Decision Making for the Environment Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Improving Environmental Decision Processes
2 Improving Environmental Decision Processes
Pages 23-40
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 23... ...
developing useful criteria to characterize and evaluate the quality of environmental decisions, (b) developing and testing formal decision science tools for structuring decision processes, and (c)
|
From page 24... ...
. A further challenge is to address the linked nature of environmental processes and environmental decisions across time scales, physical scales, and institutional scales.
|
From page 25... ...
Another problem that often arises with environmental analysis is a failure to address key decision-relevant questions. For example, a billiondollar research program to assess the cancer risks of dioxin not only failed to resolve the scientific issues but also may not have been asking the right question, which, for many affected people, concerned the overall health risks to groups exposed to multiple hazardous chemicals, not just the cancer risks of dioxin exposure.
|
From page 26... ...
Among the consequences are heightened social conflict, delayed decisions, and mistrust. Because of these pervasive problems at the junction of environmental analysis and decision making, several authoritative studies have recommended processes that integrate analysis with broadly based deliberative processes involving the range of parties interested in or affected by the decisions (e.g., National Research Council, 1996; Presidential-Congressional Commission on Risk, 1997; Canadian Standards Association, 1997; Royal [UK]
|
From page 27... ...
. From a decision science standpoint, good environmental decisions consider both physical and social phenomena -- environmental processes, the available options, the effects of different options on environmental and social conditions, and so forth -- and human values.
|
From page 28... ...
. Decision science has developed some systematic techniques for doing this integration in ways that can be applied to environmental decision processes (Slovic and Gregory, 1999)
|
From page 29... ...
. A major challenge in applying a decision science approach to environmental decisions is the linked nature of these decisions.
|
From page 30... ...
The problem of defining decision quality for practical environmental decisions, however, has not received the level of research attention it deserves. Both the normative and the behavioral traditions in decision science have difficulty with this problem.
|
From page 31... ...
. It would inform the design of environmental decision processes by addressing questions such as these: · What criteria do people use to evaluate decision quality?
|
From page 32... ...
Developing Formal Tools for Structuring Decision Processes Behavioral decision research shows that individual decision makers typically omit key elements of good decision processes and that their decisions suffer as a result (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein, 1977)
|
From page 33... ...
The advantages of formal techniques of preference construction are that the judgments involved are made explicit, that the value information can be used in many ways to help clarify the decision process, and that decision makers in collective choice situations can learn a great deal through joint efforts to clarify preferences. The disadvantages are also substantial: the questions involved are difficult to answer and require decision makers to make their inchoate feelings explicit, the questioning process may be confusing, the process can be cognitively and analytically demanding, and it may not be clear how the results will be used.
|
From page 34... ...
, on the presumption that highly precise probabilistic judgments are often unnecessary. Scenarios offer another widely applied approach to characterizing uncertainties for environmental decisions (Waack, 1985a, 1985b)
|
From page 35... ...
Moreover, because these assumptions are sometimes not shared by people affected by environmental decisions, attempts to employ them on actual environmental policy decisions have proved controversial and divisive (National Research Council, 1989, 1996)
|
From page 36... ...
Research on formal tools for structuring decision processes might address such questions as these: · How can formal methods for improving decisions be made understandable and cognitively tractable for participants in complex environmental decisions? How can such methods be applied in real-world decision settings?
|
From page 37... ...
. Many government agencies in the United States and elsewhere have made commitments to using broadly participatory processes involving analysis and deliberation to make or support environmental policy decisions and many have tried to implement those commitments (see, e.g., Beierle and Cayford, 2002; Leach, Pelkey, and Sabatier, 2002; Bradbury et al., 2003; Kasemir et al., 2003)
|
From page 38... ...
. With clearer conceptual frameworks for examining environmental decisions, findings from these separate, older lines of research can be linked to the study of environmental decisions and can generate new and fruitful hypotheses to explore.
|
From page 39... ...
Recent theoretical, conceptual, and empirical work on analytic-deliberative processes and the increasing development of a selfidentifying community of researchers and practitioners has set the stage for rapid progress through conceptually coherent empirical research on the design and study of processes for informing environmental decisions through analytic deliberation. Continuing interest at the National Science Foundation in research on environment and decision making bodes well for scientific advances.
|
From page 40... ...
The increasingly widespread use in government of participatory processes requiring both analysis and broadly based deliberation indicates the potential demand for scientifically informed guidance on how to make decision processes work better. Despite the public commitments of various government agencies to openness, however, significant barriers remain to the use of results from the recommended scientific research on decision-making processes.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.