy relevant problems. The method of shared undestanding is closely related to open assessment (a scientific method to evaluate impacts of policy decisions) and open policy practice (guidance to evaluate and manage a decision support process that involves an open assessment). However, the method of shared understanding (link goes to a Finnish description), is especially focussing on developing a description of issues, statements, and values presented by participants of a complex political decision situation. This goes beyond the description of scientific knowledge (which is the aim of open assessment) and incorporating that into an "official" decision making process (which is the aim of open policy practice). The method of shared understanding aims to understand and describe also aspects and values that researchers say are wrong or decision makers say are irrelevant or unfavourable. The purpose of such an exercise is to understand, discuss, and mediate societal opinions that may lead to controversies, political opposition, or even conflicts.
Abstract
Open data and practices are becoming increasingly common in the society. This trend has also brought problems: new internet tools enable also to distribute false and even malevolent information and to distort policy making. Scientific policy support practices have not been well equipped to tackle this challenge. An example is prevalent quasi-scientific climate scepticism.
Shared understanding is a situation, where participants know, what the important issues are and where there are agreements and disagreements and why. In Parsha project it is considered a prerequisite for rational, slow thinking and societal policy making. The main objective of Parsha is to test and implement methods and tools for producing shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy-relevant problems.
Shared understanding will be produced in several policy-relevant but controversial situations, starting with climate change policies in Helsinki and disease burden disputes related to air pollution. New topics will be chosen for the latter part of the project based on future needs. The methods to be used are based on open assessment and open policy practice, which have been developed and successfully used by our team and which evaluate impacts of future policy decisions using scientific information. In Parsha, the focus will additionally be on systematically describing and analysing values and statements not necessarily based on science.
Parsha is based on i) a social innovation of hearing every viewpoint systematically without aiming at consensus; ii) an information science innovation to produce a structured synthesis from which viewpoints - including science-based - can be reproduced and discrepancies analysed; and iii) a technological innovation to produce an interface to facilitate participation, knowledge retrieval, learning, and policy support.
Parsha will extensively use participation and co-creation in its studies and actively share its results. It will use experiments to test performance of the innovations: whether they actually can collect, synthesise and describe information from participants to their satisfaction; whether the synthesis is informative and correctly interpreted by others; whether the disputes can be identified and their impact described; and whether such analyses actually help policy makers avoid emotional, fast thinking. If they do, many complex environmental and health problems may come closer to a solution.
See also
Some important pages related to the project:
- Drive folder for the application (DL 28.9.2016)
- Project description in Harava (password-protected)
- Relevant methods in Opasnet:
- Academy instructions: