The article deals with some implications of radical uncertainty for participatory democracy, and more precisely for Participatory Technology Assessment (PTA).

While some have argued that, in democratic societies, people simply have a right to a participatory role, others base arguments for public participation on the idea that lay people may have access to knowledge which is unknown to officially sanctioned experts. This paper reports on a novel empirical approach called “participatory modelling” to analyse and capture such “lay” understandings.

Tim Jackson examines the influence of the Darwinian metaphor “the struggle for existence” on a variety of scientific theories which inform our current understanding of the prospects for sustainable development.

In his paper, Patrick Curry argues in favor of a “relational pluralism,” which provides the basis of a better alternative—ecopluralism—which, properly understood, is necessarily both ecocentric and pluralist.