Environmental Public Policy Making Exposed: A Guide for Decision Makers and Interested Citizens
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
I. Environmental Policy: The current paradigm
This introductory chapter describes the dilemma of balancing science and stakeholder goals in environmental policy making and our current paradigm or conceptual model of policy decision making. How do we currently make policy decisions that affect the public and are we doing as well as we could? Is there something fundamental that we are missing in the various approaches or methodologies we use to examine possible solutions? Is the controversy about climate change really about the scientific facts as to whether climate has changed or is it about disagreements regarding possible strategies to address impacts from climate change? The current environmental policy making paradigm reflects a bias toward the approaches used in the physical and biological sciences where the more complex problem is broken down into smaller problems that are individually solved based on science rules. The presumption that the whole is the sum of its parts pervades this conceptual model. In addition, the presumption of deducing the truth in the physical and biological sciences, which has served the physical and biological sciences well in the past, when applied to social and policy problems, is problematic as it often leads to the wrong problem being solved and/or stakeholder disenfranchisement. In this chapter, the long-held presumption that solving science and technology problems solves environmental policy problems is challenged.
II. The missing element
Practitioners commonly fail to understand that decision making requires a set of value judgments that vary because they are situational. Value judgments characterize wicked problems. In wicked problems, there are many stakeholders with diverse perspectives making it difficult to define the problem, no single right answers, no stopping rules, no objective measures of success, while solutions require iteration, must often be discovered, and often have strong moral, political or professional dimensions. Environmental problems are classic wicked problems with diverse stakeholders, competing interests, often an overwhelming number of solution possibilities, and a strong moral dimension as in Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons." Furthermore, all choice problems (and hence, all decision making problems) are wicked problems. Different spatial and temporal scales complicate public policy problems and choosing which scales to address also makes those problems wicked. Therefore, policy making utilizes factual information but how that factual information is combined is a wicked problem. When people disagree about environmental issues such as climate change, is the disagreement really about the facts or about what policy alternatives should be considered?
Written from a practitioner's perspective, the complexity of relying on detailed science and technical facts to inform stakeholder discussions and policy discussions is dissected and evaluated. The nexus among policy making, stakeholder priorities and objectives and the use/miss-use of scientific information is discussed. In this chapter, we discuss multi-criteria problems where decision makers and other stakeholders often misidentify the wicked problem with potentially bad results.
III. Wickedness: It's not just for decision making
This chapter introduces the first principles common to creating indices, doing alternatives ranking and multi-criteria decision analysis. Indices are often created in order to simplify the delivery of a message and have the shroud of objecti
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks® and the ThriftBooks® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
