Moving Towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security (MAGIC), a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 689669). Website: https://magic-nexus.eu/.
MAGIC contributes to the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth by testing the robustness and the quality of the narratives about the current Nexus situation in Europe.
To this purpose, MAGIC focuses on key components of the sustainability strategy – water, food, energy and land use – stressing how they are deeply entangled in what has been called the Nexus. MAGIC goes beyond the usual practice of considering each resource flow (energy, water or food) independently and developing separate quantitative analyses.
MAGIC studies not only Nexus policy issues but their underlying “narratives”, that is, how the policy issues are framed by pre-analytical choices of how to define and delimit the problem and the system at hand. Our approach involves checking the feasibility, viability and desirability of policies using the metabolic pattern of socio-ecological systems as the underlying theoretical concept and doing so across spatial scales (e.g. EU, Member States and regions).
In this way, MAGIC seeks to overcome the prevailing scientist-policy maker (purported) separation, whereby scientists are supposed to produce and certify the facts and policy makers guarantee the legitimacy of the values. In MAGIC, a diversity of social actors carry out together a critical appraisal of the narratives that shape the process of generating the information used for governance of the Nexus. The appraisal of narratives encompasses the initial identification and framing of the problem to the choice of models through which variables and data are combined to generate quantitative results, and how these are legitimated, interpreted and used (or not used) in decision-making processes.
MAGIC thus develops a novel approach to the use of scientific information in the process of governance by replacing the narrowly technocratic and disciplinary research paradigm with Quantitative Story-Telling (QST). QST aspires to check the robustness, the usefulness and the fairness of the narratives used to discuss and select policies. The theoretical foundation of QST is the theory of post-normal science, which acknowledges the unavoidable presence of scientific uncertainty and value plurality in the sustainability discussion.
For more information, see: https://magic-nexus.eu/ or http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/203266_en.html