Structured Decision Making: A Practical Guide to Environmental Management Choices

by Robin Gregory, Lee Failing, Michael Harstone

This book outlines the creative process of making environmental management decisions using the approach called Structured Decision Making. It is a short introductory guide to this popular form of decision making and is aimed at environmental managers and scientists. This is a distinctly pragmatic label given to ways for helping individuals and groups think through tough multidimensional choices characterized by uncertain science, diverse stakeholders, and difficult tradeoffs. This is the everyday reality of environmental management, yet many important decisions currently are made on an ad hoc basis that lacks a solid value-based foundation, ignores key information, and results in selection of an inferior alternative. Making progress – in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible and transparent – requires combining analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences and applied ecology with deliberative insights from cognitive psychology, facilitation and negotiation. The authors review key methods and discuss case-study examples based in their experiences in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings. The goal of this book is to lay out a compelling guide that will change how you think about making environmental decisions. Visit www.wiley.com/go/gregory/ to access the figures and tables from the book.

314 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Joshua Booker · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential reading for decision analysts, but probably overkill for everyone else (Smart Choices is a better primer). Dense with information and advice, most of which I found incredibly useful. The only irksome quality I found was the repeated and popular assertion that “ought”s can’t come from is, that science alone can’t guide our decision making. I agree only so far as to say that most people’s values are based on unscientific foundations, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that a value system couldn’t or shouldn’t be empirical to some degree. As an analyst, I’m willing to play along with any absurd combinations of objectives in order to resolve a problem, but I think we should be able to put ourselves in a position to separate good decisions from bad ones based on the type of value system used to make it. Anyway, it’s still a great book.

[Giuliana Ferrari · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually don't give more or less than 3 stars for an academic book, given they are usually highly instructional and don't perform a life-changing mind-altering process in my mind. This is a good book, albeit highly repetitive at times, but honestly it's just average. Some chapters were quite boring to go through, which explains why it took me so long to read through it. On and all I would recommend for people in the area but that's basically it.

[Otto Hahaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the most important lesson I got from this book is that the most mathematically sophisticated (and groovy) methods for decision working do not work in real life. Oh well. I could added one more star if I wanted to, now only three stars because there is not much I can use in my daily work. But if I had to interact with lots of real people in muddy real life situations, I would definitely read this again carefully and add one more star. But as it is, my decision making is in more abstract level, where I can try to use esoteric algorithms for my grossly simplified problems...