Debating Comprehensive Decision Making

The Great Debate

There comes a time in many situations where a debate occurs over something where people may passionately take sides to stand up for what they believe in or what they enjoy most, or simply people may just debate for the sake of being argumentative. Some debates are very worthwhile and seek to achieve an outcome, others are simply pointless and can be destructive....

Ever had this debate?? personally I am an 'A' type man

Being a highly involved sportsman a debate is nothing new to me (well the idea isn’t anyway), and as things can get very competitive things are often heatly debated to determine an outcome. (that’s just the nature of us humans...).

Many kinds of debates can happen in sport ranging from who is right or wrong on the pitch, what sporting code is better than the other, who is the greatest sportsperson ever, who threw what shot, who scored what goal, or even more recently is that athlete on drugs...  Personally, I always enjoy a good debate over who will win what game or who is the best player in a particular team.

Anyway, moving on from sport, who has had a debate over the theory of Integrated Environmental Management? Yes, I just did ask that... and before you ask any more questions, yes I have had a debate over IEM theory.

So what is there to debate within the topic of IEM is probably now resting in the back of your head, well of course it has to be about Comprehensive environmental decision-making. The main question to be debated here is whether the seemingly impossible be made possible with IEM?

(For those of you who haven’t had a coffee yet the debate is therefore about whether comprehensive decision making is possible or not within integrated environmental management)

So back to the school setting of ERST 633 we go to look at an article by Bob Bartlett (1990). As for the debate, we are going to address two key questions:

1. Is comprehensive environmental decision making desirable?
2. Is comprehensive environmental decision making feasible?

...And in case you have not already realised this is a really serious debate... we even had a scheduled timetable:

Debate Approximate Timetable

1. 0900: briefing
2. 0910-1010: preparation and coffee
3. 1010-1050 ‘ish’: debate
4. 1050-1100 ‘ish’: the judge’s’ decision
5. 1120 ‘ish’: discussion

Ok enough tomfoolery (for now) let us move on to the main event, THE DEBATE, and because I heard some one likes tables... the argument has been put into a tabular format to see a head to head visual debate, mainly because you won’t be able to hear me screaming my defence of the debate on the blog!!

Debating the desirability and feasibility of comprehensive environmental management
Positive for Comprehensive Environmental Decision Making	Against Comprehensive Environmental Decision Making
·         Finding Real solutions to problems that were truly environmental were not possible if segmented and fragmented thinking was the basis for decision making.      ·         Integrated comprehensive decision making is required by the nature of our environment .      ·         Because everything is interrelated, comprehensiveness means each decision must be comprehensive.      ·         Comprehensive decision making can be very             effective at local and regional scales for many serious environmental problems (micro level ).      ·         Seen as instrumental, material and technocratic , girded by the premise that all things are knowable and all things are controllable by humans and their technology. To this extent comprehensive decision making is a logical product of the rationalisation of the world and the dominance of technical and economic rationality in the modern mind.      ·         Incrementally including comprehensiveness on decision making until a threshold is reached that may bring about the change of decision making to   be under pinned by comprehensiveness...      ·         Moving forward perhaps in this decade or the next, comprehensive decision making will be the norm?	·         “what must be done, cannot be achieved”      ·         Comprehensive environmental decision making is ideal, but seen as unrealistic, and not doable.      ·         According to (Bartlett...) there are two broad limits to comprehensive environmental decision making: pragmatic constraints imposed by existing institutions, attitudes and resources; and theoretical limits imposed by the nature of decision-making, organisation and rationality.      ·           Money constraints – hard to obtain in the face of overall budget and economic pressures, and the pressing needs of existing environmental programs.      ·         Comprehensive decision making is not widely understood or appreciated by the general public. There is a lack of overall knowledge and interest, comprehensive decision making has never received focussed attention from environmentalists, government analysts or policy scholars.      ·         Few experts are prepared to engage in or promote the idea of comprehensive environmental decision making.      ·         Immediate substantive interests are better served by achievable reform of the already fragmented status quo.      ·         The alternative to comprehensive decision making is incremental decision making. A pragmatic approach that differs only incrementally from the status quo, much like how policy is made.      ·         Seen as idealistic and infeasible for individuals and organisations. (money & knowledge constraints)

Right so the debate has come to an end, and with all great debates there are winners and losers. If we refer to task four on the debate timetable the judges made a decision on who won the great debate (because all great debates have winners). The decision was a draw... yes a draw, so was this not a great debate then because there was no winner? Well yeah pretty close to it, ok so we were not great at debating but we had a good learning experience and learnt the ins and outs of comprehensive decision-making.

Ok so luckily we didn’t fall asleep, but according to the judges, we were far too kind to each other and lacked the element of ‘ruthlessness’. For next time, the focus shall be on providing a hard lined rebuttal and being more persuasive with our own argument. 

Note never concede to the opposition, if that happens in sport you are as good as silver.

Moving Forward with IEM

Recipes for an Integrated Environmental Management approach

Buhrs (2009) believes that in practice, environmental integration is about enhancing the incorporation of environmental knowledge, values and interests in human thinking, decisions, actions and institutions as well as about promoting the consistency between environmental management efforts by a variety of ways and means. So if we know what a rough definition of guideline of what IEM is, how do we apply it to environmental issues?

To begin with, we need a set of integrated environmental management criteria to assess how the environmental problem is currently being managed. In my second IEM blog post, I briefly referred to an IEM matrix that was produced by Buhrs (1995). This is a type of IEM matrix that encompasses a broad range of initiatives and helps us to understand environmental problems by resolving the ‘x’ and ‘y’ questions, which can be very useful in the initial stages of IEM. 

From reading the literature on the topic of IEM, I have however come up with a ‘recipe’ style criterion that can be used to assess various forms of integration.

Google defines a recipe as “a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including a list of the ingredients required” or “something, which is likely to lead to a particular outcome”.

A recipe for preparing a cake is just as important to follow as a recipe to integrated environmental management if we desire to achieve a purposeful outcome. The missing of particular ‘ingredients’ may lead to a final result that we did not intend to achieve or do not want. We must remember the key term integration.

IEM Recipe

The following is my recipe for assessing the integration of environmental management. My recipe uses a combination of criterion types ranging from the meta policy level right down to the most practical approaches that can be undertaken in IEM.

POLICY Buhrs (2009)	IMPLIMENTATION Margerum & Hooper (2001) and Margerum (1995)	OPERATIONAL Margerum and Born (1995) and Margerum (1995)	GOVERNANCE Scrase and Sheate (2002)
A policy focussed approach involving the dimensions of cognitive, policy and institutional. There are two influences: (internal & external) External Forms: - EIA, CBA, environmental assessment/education. Strategic assessments, economic instruments & greening of institutions Internal Forms: - sustainable development, CRA, integration of environmental institutions, integrative principles, national councils.	Collaboration – encouraging the involvement of stakeholders and community into various stages of the process.  Consensus support and building of relationships Using leverage point mapping process Use of strategic direction involving data collection, remedial activities and decision making Laws and policies should support an integrative approach	A coordination focused approach using communication and conflict resolution Tools: Communication – information and data sharing, joint budgets, coordinating committees, joint planning process, Plans (projects, programmes, policy, other) Conflict resolution – additional research/analysis, appeal to higher authority, interpersonal or inter-group communication. Resources need to be available to support collaborative processes	Uses integrated information resources Involves multiple tiers of governance Include Integration of business concerns into governance View the environment holistically (development values) Ensure the integration of stakeholders into governance

Now that we have seen the tabular version of the criteria, the following are brief explanations for each individual criteria and why they may have significance:

Policy Criteria

The inclusion of a policy focussed approach that involves the internal and external forms of the cognitive, policy and institutional dimensions is critically important because there is a wide range of environmental and non environmental policies that contain significant sources of environmental pressure. Such policies may include economic, agriculture, transport and energy. These three dimensions determine the knowledge that guides human interactions with the environment, the intentional courses of action affecting the environment and the formal and informal rules that guide actions and behaviour affecting the environment (Buhrs, 2009).

Implementation Criteria

The implementation approach is fundamentally valuable as it provides for the practical approach to managing environmental issues. This criterion encourages a bottom up approach to solving environmental issues involving an emphasis on the collaboration of stakeholders and the community to encourage consensus building and healthy relationships, which can encourage effective decision making. Margerum & Hooper (2001) emphasise that stakeholder groups make use of strategic direction from the ground up which involves the collection of data, remediation and the direct influence on decision making.  Another key process that is advocated by Margerum & Hooper (2001), is a process called leverage point mapping. Because there is not one dominant policy or agency, but rather a multitude of actors where one shall not surpass another, the advantage of using leverage point mapping is that it forces stakeholders to specify how they expect to achieve their goals and objectives. By being able to map out the steps that all of the stakeholders may take, it is possible to recognise what they can and cannot achieve.

Operational Criteria

The emphasis of the operational criteria is to evaluate the coordination of the management i.e., how communication and conflict resolution processes work. The communication process is critical for the purposes of sharing information, analyses, setting goals and evaluating objectives ( Margerum & Born 1995). Because the process of coordination involves multiple stakeholders or participants bringing together multiple ideas, perspectives and biases, resolving potential conflict is very important. A lack of coordination can be directly attributed to inconsistencies within policies and objectives.

Governance Criteria

The governance criteria views the environment holistically using integrated sources of information. It includes involving the use of integrated information resources, integrating the concerns of businesses into governance, and ensuring the integration of stakeholders into governance. Ensuring facts and data are integrated into decision-making is important for the outcome of policies and ensuring the successful monitoring of future problems can be achieved. Any environmental decision that overlooks the interests of businesses imposes excessive costs on industry and threatens the goals of public policy (Scrase & Sheate, 2002). The final point of the criteria is ensuring that stakeholders are integrated into decision-making.

Approaches to institutional reform designed to enhance integration

The following are 6 suggested approaches from Buhrs (1995) to enhance the use of integrated management within environmental management:

1. Increase range of powers/ responsibilities in central govt

2. Tools to improve coordination, e.g., EIA requires integration

3. Integration of env. legislation & decision making - RMA

4. Devolution to lower levels of govt., e.g., RCs and DCs

5. Integration of environmental & economic decision making

6. Incorporating public input into decision making

Note there are also many other approaches that may exist, the following are two that were generated by our 633 class and lecturers.

·         Encourage cooperation between agencies, e.g., Memorandums of understandings

·         Devolution to community groups?

References:

Buhrs, T. (2009). Environmental Integration: our common challenge. Albany: Suny Press.

Margerum, R. D. (1999). Integrated Environmental Management: The Foundations for Successful Practice. Environmental Management, 24(2), 151-166.

Margerum, R. D & Born, S. M. (1995). Integrated Environmental Managemnt Moving from  Theory to Practice. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 38(3), 371-390.

Margerum, R. D & Hooper, B.P. (2001) Integrated Environmental Management: Improving Implementation Through Leverage Point Mapping. Society and Natural Resources, 14 , 1-19.

Scrase, I. J & Sheate, W. R. (2002). Integration and Integrated Approaches to Assesment: What do they mean for the environment? Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 4, 275-294