LOS EFECTOS DE LA LIQUIDACIÓN PARA EL DEUDOR PERSONA JURÍDICA

One recognised value of invited communication process is the resources they can provide to enable participants to engage effectively (Table 4). These inputs include human resources, material resources, and time (Hegger et al., 2012; Rowe et al., 2008). Findings from both cases indicated these resources are important for engagement involving decision-makers (see text box). As noted previously, decision-makers do initiate and organise engagement (Figure 6). An invited process can be attractive if it: makes it possible for decision-makers to engage (by providing travel and technical support for meetings); makes it easier to engage (by identifying knowledge sources and making them more accessible); and contributes expertise in the form of the professional knowledge and skills of the facilitators (e.g. specialist science knowledge and facilitation skills). Facilitation that promotes communicative competence and meaning-making among participants is a particularly important component of good quality engagement exercises because participants may not have these skills. While such skills are undoubtedly valuable, the mark of good engagement is participation by those with relevant knowledge to contribute and/or an institutional mandate aligned to the objectives of the engagement exercise (Table 14).

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day to day activities and distractions allowing for effective engagement with new knowledge and concepts. In both the case studies, however, it appeared that decision-makers from the most poorly resourced jurisdictions engaged less. One possible explanation is they did not have time to engage. Organisations with financial resources can ‘buy time’ by paying for private consultants to undertake particular tasks, or those running engagement projects can offer to pay for people’s time. This was evident in both cases. The obvious disadvantage for the public institution of this strategy being that the capacity developed by those individuals through engagement leaves when the immediate task is complete. Still, it appeared that some organisations did not have the capacity to allocate staff time or have consultants filling gaps. While the “absorptive capacity” of institutions—encompassing the necessary knowledge, motivation and skills—has been recognised as necessary for knowledge co-production (Roux & Nel, 2013) there appears to be a much more fundamental element about capacity relating to the wherewithal to employ and keep staff that underlies this and which was likely lacking in some jurisdictions in both Australia and South Africa (Robins & Dovers, 2007; Roux & Nel, 2013).

These findings have several implication for planning and evaluating engagement with science. Firstly the capacity of invited institutions may be a limiting factor on the outcomes and impact of engagement. Uneven engagement may result in information gaps (as noted in NFEPA), limit the opportunity to build relationships and trust through face-to-face interaction particularly where they don’t already exist (such as among regional NRM groups), and potentially compromise the quality of decisions requiring negotiation. It is possible that those organisations with the capacity to engage benefit while those organisations without are left further behind (Robins & Dovers, 2007). Clearly three or five year projects cannot replace

Resources valued by decision-makers 1. Time away from normal tasks

2. Support to bring people together

3. Providing communication channels between participants

4. Preparing materials for discussion & collation of outputs

5. Facilitation of dialogue

6. Expertise and professionalism of facilitators

An important pre-condition for decision- makers to apply the cognitive effort required to consider the application of science was time away from their normal activities. In other words, co- production or engagement processes can create “shadow spaces” (CSIRO, 2014b) or “third spaces” (Roux, Nel, Cundill, O’Farrell, & Fabricius, 2017) away from

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long term, stable resourcing for NRM agencies but the deliberate application of a normative rationale for decision-maker engagement in the design of such projects would be the first step to considering if and how such disparities can or should be addressed.

The second aspect of the communication process identified in the draft framework in Chapter 2 was the quality of dialogue and deliberation as indicated by interactivity and knowledge symmetry. The value of interactivity was noted by decision-makers in both case studies and I would argue the need for interactivity should be a key consideration in choosing between engagement and information dissemination approaches in a given decision context. Dialogue was valued specifically as a mechanism to listen and learn about the perspectives of both colleagues and scientists and as a prompt for an individual’s own cognitive processing i.e. hearing a different point of view or needing to explain or defend one’s own claims in the vein of “communicative competence” (Habermas, 1984). This seems to be of particular value to decision-makers working in complex and dynamic decision-contexts. Australian NRM managers needed to change the way they conceptualised ecosystem management under climate change. South African water managers needed to expand their vision of water allocation to include ecosystem maintenance. There were indications that making and questioning claims, particularly when it involves credible experts, may carry more weight than reading lengthy documents (which many are unlikely to have the time to do). These findings also raise a fundamental question for institutions considering the value of engagement and that is whether they expect or want decision-makers to critically examine scientific content and scientific advice? Or do we expect decision-makers to passively take advice from scientists (and the public) which is the current assumption in the PES discourse (Spruijt et al., 2014; Stilgoe et al., 2006).

Deliberation is a particular form of dialogue or discussion involving considered and careful weighing up of different propositions (Fearon, 1998) and was a less obvious component of engagement in the two case studies than dialogue. The fact that none of the interview transcripts contained the word ‘deliberation’ may simply be because it is a form of jargon not generally used in NRM. Certainly some of the discussions that took place at key decision points in the NFEPA product development (Nel et al., 2016) seemed to involve weighing up of different options. Knowledge symmetry is recognised as a pre-condition for democratic deliberative processes and to allow for different framings of issues beyond those derived by those initiating the process (Bogner, 2012; Chilvers, 2008). The valuable knowledge and expertise of decision-makers was explicitly recognised from the outset of

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NFEPA and emerged during AdaptNRM. Decision-makers certainly influenced the scope and content of products if not the actual nature of the products (conservation planning tools for NFEPA and web-based synthesis products for AdaptNRM). The limitations of participant power relative to those running deliberative processes has been observed elsewhere (Abelson et al., 2003). I would suggest these boundaries need to be negotiated early in decision-maker engagement processes and, as with NFEPA, explicitly identified points of deliberation, particularly around contested issues or where there exists a high degree of uncertainty. Several AdaptNRM participants highlighted areas that weren’t open to debate and deliberation such as who could be involved in the process (some wanted community and local government involved) and the approach being used, e.g. “I sort of felt, there were some things I raised that just because I was one voice amongst many it was a minority so my voice wasn’t heard” (NRM22). While time-poor decision-makers may appreciate facilitators structuring the engagement process and synthesising inputs, the potential of engagement processes may not be realised if participation is tokenistic or purely instrumental (e.g. to get “buy-in” to products). Not allowing for deliberation may also risk disengagement.

A final aspect of the communication process that was not identified in the draft evaluation framework in Chapter 2 but that emerged from the case studies was elicitation. A key part of the engagement process in NFEPA was about eliciting the tacit knowledge participants had about aquatic ecosystems and appropriate thresholds for management (Nel et al., 2016). Such processes may be particularly important in engagement related to knowledge co-production but possibly less so in other engagement contexts. In AdaptNRM, the practical knowledge of decision-makers was elicited to illustrate how scientific knowledge about climate change could be applied to adaptation in a regional context (captured in “case studies” in the final reports). Elicitation of expert knowledge has received considerable attention in the conservation sciences but focuses on expert scientific knowledge which is used to populate models in the absence of empirical data (Martin et al., 2012). The type of elicitation referred to here is targeting non-experts, is less quantitative, and in part is about linking science with participants’ values (Leith & Vanclay, 2015). Where eliciting tacit knowledge is important, human interaction through engagement may be of greater importance (Roux et al., 2006).

5.4 Outcomes and impacts

I predicted that direct outcomes of engagement with science would manifest at the individual and institutional level, as well as in linkages or relationships and outputs (Chapter 2

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framework). My case studies suggest that valuable outcomes of decision-maker engagement do manifest at an individual level as predicated for other lay publics (Mohr et al., 2013; Neresini & Pellegrini, 2008) and participants in transdisciplinary research (Carew & Wickson, 2010). Public engagement related to policy development is perhaps inevitably valued according to what decisions and policy instruments emerge (Emery et al., 2015), but individual transformation through engagement is also important (Lawrence, 2006; Walter et al., 2007). For example, a range of learning was evident and valued by decision-makers in the case studies. This went beyond learning about the science under discussion to: learning from peers (as documented in the Shared Learning module produced by AdaptNRM); learning about the products of the exercise and their application (particularly NFEPA); and learning about the practices of inclusive and robust engagement practice and knowledge co- production.

It has been said that learning in individuals most often occurs through social interaction with others (Reed, 2008) and this may be a particular value associated with engagement exercises over other modes of science communication. Learning sometimes led decision- makers to new ways of conceptualizing issues which in turn may translate into a better capacity to solve problems. Engagement with science by decision-makers, particularly in face-to-face modes, is also credited with helping build trust and professional relationships (Mitton et al., 2007; Roux et al., 2006). The cases suggested that the value of building relationships through engagement matters most when participating organisations and individuals don’t have established relationships or in the absence of other collaborative mechanisms such as communities of practice or bridging agents. So in Australia, small remotely-located organisations with high staff turnover and few formal bridging agents valued relationship-building more than in South Africa, where a highly experienced and established group of water professionals had respected bridging organisations and communities of practice. However, relationship-building may become a higher priority in South Africa with a new cohort of professionals moving into the domain. This highlights a key challenge where outcomes are manifest primarily with individual decision-makers. When individuals leave an organisation or a sector, their enhanced knowledge and professional networks are lost. Both cases show the duration of individual benefits of engagement can be time limited in the NRM sector due to the high level of churn.

Another purported outcome for individuals and institutions arising from engagement is science becoming more accessible, relevant and credible (Cash et al., 2003; Hegger et al.,

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2012). The original goal of AdaptNRM was information provision so it was fundamentally about improving the accessibility of science to regional NRM planners. This outcome was arguably achieved for participating individuals and organisations through the collation and synthesis of science from different sources, elicitation of the tacit knowledge of decision- makers, translation of climate models into strategies for management, and raising awareness of CSIRO research and how it may be relevant. Similar observations can be made about NFEPA. The cases suggest that making science accessible can be a valuable outcome of engagement where the knowledge of decision-makers is valued and where there are opportunities for that knowledge to be elicited, questioned and incorporated as appropriate with science to produce (potentially) relevant products. This contrasts with a deficit approach where the needs of decision-makers are assumed or subsumed by science imperatives

It is less clear how engagement activities involving decision-makers actually improve the credibility of science. In both cases studies, decision-makers had high levels of education, often in science, and so tended to trust science and see it as a credible or believable source of knowledge, possibly more so than other lay publics (Bauer, 2008). Indeed it is possible that the perceived credibility of science motivates decision-maker participation in knowledge co- production activities like AdaptNRM and NFEPA. Only one instance emerged where the credibility of science was questioned and that was with the wetland component of the NFEPA products. This was judged by some to be built on inadequate data and so not credible and rejected. These findings support recent work suggesting the importance of CRELE (credibility, relevance and legitimacy of science) “represents a more intra-scientific perspective, rather than being empirically-rooted in the needs or considerations of policymakers” (Dunn & Laing, 2017, p. 147). As with Dunn & Laing, the decision-makers I interviewed generally lacked the resources to interrogate the credibility of science at the level scientists do. This is where trust in individual scientists becomes critical and potentially problematic. In NFEPA, technical expertise allowed some decision-makers to make informed judgments about the applicability of the wetlands components of NFEPA products but what of decision-makers without this expertise? This illustrates the value of investigating the science-policy interface through a communicative lens where we can “open up” (Stirling, 2008) our values so that non-adoption may be viewed as success because participants understood the science well enough to determine it wasn’t applicable in their decision context.

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My proposition in Chapter 2 followed the Rowe et al. (2004) PES evaluation framework that predicts legitimate engagement processes are required for acceptance of the resulting outputs and decisions or at least increases their “acceptability” (sensu Heink et al., 2015). Legitimacy of process was not a concern raised by decision-makers in either of the case studies which may reflect the inclusive approach taken by project teams or that decision- makers who felt the process lacked legitimacy did not engage and were not interviewed. However, interviewees from both cases valued science not only as a source of knowledge by which to understand the natural world, but from which to justify or legitimise their decisions —to people higher up in the institution, to the general public, and to entities whose interests might be disadvantaged by their decisions. Simply pointing to science to justify decisions ignores the values and social biases inherent in deciding how to respond to scientific knowledge (Jasanoff, 2003; Nowotny, 2007). It is also unclear whether or not saying decisions are based on science automatically leads to public acceptance (the vaccination example being one of many). This finding raises important issues about the conduct and evaluation of science engagement involving decision-makers.

Firstly are NRM decision-makers seeking science from projects such as AdaptNRM and NFEPA simply to justify politically-based decisions as has been described elsewhere (Jasanoff, 1990; Nelkin, 1975)? Did they ‘cherry-pick’ supportive results and ignore others? I cannot say without analysis of the policy instruments and how they have been implemented. However, an argument against this idea is that the projects synthesised science and other knowledge into tools to help conceptualise problems or locate where natural assets are located. If these tools can be considered ‘advice’ they are contingent—offering a range of perspectives and options rather than absolute answers (Stilgoe et al., 2006). This means decision-makers still need to interpret science, make value judgments, and apply other knowledge in order to make decisions (the ‘cloud’ in Figure 8). Those decisions have not been made for them by scientists.

The desire of the decision-makers interviewed to use science to legitimise their decisions was driven by the necessity for trade-offs and avoiding controversy. I suggest that the principles of engagement with science as envisaged in the PES discourse does not comfortably accommodate the legitimisation of these decisions (e.g. Wynne, 1996) – particularly where much of the actual decision-making process remains opaque and outside the process of science engagement (Figure 8). Instead, engagement should be valued for being able to shed new light on policy and management issues by bringing together a range of

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relevant knowledges and enabling dialogue to develop mutual understanding and articulation of the implications of these knowledges for the decision context. I suggest a more appropriate outcome for evaluation is acceptability of the outputs of engagement as determined by legitimate processes of product development incorporating transparency, inclusivity and enabling dialogue (Chilvers, 2008; Hegger et al., 2012) as well as principles of robust science such as hypothesis testing, replication, and repetition and peer review.

Figure 8: Schematic representation of potential knowledge flows in NRM decision- making with yellow boxes representing a decision legitimization outcome.

Where decision-makers aren’t simply implementing absolute scientific advice, some sort of individual transformation or outcome seems a necessary pre-cursor to the utilization of science and subsequent impact. Improved individual capacity may change institutional cultures or norms—part of “institutional capacity” described by Bottrill and Pressey (2012) in their work on evaluation in conservation planning. There was some indication of at least the potential for changes in cultural norms resulting from AdaptNRM with several interviewees noting a key outcome was their greater awareness and understanding of robust engagement and co-production techniques as demonstrated by the project team which may conceivably translate into institutional culture change. While these individual outcomes are undoubtedly valuable, both cases showed they may be short-lived in the NRM sector with high staff

decisions interpretation value judgments other knowledge institutional drivers etc

AdaptNRM & NFEPA projects decisions justify /accept contradict /reject credible science decision-maker knowledge ??? NFEPA products AdaptNRM products

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turnover. Beyond individual impacts, an engagement exercise or series of complementary programs (e.g. Roux et al., 2017) may also contribute to institutional and social impacts.

In Chapter 2 I defined outcomes as results which may be directly influenced through the design and implementation of an engagement process versus impacts which may be subject to many complex social, political and environmental forces unrelated to engagement itself. The distinction between outcomes and impacts can be blurred however. For example AdaptNRM helped foster relationships among regional NRM groups (an outcome) which at the time of interviews had already translated into collaborations, standardised approaches across organisations and sharing of resources (impact). The sponsors of AdaptNRM attempted to achieve institutional impact by funding both an information provision process and production of a policy instrument that could incorporate that information (updated regional plans). Knowledge from AdaptNRM did inform some regional plans which may be seen as an institutional impact, although these had yet to be implemented and so had not yet resulted in material impact (such as biodiversity impacts). Likewise for NFEPA, the products and knowledge developed have had institutional impact by being incorporated in national and provincial plans, strategies and methods used by decision-makers—see Chapter 4 and Nel et