The Palm and Pomegranate. Post-Normal Science and Land Policies. The Case of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP)

Post-normal science (Ravetz and Funtowicz 1993) is a paradigm, i.e. a worldview shared by a specific scientific community (Kuhn 1978), characterized by a condition for which facts are uncertain, values are not shared, the stakes are high and decisions are urgent. The uncertainty of the facts - which could appear to be a counterintuitive statement - derives in turn in this context from a situation that can be defined as the length of the causal effects (Ungaro 2004). The length of causal effects, as a characteristic of post-normal science, consists in the inability to control and predict all the consequences arising over an extended period of time from complex scientific applications (e.g. the negative externalities potentially related to transgenics fall in this field). A further consequence of this characteristic of post-normal science is the widening of the expert community. Given the length of the causal effects and the uncertainty of the facts, the expert community is integrated, in this context, by unconventional knowledge such as traditional experiences, community uses, informal skills, generally unqualified academic knowledge. In the field of eco-politics, post-normal science has an important influence on the decision-making process. In this contribution, I use the metaphor of the palm (adaptation) and pomegranate (utopia) to illustrate the connection between post-normal science, decision making and risk defense mechanisms in a concrete case, the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The palm - as a metaphor for a plant that also adapts to arid soils and unites the feminine and the masculine - indicates a path that in terms of political ecology tries to reconcile feasibility and sustainability. The pomegranate - as a metaphor for infinite abundance - indicates the hope of being able to transform a non-place into something feasible. The basic question on which the extreme poles of the dilemma illustrated above are based - the palm (adaptation) and the pomegranate (utopia) - is given by a further characteristic of political ecology in the era of post-normal science, namely the phenomenon of the territorial concentration of the costs of companies with environmental impact and the spread of benefits, a phenomenon that allows the emergence of new forms of decision-making that refer to a post-universalist democracy of proximity.