The praxis of reflexive design: lessons from a Dutch programme on sustainable livestock systems

Deliberative policy analysis has been practiced often in cases that Beck, Giddens and others have designated “reflexive modernisation”. Deliberation under such circumstances is to support a synthesising kind of judgment in which assumptions, knowledge claims, distinctions, roles and identities normally taken for granted must be critically scrutinised. Thus existing institutions tend to provide inadequate guidance for such “reflexive design”. In this paper, we shed some light on this challenge by telling and reviewing the story of Programme 348: “Future Livestock Production Systems” for the reflexive modernisation of Dutch agriculture, following major crises in the country’s husbandry sector. Although an institutional arrangement had been created that was rather favourable to reflexive design, the programme encountered significant difficulties which we argue were rooted in the institutions that have emerged throughout agricultural modernization over the past century: established identities, knowledge stocks, economic rules and so on appear to fight back against the very projects that are designed to transform them. We draw on these findings in order to formulate some lessons for practices of reflexive design.