Structural Decision Making: Using Decision Research to Improve Stakeholder Participation and Results

摘要

Stakeholders may be involved in a range of business and government decisions, but often their participation is treated as an afterthought in decision processes typically viewed as better left to government officials or technical experts. An exception to this norm is an approach called structured decision making (SDM). SDM includes opportunities for stakeholders to access information about a particular issue and to express their views and concerns through public meetings, workshops, or other means that both highlight their concerns and explicitly incorporate them into the decision process. Examples include the Water Use Planning process in British Columbia (Arvai et al. 2001, Gregory et al. 2001b), a pilot project for the U.S. Department of Energy on the cleanup of contaminated sites (Arvai and Gregory 2003b), and several ongoing deliberative processes in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. However, failures to involve stakeholders in a meaningful way appear to far outnumber the successes.