6.1 Environmental decision making as a learning process

There are many ways of making decisions, and there are different ways of describing decision-making processes and recognising their boundaries. You are now going to be introduced to one framework that offers much to guide environmental decision making, and is a useful way of ordering thinking about decision making. It is based on tried and tested ways of analysing decision situations and of working out appropriate courses of action. The overall purpose of the framework is to provide a structure to enable environmental decision making to be a process of learning that allows for continuous improvement rather than a one-off, constrained activity that stops once a decision is made. The framework suggested is shown in Figure 20.

Figure 31 T863 framework for environmental decision making

How does this framework compare with methods of decision making discussed in previous sections? An important distinction between the framework shown in Figure 31 and other staged procedures for decision making is the iterative nature of the process described. Although in many cases a clear ‘decision’ can be identified, this may not be an end in itself. What may be more important is the opportunity that this process provides for those concerned to learn about the situation, and to be better prepared to deal with similar situations in the future. The framework thus represents a formalisation of the experiential learning process described in Figure 11.