Tampa Bay NEP Research Plan: A Decision Science Perspective on Understanding Public Values and Attitudes Related to Ecological Risk Management

The purpose of this research plan is to outline an approach to understanding public values and attitudes relating to policy initiatives in ecological risk management. Although key elements of the approach are intended to be broadly applicable, the specific case study of nitrogen deposition by air to the Tampa Bay, Florida estuary is used to illustrate and provide supplementary details of the proposed approach. Understanding how the public views the problem of airborne nitrogen deposition, and what considerations it may use when evaluating alternative policy responses, is one of the primary questions now under study by the Tampa Bay National Estuary Program (TBNEP). In particular, the TBNEP seeks answers to questions concerning (a) the reasons why people care about protection of water quality in the Tampa Bay estuary, and (b) ways in which the broad range of stakeholder concerns can be evaluated and measured to facilitate their incorporation into risk-management policies. This research plan focuses on the contribution of insights from the decision sciences to addressing these important questions. It represents one of four social science perspectives (the others being psychology, anthropology, and innovative economics) to understanding public values, which taken as a whole seek to broaden the range of techniques available to encourage public input and to develop an improved management plan for the estuary. In many respects the four approaches are complementary, so that both general techniques and specific study suggestions are expected to be quite similar. In other respects, however, the four approaches are quite different, with a decision science perspective giving particular attention to the ways in which values and tradeoffs are formed, to the quality and interpretation of expressed judgments and evaluations, and to the use of decision aids in clarifying stakeholder concerns and in developing defensible linkages between the value-and fact-based aspects of a proposed risk-management initiative. In light of the mandate for the research plan, this discussion of a proposed study approach will focus on insights and techniques that are based in the decision sciences and leave issues relating to the complementarity of the different approaches to presentations at the May, 2001 workshop and to subsequent discussions. 2 A variety of techniques from the decision sciences can assist the Tampa Bay NEP in developing plans for protection of the estuary that incorporate, and are responsive to, both the complexities of the ecological risk-management challenges and the interests and values of the diverse set …