o Time : December 07, Friday 12:00 ~ 2:00 p.m.

o Venue : 9705(The 7th floor seminar room)

The use of Integrated Assessment to Support Mutli-Stakeholder Negotiations for Complex Environmental Decision-Making


Abstract

Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA) is an analytic tool used in recent years in the turbulent middle ground between sicnece and public policy. Its central purpose is to inform environmental decision-making on very complex policy questions. The ideal of its usefulness in policy-making sometimes obscures more than it clarifies. Sometimes, scientific findings need to be understood in terms of the political uses to which they can and will be put (e.g., which policies are being justified and which institutions are being defended).

To explore the interaction between multi-stakeholder negotiation and IEA in decision-making at the regional level, researcher designed a multi-party, multi-issue negotiation simulation exercise requiring a set of policy actors to incorporate the results of a hypotehtical integrated assessment into their policy dialogue. The exercise, ''Ground-level Ozone: A Negotiated Rule-Making Process on Varara''s Air Pollution Crisis'' explores how negotiating parties perceive IEA data, as well as how their perceptions influence decision-making on air pollution mitigation policies in a metropolitan area. Finally, this paper discusses the use of negotiation simulations as research tools in generating or testing hypothesis.