The Environment Council is pleased to present a learning paper on the Management of Uncertainty through Stakeholder Engagement (MUSE).

 Uncertainty is at the heart of sustainability choices and the spanner in the works of good planning. Even the most brilliant strategists are hard put to do their job with a shaky evidence base and little inkling of how the unexpected might upset their assumptions. 

Uncertainty can also be a major source of conflict. When a decision affects a number of people, agreeing a course of action satisfying all concerned is difficult enough in the best of circumstances.  Often where you stand depends on where you sit: the same information can lead to very different conclusions according to the perspective from which you view it. People can argue about the unknown as well as the known – and, crucially, about how much precaution is warranted to address it. 

 Yet business and governments in particular have to plan, have to agree courses of action to move forwards.  Few people like to admit uncertainty in their plans; in our culture it is often akin to failure, and so frequently uncertainty is dismissed. 

However, today there is growing recognition that this sort of approach is likely to be counter-productive, and interest is rising in new methods for engaging with the public constructively over uncertainty about risks and impacts to their health and environment. While the calls for more ‘public and stakeholder engagement’ proliferate, practical guidance on how to run such dialogues over matters affected by significant uncertainties is markedly lacking. Current methods do not always meet needs of the situation and the genuine interest in methods such as citizens’ juries, stakeholder forums and consultation, can flounder in an air of scepticism by some of their participants: poor implementation or ignored results often being cited. 

This project seeks to draw together the learning from these experiences and set it in a context of other techniques for managing uncertainty.  The work is funded by BNFL who explicitly wished to share with a wider audience the knowledge and learning gained through the processes they and others were involved in.  

Download the research document 'Management of Uncertainty through Stakeholder Engagement (MUSE) - Practical Guidance for Setting Strategy in an Uncertain World' here (.pdf, 310KB).

For more information on this paper, please contact Eva Beresford by email or phone on 020 7632 0145.