Environmental Public Policy Making Exposed

This book exposes the barriers to inclusive and effective public policy making, which are the current decision making paradigm and commonly held ideas that reduce public policy problems to scientific and technical ones. Through both environmental policy and other decision making examples, readers are shown the commonalities of all decision making. Solution-oriented practitioners and stakeholders will find this book filling a conceptual and methodological gap in existing policy literature and practice. The authors deftly guide readers from post-normal science, wicked problems, and uncertainty concepts to a conceptually-grounded, practical implementation of a new approach, the open solution approach. The Multi-criteria Integrated Resource Assessment (MIRA) is described as the first generation methodology that fulfills the expectations for the inclusive, transparent, and learning-based open solutions approach. MIRA is a holistic package of concepts, methods and analytical tools that is designed to assess Decision Uncertainty, the combined uncertainties that include data, problem formulation, expert judgments, and stakeholder opinions. Introduction of the Requisite Steps, the common steps found in all decision making, provides the yardstick for evaluating a variety of decision making processes, decision tools, and commonly found indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Newsweek Green Ranking of corporations.

The use of anecdotes, policy stories, and case examples makes this a very readable and practical book for citizens and experts. With this book, readers are prepared to critically evaluate these common indices for their personal use as well as challenge policy processes as a stakeholder. For policy practitioners, this guidebook will become a rubric to ensure an effective public policy making process and to critically evaluate decision support tools.

Auteur

Dr. Stahl is currently a senior environmental scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, specializing in environmental policy development and decision analysis. Her expertise includes air quality programs, integrated health and ecological analyses (including stakeholder participation), the construction and use of indicators in integrated analyses (including cumulative impact analysis), uncertainty in decision making, and making sustainability operable through good decision analytic principles. With A. Cimorelli, she is a co-developer of the Multi-criteria Integrated Resources Assessment (MIRA) open solution approach. Mr. Cimorelli is currently retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is an internationally recognized expert in near-field atmospheric dispersion modeling. During his 41 years of professional experience he served as a senior physical scientist and regional meteorologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with responsibilities that included, research and development in atmospheric dispersion modeling and other related analysis techniques. Mr. Cimorelli is one of the principal developers of the AERMOD modeling system. His expertise also included the development of Agency guidance related to all aspect of air dispersion modeling, as well as the review and conduct of regulatory air modeling studies and air risk assessments. Additional he has taught many undergraduate and graduate courses in advanced air quality modeling, environmental law and environmental engineering at both Drexel and Temple Universities. With Dr. Stahl, he is a co-developer of the Multi-criteria Integrated Resources Assessment (MIRA) open solution approach.

Contenu

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 objectivity. But how 'objective' are indices like the Dow Jones Industrial average, Consumer Reports' ratings for appliances, the OECD Better Life Index, or Sustainability indices? What is the balance between the facts and the values in these measures and how should these be critically viewed? The rules (i.e., context and the assumptions) used to create them determi…