2.3 Characterising environmental decisions

Discussion

• (a) I have come across all the terms in the table before but I do wonder what the authors mean by words such as ‘elite corps’, ‘deliberative’, ‘natural systems’, ‘persistence’ and ‘critical natural areas’. There is some qualification of these terms in the text of their book, so I have either looked these up there or made some assumptions about what is meant:
  • Elite corps – seems to refer to senior members of responsible organisations. This mode of decision making is one where those who do not fall into that category do not participate in the decision process.
  • Deliberative – organised for a process of deliberating or debating, which as it’s in a category about urgency implies a longer time period is available than the ‘urgent’ category.
  • Natural systems – I assume here that ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘manufactured’ is meant and that system refers to an assembly of interconnected components that does something. But I’m aware that ‘natural’ and ‘made’ distinctions often get blurred and ‘system’ is often used in a vaguer sense. The examples given regarding ‘natural system scales’ in the table are watersheds and airsheds, and while water and air are what I think of as ‘natural’, there is a lot about their use and management that isn’t. I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘airshed’ (other than as sheds that house aircraft!) so I looked it up and found it to mean an area where common weather conditions behave in a coherent way with respect to air pollution in the atmosphere. As such it provides a unit for analysis or management in the way that a water catchment area does. My understanding of ‘watershed’ in this context is also what I would think of as a water catchment, i.e. an identifiable area rather than a boundary. My understanding is that terms such as watershed, water catchment and airshed are used in a range of different ways in different countries and traditions.
  • Persistence – I presume this refers to elements that persist over along time rather than breakdown, as with radioactive particles or some kinds of pesticides.
  • Critical natural areas – I assume this refers to ‘critical’ in its ‘crucial’ rather than its ‘finding fault’ or ‘evaluating’ senses. But critical for what? Looking it up in their book, I note that Sexton et al. have given a definition as ‘issues concerning the protection of are as such as coastlines, floodplains, wetlands, ecological bio-reserves, parks, and the habitats of endangered species’.
• (b) A few examples of dimensions I have direct experience of:
  • Levels – all the social levels;
  • Domain – issues of critical natural areas and natural resource management: neighbourhoods (villages) and countries, watersheds; persistence (nuclear power issues) and context (my interest in ‘trajectories’ of decisions which in corporate past, present and future);
  • Setting – individual acting as member of an organisation; environmental advocacy groups, community groups and affected or interested individual; urgent and deliberative decisions;
  • Modes – emergency action, routine procedures and collaborative learning;
  • Assumptions – I have come across all the assumptions about basic underlying causes of environmental problems (though I’m not entirely sure what’s behind ‘failure to use comprehensive approaches’ so would need to check that one);
  • Evaluation – I have also come across all the evaluation criteria.

From my own experience I would add ‘multi-agency’ as a social level of the environmental decision. I would add ‘rural’ tour ban infrastructure/growth management from a UK context, and I would add ‘ethical’ to the criteria for evaluating environmental decisions.