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© 2012 by R. Gregory, L. Failing, M. Harstone, G. Long, T. McDaniels, and D. Ohlson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Structured decision making : a practical guide to environmental management choices / R. Gregory ... [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3341-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4443-3342-8 (paper)
1. Environmental management–Decision making. I. Gregory, Robin (Robin Scott)
GE300.S7834 2011
333.7–dc23
2011038034
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Foreword
This book is about the creative and messy process of making environmental-management decisions. The approach we describe is called Structured Decision Making, a distinctly pragmatic label given to ways for helping individuals and groups think through tough multidimensional choices characterized by uncertain science, diverse stakeholders, and difficult trade-offs. This is the everyday reality of environmental management, yet many important decisions currently are made on an ad hoc basis which lacks a solid value-based foundation, ignores key information, and results in selection of an inferior alternative. Making progress – in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible, and transparent – requires combining analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences and applied ecology with deliberative insights from cognitive psychology, facilitation, and negotiation. We review key methods and discuss case-study examples based in our experiences in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings. Our goal is to lay out a compelling guide that will change how you think about making environmental decisions.
We gratefully acknowledge partial funding support from the Decision, Risk and Management Science program of the US National Science Foundation (Award No. 0725025). We also acknowledge intellectual support from many colleagues and clients over the years who – through a mix of interest, curiosity, and frustration with conventional methods – have seen fit to work with us on a wide range of environmental-management problems, including Joe Arvai, Trent Berry, Cheryl Brooks, Mark Burgman, Bob Clemen, Jean Cochrane, Alec Dale, Nate Dieckmann, Daryl Fields, Baruch Fischhoff, Bill Green, Nicole Gregory, Paul Higgins, Dan Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, Howard Kunreuther, Sarah Lichtenstein, Lynn Maguire, Steven Morey, Ellen Peters, Mike Runge, Terre Satterfield, Basil Stumborg, William Trousdale, Nancy Turner, Terry Walshe, Carl Walters, Tim Wilson, and Kristin Worsley. Many of you (along with Rachel Flood and Leisha Wharfield) also helped by commenting on draft chapters of this book, for which we (and our readers) send thanks. We also thank the editorial staff at Wiley-Blackwell, which has been helpful, professional, and efficient. We take full responsibility for any errors or confusion in how these ideas and case studies are presented, but we recognize and appreciate the many contributions of your clear thinking and practical insights.
This book is dedicated to Ralph Keeney and Paul Slovic. Your enthusiasm for improving how society addresses environmental and risk-management decisions, and your continuing excitement over each new opportunity to learn a little more about how people join emotions with reason to make tough choices, informs and inspires us. Without your friendship and guidance, this book would not exist.
Preface
This book is about decisions. More specifically, it is about making decisions concerning the management of environmental resources. By ‘decision’ we don’t mean a routine i-dotting and form-filling exercise to fulfill an administrative requirement. We mean clear and considered decisions generated through working as part of a team to develop a resource-management plan, prepare an environmental assessment, design a policy framework, propose an infrastructure project, or engage in a host of other activities that may significantly influence the use or protection of valued natural resources.
Our goal in writing this book is to reset the guideposts – even, we might boldly hope, to propose a standard – for what constitutes defensible decision making for the management of environmental resources. In so doing, we are divulging a well-kept secret: there are ‘best practices’ in decision making. Every decision context is different. Yet there is an emerging consensus about what constitutes a responsible and defensible approach to difficult decision making about environmental resources. This book sets out a guide for people who want to lead or be part of such decision processes – whether as managers, facilitators, technical experts, decision makers, community residents, resource users, or as members of non-governmental organizations or interest groups.
The approach we describe is called Structured Decision Making (hereafter SDM). It is a distinctly pragmatic label that we believe captures the essence of the approach. We could equally have called it ‘a useful way to think about addressing tough environmental choices’, but this abbreviation would be unwieldy. An SDM approach combines analytical methods from the decision sciences and applied ecology with insights drawn from cognitive psychology and the experience of facilitators and negotiators. People use SDM methods to organize complex issues in ways that help individuals and groups build common understanding, identify relevant information, and find innovative solutions to difficult environmental-management problems.
SDM is particularly helpful for groups of people working together on solutions in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible and transparent. This framing profoundly changes how decisions are approached: who is involved, how the purpose is defined, how attention and resources are applied across different issues, and how success is gauged.
One of the distinguishing features of SDM is that it gives attention to both the values of people affected and factual information concerning the potential consequences of actions. This dual focus is the foundation of defensible decisions: explicit value-based choices based on the best available information. SDM neither should nor can ‘make’ decisions, but by linking values and facts it provides enormous insight to those charged with this task. To this end, we will introduce methods developed in the decision sciences, but tested and implemented in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings over the past decades in Canada, the United States, and other parts of the world. We emphasize how the fundamental goal of SDM processes – providing clear insights about possible courses of action to those charged with making a decision – can still be achieved in the midst of deadlines, resource constraints, limited attention, and overworked people with diverse perspectives.
Although we have a range of research and academic credentials, we are primarily practitioners and our experience is in applying SDM to environmental problems in the real world. Thus our approach in this book is unapologetically practical. Our goal is to bridge the gap between theory and practice in environmental decision making. We’ve tried to synthesize an enormous amount of thinking by minds greater than ours into a volume that will be understandable and useful in the real world. To keep us grounded, we’ve used an abundance of examples to illustrate both the pros and cons of suggested methods. We include success stories from our own work and the work of others, as well as some of our favorite mistakes – from which we like to think we’ve learned a great deal.
Who should read this book? Our comments are addressed to a broad audience of resource managers, risk analysts, land-use planners, industry leaders, environmental NGOs, facilitators or negotiators, and government decision makers as well as concerned resource users and the residents of potentially affected communities. In our experience, all of these people can and should have the opportunity to participate in meaningful and productive decision-making processes about environmental resources that lead to the implementation of recommended actions. This book also is intended to be appropriate as supplementary reading for university courses in environmental decision making or for courses in planning, ecology, resource economics, and environmental management, at either advanced undergraduate or graduate levels.
Despite the emphasis on methods, this is not primarily a how-to text. It’s meant to introduce you to a new way of thinking about problem solving and accountability in decisions that involve public resources and multiple interests. You don’t need to master any fancy mathematics or complex technical tools to benefit from SDM. You may need to change how you think about choices. We hope this book provides a guide to this new way of thinking and gives you a set of tools that are useful for finding solutions to tough environmental-management problems, particularly those that involve multiple stakeholders and choices over diverse and conflicting interests.
Structured Decision Making contains 12 chapters. The first documents why a new approach to environmental decision making is needed. The second outlines the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of SDM, just enough to thank our predecessors and mentors and to allay any fears that we’ve made it all up. Chapter 3, on decision sketching, introduces the idea of structuring your resource management problem as a decision from the start. Chapters 4 through 9 cover core methods, emphasizing the role of behavioral considerations as well as analysis and deliberation. Chapter 10 discusses critical concepts of iteration, learning, and monitoring – keys to responsive decision making under uncertainty. Chapter 11 provides a reality check, meant to keep our feet on the ground and focus on what is possible in terms of people, institutions, legal constraints, information, and politics. The final chapter briefly summarizes key points. At the end of most chapters we also list key readings that provide additional details on concepts and methods.
Case studies are included in every chapter. These demonstrate SDM methods in practice and provide ideas, based on our collective experience, about which analytical techniques will work under what circumstances and how to deal with decision makers or other participants who may be hostile, bored, inflexible, or looking for miracles. Despite our emphasis on environmental-management problems, SDM is fundamentally about working with people. If a process to aid resource decision making and environmental management is going to be effective in this modern world of participatory democracy and stakeholder involvement, then it must be understandable and responsive to the needs of the participants.
The bottom line is that SDM, done properly, can help to clarify values, build a common understanding of the best available information, improve the quality of deliberations, and help to identify and implement better management alternatives. It can also save time and money, and – to the extent that the application of SDM methods helps resource management agencies to avoid litigation, lengthy negotiations, or costly remedial efforts to overcome management failures – these savings can be substantial. An SDM process requires knowledge of a mix of analytical and deliberative techniques, along with a willingness to learn and to be both frustrated and delighted by how people address tough environmental and societal choices. It also requires that the minds and hearts of participants (including SDM analysts and their clients) be open to restructuring environmental issues in ways that can lead to new and broadly acceptable management opportunities.