Book Review: The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crisis

initiative in the San Francisco Bay region; and EBCRC, which looked at military base conversions in the San Francisco Bay region. This forty-eight-page chapter is the heart of the book and gives an excellent insight into the practice of fostering collaborative rationality. Some are successful, some are not and the reasons are cogently analyzed in relation to the DIAD framework. The subsequent four chapters then go into detail on how, practically, to generate collaborative rationality in practice situations. While linking back to concepts such as incentive structures, ideal speech situations, and agonism, Chapter 4 also delivers practical wisdom on how to handle groups, provide leadership, and shape communication. Chapter 5 unpacks the communication dimension more fully, looking at how dialogue constitutes a community of inquiry. The role of metaphor, story-telling, role playing, and drama are all discussed. Collective bricolage is Innes and Booher’s terminology for creating new strategies through these dialogic means. The importance of knowledge is explored in Chapter 6. Expertise plays a much more limited role in public decision making than we all pretend. There is an excellent summary of why policy makers do not use research and why they do use it in four pages at pp. 144-48, which I instantly copied and sent to those in my institution concerned with achieving policy impact through academic research. The authors also concentrate on the different forms that knowledge can take, the different ways that conflict over scientific knowledge can be handled and some examples from the Chapter 3 case studies of joint fact-finding endeavors. The penultimate chapter then takes the discussion of knowledge further to discuss multiple knowledges, the knowledge of the powerless and disposed, and strategies for incorporating local knowledge. Further cases are considered although these were less convincing than the Chapter 3 cases because they are essentially drawn from the research literature rather than firsthand experience. Finally, there is the attempt to contribute to a broader social theory. The great conceptual strength of Innes and Booher’s argument is that it provides a practice-based contribution to the theoretical movements of collaborative planning and deliberative public policy making. This builds on the traditions of pragmatism and social constructivism and contributes to the literature on interpretive forms of knowing and communities of inquiry. Less convincing, in my view, is the engagement with complexity science and the suggestion that generalizing collaborative rationality can build a more resilient society. Resilience is here understood in terms of creating a system “that can withstand shocks and surprises, absorb extreme stresses, and maintain its core functions” (p. 205). Extrapolating from their analysis in the rest of the book, they argue that a resilient governance system needs to be adaptive in the face of uncertainty and hence exhibit diversity, ample opportunities for interaction, and effective methods for the selection of action. This implies an emphasis on building networks at the center of governance activity. Additional components for resilience are then: diversity and interdependence, collaborative dialogue and development of knowledge, boundary spanning, monitoring and feedback. They also stress the value of small, diverse working groups. They point to the tensions between traditional hierarchical structures of government and the need to rethink the roles of government officials, leaders of agencies, civil servants, and elected politicians. However, I find the logic of this argument unconvincing. The authors claim that collaborative policy processes are complex adaptive processes. This may well be true but it is a leap to suggest that a general reliance on collaborative rationality will promote resilience of public policy systems as a whole. Understanding interactions between actors in terms of complexity may help progress those negotiations but this is not the same as saying that all interactions should take the form of collaborative rationality in order to make a social or public policy system more resilient. This is particularly as they have already convincingly shown that collaborative rationality cannot work in all circumstances. I think that they also underestimate the implications of complexity science. They argue that “complexity thinking suggests that as policy professionals we need to operate at the system scale rather than focus piecemeal on individual fixes” (p. 33). Such complex systems thinking is much more expert-led than is implied and it is more difficult to mesh this with the mediation and negotiation of individual problems that actors will come to the table to discuss. However, this disagreement in no way diminishes my admiration for this book which I have already repeatedly recommended. This book not only contributes to contemporary planning theory—by grounding it in practice evidence—but also is highly relevant to work on environmental justice and on science and environmental planning more generally. It is to be profoundly hoped that it will be taken up across disciplines to get its message across.