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3 Decision Support and Learning
Pages 71-90

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From page 71...
... We then recommend ways that the federal government can apply this mode of learning in its own decision support activities and facilitate decision makers around the country in making adaptive responses to climate change and learning from their own and others' experiences.
From page 72...
... Another challenge is that most climate change decisions will be undertaken in a decentralized fashion, as local and state governments, firms, and other institutions respond to a changing climate. Thus, the federal role in decision support will have to be aimed at creating and informing a distributed capacity to make sensible choices.
From page 73...
... 3. In adaptive management, actions are designed as experiments so that they will perturb the decision environment and thereby generate information useful for future adjustment and improvement.
From page 74...
... (Unplanned learning is not the same as deliberate trial and error or adaptive management, described below.) However, the underlying assumptions of unplanned learning -- that the decision environment is stable and the decision maker is unitary -- do not fit at all well with the decision environment created by climate change.
From page 75...
... (2000:vii) , evaluation helps people, individually and collectively, make sense of policies and programs "by providing systematic information about such things as the outcomes or valued effects of a social program, the cause of program success or failure, and the degree to which policy directives are being followed." To learn from program evaluation, decision makers need to identify explicit goals for a program, develop indicators of performance towards those goals, and gather data on the indicators.
From page 76...
... Adaptive management theory calls for policy interventions to be treated explicitly as experiments: carefully planned and monitored with replication and comparison of management treatments (or lack of treatments) at appropriate spatial and temporal scales.
From page 77...
... Given all the conditions that must be met, explicit experimentation is rarely practical in climate change applications. The field thus distinguishes active adaptive management, in which policy actions are explicitly designed to help generate learning as well as achieve program goals, from passive adaptive management, in which information collection is explicitly designed to improve the prospects of reliable inference from observing the effects of policy actions taken solely to achieve program goals.
From page 78...
... . Although progress in these areas is promising, in many cases adaptive management may prove difficult for climate-related decision support, because of the institutional setting of decision making.
From page 79...
... In this sense, the process synthesizes information from assessments of both risks and management actions and thereby informs ongoing decision-making processes. The deliberation with analysis mode of learning resembles program evaluation and adaptive management, but with two important differences.
From page 80...
... Thus, it presumes a qualitatively different situation than the ones envisioned in conventional program evaluation or adaptive management in which a single decision maker is assumed. As noted above, responding to climate change often involves parties with different perspectives, including both the typical differences between scientists and decision makers and the divergent values and interests among the decision makers.
From page 81...
... The deliberation with analysis model as developed in 1996 strongly emphasized broad public participation as a way to achieve an actionable understanding of the choices facing a decision-making body -- in other words, as a part of decision support. More recently, a set of principles has been identified for effective public participation in environmental decision making (National Research Council, 2008c)
From page 82...
... . In designing such processes, the responsible agencies can benefit from following five key principles for effectively melding scientific analysis and public participation: 1.
From page 83...
... Second, inclusiveness matters. The implications of a changing climate are becoming apparent to constituencies ranging from agriculture to tourism to local governments, and their responses are still taking shape.
From page 84...
... The federal government should also fund research on decision support efforts that combine deliberation with analysis and that use other appropriate learning models, with the aim of improving decision support for a changing climate. FEDERAL ROLES IN FACILITATING LEARNING The federal government can contribute to adaptive learning in response to climate change in three ways: designing its own decision support activities for learning; encouraging nonfederal decision makers to take climate change into account in various ways; and providing support to enable those decision makers to learn more effectively from their own and others' efforts to respond to climate change.
From page 85...
... Framework Convention on Climate Change could be strengthened to provide concrete guidance on methods and approaches for adaptation and management. Internet-based mechanisms such as blogs, Wikis, and user-based reporting systems may also help provide distributed intelligence on decision support innovations.
From page 86...
... . Boundary organizations such as the RISA centers can promote the use of innovative decision support products by "early adopters" and, by linking decision makers to the early adopters, help spread useful decision support innovations.
From page 87...
... Of course, price signals alone are so limited as a form of communication that they hardly qualify as decision support. Prices do not directly foster understanding of the wider implications of a changing climate, and they provide little information on which behavioral changes are most efficacious.
From page 88...
... Responses to climate change can benefit greatly from good networks: Networks can facilitate decision makers' access to sophisticated knowledge and information drawn from science, engineering, law, and other professions, as well as to each other's experiences. The federal government can play an important supporting role in facilitating the networks necessary for climate change decision support by helping reduce the costs of communica
From page 89...
... As the long-term relationships built through the RISA centers illustrate, networks that link federally supported researchers with users of the knowledge they produce increase the utility of federally sponsored research on climate phenomena and facilitate deliberation informed by analysis. Among the kinds of capabilities likely to be cost-effective are support for convening network participants for face-to-face meetings, such as regional conferences, funding a webmaster for a weblog, providing space on an internet server, and providing start-up funds for networks that might be able to develop nonfederal support for their continued activity once members recognize their value.
From page 90...
... 90 informing decisions in a changing climate We conclude by suggesting that the federal government fund studies of social networking, boundary organizations, and other mechanisms that enable deliberation with analysis on climate-related response options among public- and private-sector organizations; build on models such as the RISA centers to expand the body of practical experience in using networks and boundary organizations to address the issues of climate change; and work with philanthropies and other nongovernmental organizations to develop innovative ways of coordinating networks and supporting boundary organizations to provide distributed mechanisms for learning to provide climaterelated decision support.


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