Heterogeneous Knowledge in Distributed Environmental Governance: Emergence, Integration, and the Preservation of Disagreement

Governance of an interdependent environmental field requires knowledge that no party holds. Knowledge of such a field stands distributed among hydrological services, ecological programmes, health authorities, industrial operators, and populations resident in the systems concerned, and their holdings differ in variable, in resolution, in evidential standard, and in the kind of claim they issue. The prevailing response is integration understood as reconciliation: harmonise the categories, resolve the disagreements, and produce a single account on which decisions may rest. This paper argues that reconciliation so understood is unavailable and that its pursuit is harmful, and proposes an alternative conception of what integration can be. The method is conceptual, developed through an examination of what aggregation procedures preserve and what they discard. Three insights are advanced. Knowledge of a distributed field is not the union of what its parties hold, since the relations among their holdings, including their disagreements, carry information that no party's holding contains. Aggregation over claims that stand in logical relations to one another cannot in general be conducted claim by claim without producing conclusions no party accepts, which is a known impossibility whose bearing on environmental assessment has not been drawn. And the claims held by parties in such a field are of kinds that cannot be averaged, since a probability, a rate ratio, a monetary estimate, a qualitative account, and a legal duty are not five measurements of one quantity. From these the paper develops a conception of integration as temporary, question-relative assembly that preserves disagreement, uncertainty, and acknowledged ignorance as first-class content, together with the provenance required to prevent a single source counted twice from appearing as two confirmations. The paper surveys social epistemology, judgment aggregation, expert elicitation, post-normal science, co-production, epistemic injustice, and the traditional-knowledge literatures, states what each owns, and identifies the residue. It reports no empirical study and establishes no formal result.