About UKH

The Uncomfortable Knowledge Hub (UKH) is a legacy of the Horizon2020 project ‘Moving towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: Informing Nexus Security’ (MAGIC).

After more than four years of interdisciplinary environmental and social research, a key policy recommendation of MAGIC was that silos in water-energy-food-environment nexus governance should be overcome by promoting the uptake and use of uncomfortable knowledge.

The UKH seeks to continue the dialogue with policy actors and interested citizens established by MAGIC, by opening up the discussion about WEFE-nexus governance to alternative problem framings.

1. Denial refusing to acknowledge or engage with information.
2. Dismissal rejecting the information as faulty or irrelevant.
3. Diversion distracting attention away from an uncomfortable concern.
4. Displacement addressing a simplistic chosen representation of a problem -i.e. a model- rather than the predicaments associated with a given situation.

In the UKH we present new problem framings through the use of Quantitative Storytelling (QST).

QST does not claim to present the “truth” about a given issue, nor that the numbers used in the story are uncontested. When dealing with wicked sustainability issues, numbers can always be calculated and interpreted in many different ways.

QST simply presents alternative stories to enrich the diversity of insights about a given issue.