Blind spots in environmental policy-making: How beliefs about science and development may jeopardize environmental solutions

Engaging with knowledges outside of western science and questions of power is increasingly being acknowledged as an imperative for helping solve intractable environmental problems. What is unacknowledged is the difference in how this is reasoning is applied in relation to policy-making in the global North and South. While questions of power such as gender and people’s participation are integral to international policy-making in the Northern development policies for the South, there is often little on these perspectives in domestic environmental policy-making. Underlying this paradox are assumptions about science and development in policy-making that preclude a discussion of environmental alternatives. These assumptions generate blind spots in environmental policy-making that need to be addressed so that environmental policy in the global North too is able to respond to environmental problems on the basis of evidence and rather than assumptions about science and about the rest of the world.