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....
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| 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:
- Is comprehensive environmental decision making desirable?
- 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
- 0900: briefing
- 0910-1010: preparation and coffee
- 1010-1050 ‘ish’: debate
- 1050-1100 ‘ish’: the judge’s’ decision
- 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
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Positive for Comprehensive
Environmental Decision Making
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Against Comprehensive Environmental
Decision Making
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·
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?
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·
“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)
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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.
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