Knowing how it’s known: societal intelligence in crisis governance

Within the paradigm shift from resilient to robust crisis governance (Ansell et al., 2022), negotiability of societal intelligence is pinpointed as one of the independent variables impacting the ability to innovate ad adapt, and thus to robustly respond to crises. While scholars have previously employed terms such as “collective intelligence” (Bourgon, 2009) and “collective learning” (Deverell, 2010), there is still no agreed definition of what constitutes societal intelligence. Intelligence is a commonly used notion in psychology, referring to the capacity to reason validly about information (Mayer, 2004). In the field of knowledge management and organizational intelligence, intelligence is one of the “four classes of inputs exist[ing] for any system”, together with data, information, and knowledge (Ackoff, 1989, in De Angelis, 2013, p.807-808). According to this framework, the application of knowledge to a situation turns it into intelligence – the level where decisions are made. Thus, under which conditions does knowledge turn into societal intelligence? Where and how is this knowledge negotiated? Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, from e.g., neuroscience to business strategy, social epistemology to international public administration, this paper reviews the existing literature related to keywords such as intelligence, crisis governance, information, and knowledge, in order to come to a conceptualization of societal intelligence. Central themes standing out in the literature are the science-policy interface, and the strategic use of knowledge by both scientists and decision-makers; boundary organizations and their potential as interfaces where knowledge can be negotiated; the uncertainty characterizing a crisis which goes as deep as being epistemological, thus requiring a post-normal science problem solving strategy; information asymmetries and the equivocality and uncertainty thereof, thus underlining the need for knowledge negotiation; and finally, the capacity of organizations for inter- and/or intra-crisis learning.