Public perceptions of federal science advisory boards depend on their composition.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science Advisory Board (SAB) provides expert advice to inform agency decision-making. Recent regulations have decreased the representation of academic scientists on the EPA SAB and increased the representation of industry scientists. In an experiment, we asked how the US public views the goals and legitimacy of the board as a function of its composition. Respondents perceived SABs with a majority of industry scientists to be more likely to promote business interests than SABs with a majority of academic scientists. Liberals were less likely than conservatives to perceive industry-majority SABs as promoting human health and the environment, and making unbiased and evidence-based decisions. Our findings underscore the potential for politicization of scientific advice to the government.

Risk management in a developing country context: improving decisions about point-of-use water treatment among the rural poor in Africa.

More than 1 billion people, the vast majority of which live in the developing world, lack basic access to clean water for domestic use. For this reason, finding and promoting effective and sustainable solutions for the provision of reliable clean water in developing nations has become a focus of several public health and international development efforts. Even though several means of providing centrally located sources of clean water in developing communities exist, the severity and widespread nature of the water problem has led most development agencies and sanitation experts to strongly advocate the use of point-of-use treatment systems alongside whatever source of water people regularly use. In doing so, however, development practitioners have been careful to point out that any interventions or infrastructure regarding water safety and human health must also adhere to one of the central principles of international development: to facilitate more democratic and participatory models of decision making and governance. To this end, the research reported here focused on the development of a deliberative risk management framework for involving affected stakeholders in decisions about POU water treatment systems. This research, which was grounded in previous studies of structured decision making, took place in two rural villages in the East African nation of Tanzania.

Evaluating the quality of structured environmental management decisions.

Structured decision making (SDM) approaches have been advocated as a means of improving the quality of environmental and related risk management decisions based largely on the self-reported behavior of decision makers. The goal of the research presented here was to test this basis for decision quality by comparing the self-reported assessments of individual decision makers with their actual choice behavior across a set of three related environmental contexts. It was hypothesized that a modified structured decision approach would lead participants to make better informed decisions which accurately reflected their objectives, not based solely on self-reports, but also on internally consistent decision making behavior. Results from this study only partially support this hypothesis. While individuals' self-reports suggest that the structured approach outperformed results from an unstructured control condition, there was a lack of agreement between these self-reported evaluations and actual choice behavior. Beyond the obvious policy implications of decisions that are inconsistent with stated objectives, these findings point to the need for improved metrics when evaluating the quality of environmental decision processes.

Testing alternative decision approaches for identifying cleanup priorities at contaminated sites.

This exploratory study compares two approaches for involving nonexpert stakeholders in difficult policy choices. Both approaches have as their goal informing members of the public about contaminated sites and involving them in decisions regarding their cleanup. The first approach focuses on technical information and seeks to improve the available knowledge base so that participants can make choices informed by detailed scientific data. This approach is similar in intent to many of the science-based initiatives in public involvement now being undertaken by EPA, DOE, and other federal or state agencies. The second approach, in contrast, focuses on values-oriented information and seeks to improve stakeholders' ability to make difficult choices in light of required tradeoffs across a variety of technical and nontechnical concerns. The results demonstrate that although both approaches help to increase participants' knowledge level, a values-based approach is more successful in terms of helping nonexpert participants to make decisions aboutwhat have historically been viewed as primarily technical problems.