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DECISION AIDING FOR DELIBERATIVE RISK MANAGEMENT

Environmental policy debates increasingly focus on ways to incorporate the values of concerned citizens into policy decisions. As a result, there is a renewed interest in participatory decision making processes designed to enable lay stakeholders (e.g., residents of potentially affected communities and regions) as well as broader interest groups to participate effectively alongside technical experts and government representatives in complex policy debates. Participation requires, at minimum, a requisite level of competence on the part of both public participants and the facilitators or analysts who elicit, summarize, and transmit information about stakeholder concerns to decision makers. At the same time, there is a recognized need for improved data to answer stakeholders’ questions about the anticipated physical, economic, and social impacts of project or program initiatives. This desire for accurate factual information has led to new initiatives in fieldwork and modeling efforts as well as the development of extensive GIS and other computer-based networks.

While these are encouraging first steps toward the widespread adoption of more democratic, community-based environmental risk-management practices, we are dismayed by what appears to be a neglect of science-based standards for the conduct of deliberative decision making efforts. Despite substantial recent advances in our understanding of individual and group judgmental processes as the result of research by social scientists – psychologists, decision scientists, behavioral economists, and survey researchers – there continues to be little agreement on what constitutes a successful deliberative process and little discrimination on the part of most policy makers between rigorous and more casual, or even inadequate, participatory decision making processes. To this end, a significant amount of research in the lab has been devoted to developing and testing decision aiding tools that are aimed at improving the quality of participatory risk management decisions.

See:

Arvai, J. L., V. E. A. Campbell, A. Baird, and L. Rivers. 2004. Teaching Students to Make Better Decisions About the Environment: Lessons From the Decision Sciences. Journal of Environmental Education 36: 33-44. [DOWNLOAD]

Arvai, J. L., and R. Gregory. 2003. A decision focused approach for identifying cleanup priorities at contaminated sites. Environmental Science & Technology 37: 1469-1476. [DOWNLOAD]

McDaniels, T., R. Gregory, J. L. Arvai, and R. Chuenpagdee. 2003. Decision structuring to alleviate embedding in environmental valuation. Ecological Economics 46:33-46. [DOWNLOAD]

Arvai, J. L., T. McDaniels, and R. Gregory. 2002. Exploring a structured decision approach for fostering participatory space policy making at NASA. Space Policy 18: 221-231. [DOWNLOAD]

Arvai, J. L., R. Gregory, and T. McDaniels. 2001. Testing a structured decision approach: Value-focused thinking for deliberative risk communication. Risk Analysis 21:1065-1076. [DOWNLOAD]

Gregory, R., J. L. Arvai, and T. McDaniels. 2001. Value-focused thinking for environmental risk consultations. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 9: 249-275. [DOWNLOAD]