Adaptive Decision Making in the Face of Uncertainty

—Decisions about watershed restoration projects often are complicated by competing interests and goals, gaps in scientific knowledge, and constraints on time and resources. Under these circumstances, there is no best approach to decision making and problem solving. Appropriate decision processes need not always be analytically complex, but instead depend on the characteristics of the external social context, the decision makers, and the decision problem itself. Because social concerns so often prevail in restoration decisions, we begin with a discussion of issues characterizing the social context. Next, in three increasingly broad contexts for watershed restoration, we discuss the application of several methods for facilitating decisions and solving problems involving uncertainty: Bayesian decision analysis, active adaptive management, passive adaptive management, and evolutionary problem solving. Introducing the Decision Toolbox Uncertainty is a fact of life in watershed restoration. The preceding chapters of this book present a daunting picture of variation and gaps in knowledge about river ecosystems. How can managers hope to select effective restoration actions or make decisions about an ongoing project with so many management alternatives and such imperfect information? Fortunately, human beings have a long and rich history of making decisions and solving problems concerning complex systems with long response times and for which there is imperfect information. As a result, individuals and societies are endowed with a toolbox of decision-making strategies, precedents, and resources that can help to structure and legitimize the decision task, making it more understandable and manageable. This chapter explores how strategies for decision making and problem solving might be used to address watershed restoration planning and actions. What can people planning a restoration project learn from the way individuals make decisions in ordinary life? Studies in cognitive psychology show that people are generally competent, adaptive decision makers in most real-life situations, intelligently applying strategies for assessing alternatives, even when faced with many options and considerable uncertainty (Payne et al. 1993). Appropriate decision strategies depend on three situational components: • the decision problem itself—for example, information gaps, need for accurate information, effort required to get that information, possibility of reassessing the decision in the future; • the internal social context—for example, the decision makers’ expertise, analytical resources, accountability, social relationships, and communication networks; and • the external social context—for example, societal values and goals, accountability and group membership of stakeholders, geography, and timeframe Often, even in routine situations, the need for accuracy and the effort of acquiring information 1Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada. 2School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, Box 355020, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. 3U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 200 SW 35th Street, Corvallis, OR 97333, USA. 4Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.