Mind the unknowns

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys many ways in which routine practice of policy modelling is pressured—and often aims—to hide its unavoidably political dimensions. This can have a seriously regressive effect on encompassing politics, reinforcing powerful incumbents and further marginalizing less privileged interests and their favoured policy alternatives. Driven by routinely obscured forces of political justification, much modelling conceals many forms of inconvenient uncertainty, ambiguity, and ignorance. Albeit often inadvertently, this globalizing trend towards technocratic authoritarianism erodes space for reasoned deliberation by dogmatically invoking science—provoking a ‘post-truth’ backlash that further undermines democracy. By instead opening up more plural and conditional practices, policy modelling can help defuse these regressive dynamics. A wide range of methods are identified, to help prefigure, catalyse, and enact greater humility, transparency, and reflexivity about unavoidable politics and irreducible incertitudes—thus enabling policy-making to become both more scientifically rigorous and more democratically legitimate.