Samenvatting

From the abstract: "The role of expert knowledge of the environment in decision-making about urban development has been intensively debated. Most contributions to this debate have studied the use of knowledge in the decision-making process from the knowledge providers’ point of view. In this paper, we reverse the perspective and try to understand how local decision-makers use scientific knowledge in decision-making about an urban plan and how they perceive the world of the scientific experts providing this knowledge. We approached municipal administrators in the Netherlands, responsible for local urban development, with conceptions regarding the use of knowledge that were derived from the literature on this issue. By reversing the perspective on the science – decision-making gap, we find that local administrators have a different view on this divide than do scientists."