Participatory Modeling in Sustainability Science: The Road to Value-Neutrality

Participatory modeling in sustainability science allows scientists to take stakeholders’ interests, knowledge, and values into account when designing a model-based solution to a sustainability problem, by incorporating stakeholders in the model-building process. This improves the chance of generating socially robust knowledge and consensus on solutions. Part of what helps in this regard is that scientists, through involving stakeholders, limit their own values from influencing the outcome, thus achieving some level of value-neutrality. We argue that while it might achieve this to some extent, it comes at a cost to the reliability of the outcomes, which is ethically problematic.