Journal Articles
Nitrogen loading models are often designed and built without any input from decision makers. Better understanding and communication between modelers and decision makers would improve the usefulness of models.
Oil spill contingency planners need an improved approach to understanding and planning for the human dimensions of oil spills. Drawing on existing literature in social impact assessment, natural hazards, human ecology, adaptive management, global...
Marine oil spills can cause major social, economic, and ecological disruptions. Spill response managers must weigh different options and objectives when deciding what to do. We investigated the ways that preferences for spill response...
Trust is widely recognized as a key variable in perceptions and decision making about environmental risks. However, most considerations of trust treat it as a simple two-agent relationship. Based on an analysis of a...
An intensification of interest in environmental assessment during the last 2 decades has driven corporate efforts to better document environmental goals, improve environmental management systems, and increase awareness of the environmental...
Agencies responsible for remediation and long-term stewardship of areas with chemical and radiological contamination are feeling the pressure to increase public participation in decision-making. Much of the literature outlining advice for...
Knowing how people think about public participation processes and knowing what people want from these processes is essential to crafting a legitimate and effective process and delivering a program that is widely viewed as meaningful and...
In preparation for development of an exhibit on the cognitive abilities of dolphins, the Wildlife Conservation Society sought to determine potential visitor’s social perspectives about dolphin intelligence, and how these beliefs might...
Nearly all types of recreation agencies are feeling the pressure to increase public involvement.
Recent trends indicate an increasing use of computer modeling in support of local environmental policy-making. The ability of such models to improve local environmental decision making will depend not only on the characteristics of the models but...
This article reports on a study that explores what factors influence the decisions of New England local governmental officials (LGOs) to participate (or not) in regional collaborative environmental policymaking on watershed management planning. Q...
Participation by local governmental officials is not given the same attention in the literature as that of citizens, publics, technical experts, or stakeholders. Yet, local governments are often a keystone to successfully implementing and...
Public participation is well known for its practitioner insights and wealth of case reports. This knowledge is essential and has been well employed. Likewise, the theoretical literature on public participation is growing rapidly. The need for...
Watershed planning is an important focus of environmental protection efforts in many states. Still, how to involve the public in watershed planning remains controversial. This paper reports on research that invoked Q methodology to...
This article reports progress on developing a theory of public participation that may prove useful to administrative bodies. The authors review a theory of public participation based on Habermas’s theory of communicative action and then...
It is now widely accepted that members of the public should be involved in environmental decision-making. Many researchers have attempted to define process and outcome principles for "good" public participation. The emphasis of this...
This paper suggests that applications of watershed management planning would benefit from a theoretical consideration of the policymaking process. A conceptual schema from the field of risk analysis proposes that policymaking be conceived of as a...
Many important environmental and risk policy issues have become disputatious and difficult to resolve by traditional methods. Regulators and policy analysts have begun to look at tools for collective decision- making and shared problem solving to...
Book Chapters
Edited Publications
Project Reports
The management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and defense high level waste (HLW) is a complex socio-technical systems challenge. Coordinated, reliable, and safe performance will be required over very long periods of time within evolving social...
This document provides guidance for Area Planning Committees to systematically assess the potential health, social, economic, institutional, and cultural impacts of oil spills – what are often called “human dimensions impacts.”...
This report provides guidance for using focus groups to:
• evaluate public involvement during remediation of contaminated sites;
• conduct both formative and summative evaluations; and
• conduct both process...
This document lays out a framework by which defensible performance metrics for oil spill response can be developed in an analytic-deliberative process that includes a broad range of stakeholders and is informed by the best available scientific...
This report describes the results of a study about the relative importance of spill response objectives to stakeholders, from varied organizations and government agencies. In this study the population of interest includes spill...
Oil spills present a chronic threat to the environmental security of most major ports. While mitigation of the risk of oil spills should include prevention, major oil spills remain periodic occurrences. Consequently, spill preparedness and...
An intensification of interest in environmental assessment during the last two decades has driven corporate efforts to better document environmental goals, improve environmental management systems, and increase awareness of the environmental and...
This manuscript reports on how individuals in and around Brookhaven National Lab came to their perceptions of a low-dose radiation risk from tritiated water that contaminated the aquifer directly beneath the Lab. ...
In interviews with sixteen modelers and outreach professionals in southern New England, we explored themes related to ecological models and their application in local decision making. In specific, we investigated the use of nitrogen...
Other Publications