Distributed knowledge in environmental planning: Hybrid IT-based approaches in scenario-building contexts

The new argumentative and communicative approach to environmental planning is replacing the traditional approach of planning derived from cybernetic models and based on the linear control of systems' dynamics. The traditional absolute monologic rationality of planning is today challenged by more complex, multilogic, multivalue and weak rationality, explicitly contextualized to different social and physical environments. Not achieving targets, but rather building discourses and visions related to evolving situations are the new grounds of planning processes, where different stakeholders can intentionally locate behaviours, meanwhile learning about themselves and their realities. In this context, traditional cybernetic planning seem unable to face the probabilistic and chaotic environmental phenomena, so making it extremely hard to point out elements, to schedule times, to respect consistencies. However, practical cases of experimentation of the argumentative approach to environmental planning are particularly rare. Given this starting conceptual condition, the present paper will try to contribute to the research field, dealing with the potentials using an ICT based argumentative and communicative approach to environmental planning. In particular, a proposed process will be discussed, with reference to Future studies and to the Strategic choice approach, hybridized by information technologies. The context of such experimentation is a 5-year EU-financed project to build sustainable development futures in the Mediterranean region, ended in 2003.