Designing Environmental Indicator Systems for Public Decisions

摘要

Government agencies and academic scientists have developed reliable sets of environmental indicators to assist in making decisions. This very recent trend has been driven in part by scientific advances that make it possible to construct indicators that are both rigorous and informative, and in part by policies that seek to justify environmental expenditures as likely to produce the beneficial results that they intend. Environmental indicators offer the promise of applying science to help decisionmakers select tools that will produce predictable outcomes in measurable ways. In this article we examine a specific element of the emerging environmental indicator model: the connection of the indicator with the decisionmaker. Although most research programs have assumed that if indicators are scientifically valid, public decisionniakers will use them to make better decisions, this assumption is not always justified. Based on research in the middle-Atlantic region of the United States, we examine factors that affect the use of environmental indicators by public decisionniakers. In Part Ⅰ, we begin with a brief history of environmental indicator development in the 1990s, discussing the genesis of numerous attempts to establish environmental indicators as part of the decisional framework and summarizing the threshold conclusions drawn by research on environmental indicator design. This research emphasizes scientific rigor, reproducibility, and interpretation, but less attention has been paid to the needs and characteristics of indicator users. In Part Ⅱ we examine the potential users of environmental indicators. We find that critical factors potentially affecting indicator utility include the degree to which the indicator conforms to an identified management purpose, its conformity with jurisdictional and legal constraints on the intended user, and the manner in which data are maintained and conveyed for use. We conclude that in order to increase their effectiveness, environmental indicator systems must be: (1) designed to support the institutional characteristics and decisional needs of the users, (2) scaled geographically to the decisions they are intended to inform, and (3) institutionally maintained and transmitted in a manner that provides an endorsement of their credibility for the purposes for which they are to be used. Finally, in Part Ⅲ we note the importance of institutional design in constructing systems of indicators to meet the needs of current decisionniakers, and we identify a new purpose for indicators in designing new institutional structures for environmental resource management.